Family First: Chef and Restaurateur Lisa DiFebo-Osias
For Lisa DiFebo-Osias, the link between food, family and love started at a young age. When she was growing up, her extended family flocked to her grandparents’ home for dinner on most weekday evenings. “My grandmother would have a pot of gravy and meatballs on the stove,” DiFebo-Osias recalls. Her father, Robert “Bob” DiFebo, was one of six children, and siblings, spouses and cousins all crowded around the table.
On her mother’s side, DiFebo-Osias had family from same Italian village as the DiFebos. But the DiEgidios settled in Philadelphia. On Sundays, her family drove north to see their DiEgidio aunts, uncles and cousins, many of whom lived on the same block in Philadelphia. “Everyone cooked,” DiFebo-Osias says, who prepped food alongside her father.
Today, “Big Bob’s gravy” and “Bob’s meatballs” are staples on the menus of all three of the restaurants that DiFebo-Osias opened with her family’s help. She opened the first location in Bethany Beach in 1989 when the siren song of the sea and the restaurant industry proved too strong to resist.
Over the years, she never lost her enthusiasm for her Italian-based cuisine, the Delaware coast or her customers. “Lisa is a rare combination,” says friend Scott Kammerer, president of SoDel Concepts, which has 11 restaurants along the Delaware beaches. “She’s immensely talented with a strong work ethic — and she makes delicious food.”
Hard work brings rewards
That work ethic is seemingly ingrained in the DiFebo family. Bob DiFebo's father, Dominic, came to America as a 3-year-old, founded Dominic A. DiFebo & Sons, a hardwood floor company in 1938. He and Angeline Rinaldi had six children, and the brothers joined the family business.
DiFebo-Osias grew up just outside of Wilmington. While her father worked with his brothers, her mother, Charlotte, was a representative for Clinique. In addition to Lisa, the couple have a daughter, Michelle Freeman, and son, Bobby DiFebo, Jr.
By the time DiFebo-Osias was 14, she was working in Feby’s Fishery, the seafood market-turned-restaurant that her uncle, Philip DiFebo, started in Elsmere in 1974. It moved to Wilmington in 1984. The boys who worked in the shop gave her the nasty tasks, such as shucking oysters, cleaning fish and skinning eels. “You had to grab the eels live, but I would do it,” she says. “To this day, I can out-shuck some of the best shuckers.”
While studying architectural design at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, DiFebo-Osias lived with her grandmother. She loved to draw, but her real passion, she says, resided in her grandmother’s kitchen and wine cellar.
In 1979, the DiFebos bought a home in Bethany Beach. When the girls weren’t waiting tables at The Rusty Rudder in Dewey Beach, they were waterskiing and swimming.
DiFebo-Osias loved the beach so much that before her senior year in college, she decided to stay there. Her parents weren’t happy, but that didn’t deter her. She never looked back.
A Hidden Gem
In the early 1980s, the Quiet Resorts were even quieter, particularly in winter. “Everybody knew everybody,” DiFebo-Osias says. “I loved it.” However, according to her sister Michelle, there was one thing it lacked: a good cheesesteak. What’s more, only one restaurant was open all year and the hours were unreliable.
In 1989, a property on Route 26 caught DiFebo-Osias’ eye. She told her father she wanted to open a restaurant. “No, no, no, no. It’s too much work,” said her father, who’d owned a pizza shop when she was a baby. He likely knew his advice was falling on deaf ears. “When my sister decides to do something, there’s not much you can do to stop her,” Michelle says. “She’s a force of nature.”
In the end, their father wound up coming down to help turn the small building into DiFebo’s. The restaurant had 12 seats on a side porch and a carryout window. The family soon got involved in other respects. “At one point in 1989, all five of us were working: my mom, dad, Michelle and Bobby Jr.,” DiFebo-Osias recalls. Her glamorous mother, who’d taught modeling, donned T-shirts to make hoagies. A perfect manicure was a thing of the past. Bob Sr. cooked breakfast, and Michelle, then then a young, single mother, put her son in a playpen while she took orders.
“We had regulars — like ‘Cheers’ — who sat in the same seats and ate at DiFebo’s every day, seven days a week, for breakfast,” Michelle says. “It was one of the few places open in February when you’d only see five cars on Route 26.”
Then came a blurb in the Washington Post, which called DiFebo’s a hidden gem. Lines of customers started to snake across the parking lot. A blurb in The New York Times led to longer queues. Encouraged, DiFebo-Osias began expanding the menu with such dinner dishes as veal chop, which she still serves to this day.
