The 9th Street institution where hunters bring their harvest — and everyone else comes for sausage they can't find anywhere else
A Different Kind of Butcher
Most butcher counters on the 9th Street Italian Market deal in the expected: pork shoulders for Sunday gravy, veal cutlets, a good braciole cut. D'Angelo Bros. does all of that — and then goes considerably further. This is the place South Philly hunters have been bringing their deer, their pheasant, their wild boar, and their Canada geese for generations, trusting the counter crew to turn raw game into something a family can actually eat. That reputation alone would make D'Angelo Bros. worth knowing about. The sausage program makes it essential.
The shop sits on 9th Street in the heart of the Italian Market, and it operates with the focused intensity of a place that has never tried to be all things to all people. The specialty is game and exotic meats — a category that puts D'Angelo Bros. in a very small company nationally, let alone in Philadelphia. On any given day, the case might hold alligator, rabbit, venison, elk, or wild boar alongside the more domestic cuts. The staff knows these animals and how to butcher them; this is not a supermarket meat department staffed by generalists.
The Sausage Case
Old-timers from the neighborhood come in for the sausage their families have bought here for decades.
If the game counter is D'Angelo Bros.' signature, the sausage case is its daily bread. The shop makes a wide range of Italian sausages in-house — sweet, hot, fennel-forward, and variations that rotate with the seasons and the whims of whoever is working the stuffer. The cured meats are serious: capicola, dry sausages, house-made charcuterie that holds its own against anything you'd find at a dedicated salumeria. Provolone and other Italian cheeses share the case, and the pantry shelves carry the imported staples — good olive oil, pasta, vinegars — that round out a proper Italian kitchen.
The customer mix tells you something about the shop's range. Old-timers from the neighborhood come in for the sausage their families have bought here for decades. Hunters arrive in the fall with coolers in their truck beds. Adventurous home cooks show up because they read somewhere that this is where you go when the recipe calls for something no one else carries. Chefs from around the city make the trip for the same reason. The shop handles all of them without fuss.
Processing and the Hunter's Tradition
The custom game-processing operation is central to what D'Angelo Bros. is. Hunters can bring in whole animals — deer taken during Pennsylvania season are the most common, but the shop handles a genuinely broad range — and have them broken down, processed, and, if they want, turned into sausage. This is a service with deep roots in the Italian immigrant experience: in the villages of southern Italy and the Abruzzi, butchering and preserving the whole animal was not a specialty skill but a household necessity. The men and women who settled South Philly brought those habits with them, and shops like D'Angelo Bros. kept the tradition alive long after the rest of American retail had moved on to pre-packaged, portion-controlled normalcy.
That continuity matters on 9th Street. The Italian Market's staying power has always depended on shops willing to do things the hard way — to employ people who actually know their trade, to stock the difficult product alongside the reliable one, to serve the customer who knows exactly what they want and the one who needs guidance in equal measure. D'Angelo Bros. does all of this without making a production of it. The counter crew is direct and knowledgeable; you leave knowing what you bought and what to do with it.
Worth the Trip
For visitors exploring the 9th Street Italian Market, D'Angelo Bros. is one of the stops that earns a second look even after the obvious draws — the produce stalls, the cheese shops, the bakeries — have been checked off. The game case alone is unlike anything most people have seen in a retail setting, and the sausage is reason enough to plan a meal around the visit. Come with a cooler if you're driving any distance. Come hungry either way.