America's oldest Italian restaurant makes Philly's best spaghetti and meatballs

• Ralph's Italian Restaurant, established in 1900, is famously known as the oldest Italian restaurant in the country.
• Spaghetti and meatballs was on the restaurant's original menu and is still one of the most ordered dishes today.
• Ralph's fries hundreds of meatballs each day, with a special mix of ground pork and beef, wet Italian bread, and dry herbs.
• Insider visited Ralph's in December 2019. Please see their website for the latest takeout and delivery options.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Following is a full transcript of this video.

Taryn Varricchio: Plates of meatballs beside twirls of spaghetti covered in marinara sauce are ingrained in South Philadelphia. And they've made this restaurant a landmark in the neighborhood. This is Ralph's Italian Restaurant, and it's been serving Philly's best spaghetti and meatballs for 120 years.

Customer: If you like traditional Italian red-gravy Sunday dinner, this is the place to come.

Taryn: Back in the kitchen, chefs stay busy making 1,200 meatballs a week. The meatballs, set beside spaghetti, have been a staple at Ralph's since the restaurant's very first menu, in 1900.

Jimmy Rubino: I mean, this is stuff that my great-grandparents brought over. My grandparents made them, my parents made them. I'd say about 95% of the menu that you see now is still the original menu.

Customer: It's authentic South Philly. It's red sauce. It's just good Italian food.

Taryn: But not every Italian restaurant in Philly does meatballs like Ralph's. Other restaurants either use just beef, just pork, just veal, or a mix of all three. But Jimmy sticks to two meats that bring out a smooth and tender texture in each meatball.

Jimmy: A lot of people, a lot of restaurants, a lot of people make their meatballs with just ground beef. We use ground beef and ground pork. Pork for two reasons: fat, flavor. The fat in the pork kind of gives it, like, a velvety texture. And, obviously, pork meat itself makes it nice and lighter, as opposed to, like, almost like a round hamburger.

Taryn: He adds small cubes of wet Italian bread to help bind the meat together and a mix of salt, pepper, crumbled pecorino Romano cheese, dry herbs, and sautéed, caramelized garlic. And then Jimmy uses about 4 ounces of meat and rolls each one by hand. The restaurant fries the meatballs rather than bakes them, so they get a crispier coating on the outside while staying soft and juicy on the inside.

Jimmy: You have to test the oil, because if you put the meatballs in there while the oil's still, like, not hot, it'll absorb in like a sponge, and then you'll end up with oily meatballs.

Taryn: Once the meatballs turn dark brown, they make their way to the plate next to a swirl of spaghetti and two ladles of red gravy.

Customer: I've always had a great meal here. I was here about two weeks ago with another buddy of mine who'd never been here, so there you go.

Taryn: Look how big this meatball is. Really, though. My mom's meatballs are not this big. Ooh. That's a dense, dense meatball. It's like what Jimmy was telling us, he uses the pork to give it that silky, velvety texture. And it really is, it's, like, smoother and silkier, and not, like, packed, compacted ground beef. You get kind of, like, two different dimensions with those two meats. And it is incredibly flavorful.

Customer: We've been coming here for at least 45 years.

Taryn: Ralph's officially became the oldest Italian restaurant in America continuously owned by the founding family in 2012, when a restaurant in San Francisco closed. But it wasn't without a few bumps along the way.

Jimmy: You're talking about depression, world wars, prohibition.

Taryn: Prohibition.

Jimmy: And it's funny because, going back when I was a kid, there were still customers alive that were alive then that remember my grandfather would serve them wine in coffee cups 'cause you weren't allowed to serve alcohol then.

Taryn: And those customers have kept coming back. Along with a long list of celebrities, from former President Theodore Roosevelt and Frank Sinatra to Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, who together famously left a $500 tip at the restaurant, to the loyal locals who consider it a staple and after 120 years couldn't imagine South Philly without it.

Customer: This is certainly a part of the city. Certainly a part of South Philadelphia. An iconic place on 9th Street in the Italian Market.