New customers included D.C. real estate giant Carl Freeman, who’d built the local Sea Colony resort community, and his elegant wife, Virginia. Their assistant called to reserve a table. Although DiFebo’s didn’t take reservations, the staff set up a pretty table and DiFebo-Osias cooked to impress. They became regulars.
The restaurant began offering catering. Michelle, who adheres to the “there’s-a-book-for-that” approach, studied Martha Stewart’s books to learn the ins and outs. She was ready when Carl and Virginia Freeman's son, Josh, asked DiFebo’s to cater a July 4 party. The young real estate developer and the single mom experienced an instant chemistry. “We were walking down the steps of their house after dropping off the food, and I said: ‘I’m going to marry that guy,’” she recalls. Six months later, they were dating. She later joined Carl M. Freeman Companies and left the restaurant business.
As for DiFebo-Osias, she found her love in culinary school, where she met Jeff Osias, a New York native who’d never visited Delaware until she invited him.
Onward and Upward
Some might wonder why DiFebo- Osias went to the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York. After all, she already had a successful restaurant. But, again, she was determined to learn more about her craft. She left DiFebo’s in her family’s hands while she studied. Her brother had returned to Wilmington, but her sister and parents kept the business going. However, DiFebo- Osias frequently left New York at 2 a.m. to work weekend shifts in Bethany. “Now that I look back on it,” she says of going to school and owning a restaurant, “I can’t believe I did it.”
By the time she graduated, she was exhausted. She’d soaked up every opportunity, from being a sous chef to Julia Child to cooking for dignitaries. Now she wanted to be back at DiFebo’s. Then the CIA called to offer her a fellowship, the equivalent of a teaching assistant position. She would be the first female fellow. Nevertheless, she turned down the offer.
But Osias, who after graduating had been working at Celsius, a Rehoboth restaurant, said he would help run DiFebo’s kitchen if she took the CIA fellowship. “She was the first woman fellow to run one of the restaurants on campus,” Osias says. “It was such a great opportunity.” When she finished her fellowship, she was allowed to select the next candidate. She chose a woman.
She and Osias, who married in 1996, enlarged DiFebo’s to its current size in 1998, the year she went into labor while working on the line. They couple have three children: Jordan, Isabella and Jacob. They all have worked in DiFebo’s.
Looking to expand, she opened Isabella’s Pizzeria in Bethany Beach and DiFebo’s Bistro on the Green at Bear Trap Dunes in Ocean View. The pizzeria fell victim to the Recession. The bistro, she says, wasn’t a good fit. She decided to stop reinventing the wheel. “I’ve identified who I am as a chef, my food and my restaurant,” she says. “I’m dialed into what I do.”
She opened a second DiFebo’s in Rehoboth Beach in 2015 and one in Berlin, Maryland, in 2017.
She’s learned that it's tough be both a coach and a player. She gets help from her chefs and, still, her family. “My husband and parents are truly my partners,” she says. “My mother handles a lot of the daily interior upkeep, as well as working closely with our bookkeeper. My father has a daily routine—and I mean daily—of going to mass at 7:30 a.m. and then opening the restaurant to make 20 to 50 gallons of red sauce (gravy) and 750 meatballs a day.”
Osias moves between the restaurants, helping where needed. All their children work in the restaurants. “They have to,” DiFebo says. She’s equally firm with her staff. “I have high expectations. I tell it like it is. I want everyone to be on this journey with me.”
Osias says that his wife is the most passionate person that he knows. Sarah Gilmour would agree. She is the outreach coordinator for Pathways to Success, which helps at-risk students succeed.
“Most recently she and Jeff planned and delivered a meal (baked ziti, meatballs, salad and rolls) for the Pathways to Success youth at Sussex Tech,” Gilmour says. “This stemmed from Lisa hearing that the Sussex Tech Pathways youth were in need for food. She has committed to doing this once a month.”
DiFebo-Osias’ giving “comes from the heart,” Gilmour says. “She truly is a great woman.” Michelle Freeman—a celebrated businesswoman and philanthropist—says she is in “awe” of her older sister. “She is the steady force for good and a safe place for me,” says Freeman, who lost her husband, Josh, in a 2006 helicopter crash.
“The example she sets is that no matter what happens, you keep moving forward,” Freeman continued. “You can accomplish whatever you put your mind to. It might be harder because you’re a woman, but you can make things happen by sheer will. I’m proud of her. She has done her thing.”
DiFebo's
12 N. First Street, Rehoboth Beach, DE, 302.226.4550 Facebook Instagram
789 Garfield Parkway, Bethany Beach, DE, 302.539.4550 Facebook Instagram
104 Main Street, Berlin, MD, 410.629.0550 Facebook Instagram
