Tina Fey’s Favorite Pizza Shop Pica’s Reopens in Delco
The restaurant’s local roots date back more than seven decades.
Mother and daughter Pica’s pizza fans Sharon and Kerri Trainor grabbing an afternoon snack at the new Pica’s Broomall location on Tuesday / Photograph by Victor Fiorillo
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The ravenous Delco dining scene let out a collective gasp in March 2025 when the owners of the iconic Pica’s Restaurant in Upper Darby announced they would be closing after 70 years as a constant presence on West Chester Pike. Pica’s, known best for its square sauce-on-top pizza, began to wind down, eventually ending dine-in and bar service on October 25th and switching to a takeout-only operation, which ceased earlier this year. But then, last Thursday morning at 7 a.m., a message popped up on Instagram stating that Pica’s would reestablish its Delco presence that morning at 11 a.m. with Pica’s Italian Market in Broomall.
“The welcome was more than warm, as always with our Delco community,” says Angela Pica Oandasan, granddaughter of the late Pica’s founder Frank Pica Sr.; she’s running Pica’s in Broomall with her brother, Frank III. “It was zealous. I put the post out at 7 a.m., and they were lining up, the phone was going off by 10:30. It was a really nice welcome.”
The new Pica’s is located in an industrial park next to the headquarters of Marple Township Police. If you’re expecting to stroll in and sit down with a martini or a carafe of chilled chianti (or both, as my wife and I did many times in Upper Darby) while waiting for a Pica’s server who has been there for decades to take your order, this is decidedly not that. There’s no bar at Pica’s in Broomall. And there are also no servers. You order from a counter and take it to go or eat at one of the six four-tops set on the black-and-white checkered floor as Frank Pica Sr. looks down from his place on the wall covered in photos of him and other family members, a true Pica’s shrine.
“It is like Reading Terminal style,” Oandasan told me on Tuesday in between the lunch and dinner rush. “You come, you get your food and sit down. This seems to be the trend: simple.”
While Oandasan never knew a life outside of the food business, she, unlike brother Frank, actually wasn’t allowed to work at Pica’s until she was in her teens. “My dad, an older Italian, didn’t let me work until I was 14,” she explains. “Frank could follow him everywhere at eight. On my fourteenth birthday, I made my mom drive me in, but then my dad said, ‘No, you need working papers.’ He really pushed back. But then I showed up with working papers, and he went home and said to my mom, ‘Wow, she was putting the cheese on the pizza just as fast as anybody.’ [Laughs]”
Pica’s in Broomall isn’t quite fully operational. Due to a utility problem, they aren’t able to keep all of their ovens lit at once or operate certain essential appliances, like large boiler they need to cook their homemade pastas. So for now, no pastas and no dinner entrees, like their formidable chicken parm platter. Fortunately, they do have their famous pizza, which Jimmy Fallon surprised Tina Fey with on his late-night show in 2014, much to her delight. (See the video below.) She grew up eating the stuff and would secretly make visits in disguise to the Upper Darby location over the years.
Oandasan and Pica III also continue to operate Pica’s West Chester, a full-service restaurant the family established in 2017 outside of the Delco boundaries and 16 miles from the Upper Darby location. As for what will happen with the Pica’s building in Upper Darby, a sprawling restaurant complete with a large capacity banquet facility, that remains to be seen. The original sale fell through, and the family is now entertaining a few pending offers.
Now that Pica’s has opened in Broomall, West Chester University student Kerri Trainor, who lives on campus and whose family still lives in Broomall, goes to both. Trainor and her mother Sharon stopped into the Broomall location on Tuesday to pick up a pie. Sharon told me that she grew up in Upper Darby, so Pica’s was her family’s spot, and when it came time for Kerri to graduate from eighth grade, the family hosted a luncheon there for her. “It was a staple,” says Sharon. I posed the most important question of the day to Kerri: “Is Pica’s your favorite pizza spot in Delco?” “Absolutely,” she replied. “By far.”
