I Am the Victor : a short musing on where we dined for our anniversary

Took the summer off mostly. Sorry about that, MLD. I return to tell you of a culinary adventure embarked upon by yours truly and Mrs Lydonwrites, namely our anniversary dinner at the Victor Cafe in South Philly.

The Victor Cafe is situated at 1301 Dickinson St and is a converted row house (like many fine eateries) in this fair city. The food is Italian cuisine, mostly southern Italian, featuring some usual suspects in chicken, veal and fish dishes, with specials made daily by the chef. You don’t see what you like, chances are you can order up something special from the kitchen. Mrs Lydonwrites had a tortelloni in a cream sauce with asparagus and prosciutto, while I had the Linguine Calamari Faust, which was a fancy way of saying linguine fra diavolo. Why do it that way? Well…

The Victor is an eatery that specializes in opera. All the servers here are vocal arts students at either the Curtis Institute for Music or the University of the Arts and once an hour last night, one of the servers sang a selection from a range of operas, with two pieces coming from the Puccini opera “Tosca”, including one sung by our server, Casey, who will be studying voice as a grad student at Northwestern in Chicago next year.

The food was delicious and hearing opera performed live as we dined was awesome. The servers even made a big deal out of our wedding anniversary (3 years as of yesterday and going strong!) and had secretly sat us at the “proposal table” where more than a hundred couples have gotten engaged. They even played a selection by your great grandfathers’ favorite performer, Al Jolson, namely the “Anniversary Waltz”. They offered us the floor to dance, but Mrs Lydonwrites and I are no easy waltzers.

We took the spumoni and the creme brulee instead.