Davio’s Celebrates 40 Years of Steaks and Hospitality

Photo by Nina Gallant

In 1985, 24-year-old Steve DiFillippo purchased Davio’s, an Italian restaurant on Newbury Street, and turned it into one of Back Bay’s finest—and went on to open more, and more. Now with 11 locations across five states under his belt (but don’t call it a chain!), DiFillippo is celebrating the Italian steakhouse’s 40th anniversary under his stewardship.

Raise a glass to the restaurant group’s longevity at a party at the Seaport location on May 6; there’ll be plenty of steak, seafood, and dancing to music by outgoing Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck’s band, with ticket proceeds benefiting Ron Burton Training Village. (“It’s a great camp out in Western Massachusetts,” says DiFillippo. “We take inner-city kids from Boston and bring them out there for six weeks.”)  

Below, DiFillippo reflects on the past four decades of building the Davio’s brand.

Boston: When did you know you wanted to be a restaurateur?
Steve DiFillippo: When I was growing up, my parents would entertain a lot, or travel, and I’d have to cook for my older brother and sister. I always enjoyed smiling faces and the excitement of people eating food that I cooked; it was something that I just loved. As I got older, I started to travel a bit, going around to different hotels and different restaurants with my parents, and [restaurant life] always intrigued me. When I went to college at Boston University, I started working in restaurants at Faneuil Hall, and I just thought, “Wow, this is what I want to do”—I got the bug.

How does it feel to finally hit that 40-year mark?
I’m a little old. These things happen physically, but I really can’t complain. I love what I do, and I want to keep doing it. I want to keep growing and keep doing more restaurants. When I first started it was just this little Davio’s on Newbury Street, when we had about 15 people in the company, and then over the years we just kept adding another one and another one. Now we’re over a thousand people.

It’s kind of crazy, but I still look at it as just the little Davio’s on Newbury Street. I still know as many of the people that work here as I can, and I just enjoy being here. I want to keep going, and hopefully we’ll be talking about the 50th in 10 years.

When you purchased Davio’s at 24, what was your original goal for the restaurant?
Well, I took over a restaurant that really needed a new face. The menu had not been changed in a long time, and it needed new chemistry, needed new people. It basically needed to be blown up. The only thing I really kept was the name and a few people who worked there who were outstanding. One guy’s still with us 40 years later. I wanted to clean it up and start doing food that I really like—Northern Italian stuff. I wanted to do our own dishes that really weren’t being done in Boston. So that was my goal: to clean it up and get it profitable and then to grow. There was a restaurant downstairs, the original, and then there was this space upstairs with a little bar, and I wanted to do a whole other concept [upstairs], like a casual concept, which we did. It took off.

That gave us time to work on the downstairs, which is more the fancier part, but it was a big hit doing that upstairs. I graduated from BU, then I went to a chef school, and I was a marketer: I knew I had to get people going there. I went all around town to get people to come, and I really pushed it, and it really worked. Then, we got reviewed in the Boston Globe, and it took off. 

Can you pinpoint one lesson that you’ve learned in the past 40 years of Davio’s?
When you open a new restaurant, you really need to have your finances together. I think a lot of people who open a restaurant don’t realize how expensive it is. Like an ice machine breaks, how expensive labor is, or your rent. There are so many things, and I think people think, “Oh, that restaurant’s packed! Look how busy they are!” but they’re not making any money because their food costs are higher. It’s a business. You really need to know how to run a business and how to know your costs. You need to be financially fit before you do it, and I think the reason restaurants go out of business a lot is that most of the time they’re not financially fit. It’s amazing to me how people just don’t understand that it’s a business, and you’ve really got to know what you’re doing.

What has changed the most about Davio’s from 40 years ago to today—and about the neighborhood surrounding the original location?
Well, it’s just so much more action. When I opened on Newbury Street in ’85, there weren’t as many stores or restaurants, especially on that block. Newbury Street, it’s on steroids [now]. In my opinion, it’s the greatest street in the country. I love Newbury Street, and I go there all the time. I think we’re blessed to have that street in Boston. We have such great things to do in this town. So that’s the difference. Boston back in the ’80s was just getting going. There weren’t a lot of restaurants. There weren’t a lot of stores. Boston really became a first-class city.

How do you stay competitive with new restaurants and new steakhouses in the area?
You’ve got to pay attention. I can’t sit back and say, “I’m Davio’s. I’ve been here forever and people are going to keep coming here.” That keeps me up at night. We are constantly trying to get better. We’re constantly coming up with new food, new dishes, better meat, better fish. I’m always trying stuff. This week we had a big tasting on the veal chop. I’m constantly looking at everything.

And you’ve got to keep the place clean and painted, and when things break, you fix them. All that stuff adds up, and people will not go back. If they go into a restaurant and see all these broken-down things, that’s a problem, so I’m a nut about making sure everything’s perfect. You have to constantly fix things.

What kinds of changes did you have to make during the pandemic?
Delivery—we didn’t really do delivery [before]. I never thought somebody would want a $70 steak delivered, but we do thousands and thousands of dollars a day in delivery. I am shocked how much delivery we do, but we went after it. We met with all the different delivery companies and partnered with them. And of course, takeout—it’s just off the charts. It makes up somewhat for the loss of lunch, because lunch is not what it once was. Most people do not go to the office anymore.

If you, 40 years in, could go back and give advice to you, one year in, what would you say?
There are some locations that I probably chose that weren’t great, and I probably hired a few people that I shouldn’t have hired. I was in a rush; I think I should have slowed down. I made mistakes because I was always rushing to get that next location, that next building. I wanted to grow fast. I wanted to get married, have children. I was a young kid, and I was acting like a 40-year-old, and I think that was my biggest mistake. You need to slow down and smell the roses.

When I look back, why was I rushing? I was kind of out of my mind. I was 24 years old. I have clogs older than 24 years old. I wanted to have this big life and be a big restaurateur. If I just slowed down, I think I would have done a better job.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Buy tickets for the May 6 anniversary party here. 26 Fan Pier, Seaport District Boston, davios.com.