It’s been a blast, South Philly, but the iconic Bomb Bomb BBQ Grill & Italian Restaurant is closing after 33 years

Business has been blowing up at Bomb Bomb BBQ Grill & Italian Restaurant, as Deb Barbato said Wednesday, catching her pun with a smile.

She and her husband, Frank, who have run the kitschy South Philadelphia institution for nearly 34 years, announced their retirement that morning on social media. Longtime customers are flocking in before the finale on Dec. 28 for mussels, stuffed calamari, clams and linguine, $3 happy-hour mugs, warm hugs, and racks of baby-back ribs — the Barbatos’ culinary differentiator in this red-gravy stronghold.

Frank Barbato’s father, Frank Sr., bought what was then a corner bar at 1026 Wolf St. in 1951. The family lived above it when Frank Jr. came along in 1955, and the father and son worked side by side starting in 1975, selling drinks and a bar menu. Deb Barbato managed the advertising department at the South Philadelphia Review when she met Frank Jr. They married in 1984.

When Frank Sr. stepped down, Frank and Deb turned Bomb Bomb into a full-service restaurant, with a barroom in the front and a dining room in the rear. Initially, they considered changing the name, but Frank Sr. — who died in 2015 at age 92 — wanted none of that.

» READ MORE: A history of Bomb Bomb BBQ Grill

With a name like “Bomb Bomb BBQ Grill & Italian Restaurant,” you would expect a colorful story, and this tale does not disappoint.

The Barbatos were recounting it Wednesday afternoon to a table of customers: In February 1936, a chef left his job at a South Philadelphia bar and grill and took a job at a new joint on the corner of Warnock and Wolf Streets. His former boss ordered him to return.

When the chef refused, the bar was firebombed in the middle of the night, causing no injuries but shattering windows and “rocking houses to their foundations,” as The Inquirer reported in a front-page article on Feb. 17. When the chef turned him down again, a second bomb went off. This time, according to lore, the chef returned to his old job.

The bar, known then as Bob’s Taproom, became known colloquially as the “Boom Boom.” By the time Frank Barbato Sr. bought the place, 15 years after the explosions, it was the “Bomb Bomb.”

At one table Wednesday, customer Angelo Cileone volunteered that the recalcitrant chef was his birth father, Dominick LePore, giving the Barbatos another piece of the Bomb Bomb’s history.

The “BBQ Grill” stemmed from a family road trip to Busch Gardens in Virginia. The couple stopped at a barbecue restaurant and loved the food. Deb asked the manager how to make ribs. Frank spent weeks devising a wet rub and his own sauce, then ribs and other barbecue went on the menu. “Everybody down here is doing the Italian food,” Deb said. “This makes us a little different.”

The recipes for the Italian food came from both families.

The Barbatos said they were ready to go. “We’ve worked very hard for lots of years, and anybody that’s in the restaurant business and anybody that knows it are going to be sitting there shaking their heads, agreeing,” Frank said.

The couple’s three children — Frank, Andrew, and Kristina — have their own careers and did not want to take over, so they’re fielding offers for the building and business.

Bomb Bomb has been blessed by a staff of eight that has not turned over in years. Eileen Eubanks, a 31-year veteran working her lunch shift, said, “They’ve taken me in like family.” She is not sure what she will do next, but sounded optimistic.

Frank Barbato has vivid memories of Deb “running behind the bar, leading ‘That’s Amore’ and the whole bar singing on a Friday or Saturday night,” he said. “We have regular customers who, when she was pregnant, one night ordered a fra diavolo. The next morning, she had the baby and it was like, ‘Oh my God! It was because of the fra diavolo!’ They brought that child in and two more children for the next 20 years.”

Bomb Bomb has hosted pols and entertainers. Frankie Avalon, in town playing the teen angel in Grease in 2003, was eating a leisurely dinner when he realized he was late to the show. The Barbatos hustled him to the Kimmel Center.

“We were looking at each other this morning and saying, ‘where did all that time pass?’” Deb Barbato said. “We’re getting such comments and it’s just been incredible. We love our neighborhood. It’s been great to us and we’ve been great to them.”

In the summer, neighbors would drop by with pots for takeout crabs. December means stuffed calamari. “It’s hard work, stuffed calamari,” Deb said. “I could stuff up to 1,500 during the Christmas season. It’s hard to really enjoy the holiday like that. I looked at my husband and said, ‘What am I doing next year? Relax and have fun, right?’”