Football coach is now running family’s pizza parlor
Sal Dewalt always figured he might end up in the restaurant business one day.
He just didn’t expect it to be now, as owner of the family pizza parlor in Allentown where he practically grew up.
After coaching college football out of state for nearly a decade, Dewalt returned to his hometown just as the pandemic hit. He wanted to raise his children close to his family. And he wanted to change careers and go into real estate.
Those plans changed suddenly last fall.
Dewalt’s father, John Dewalt Jr., died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm. He was only 58.
Amid their grief, the family had to decide what would happen with Salvatore Ruffino’s Pizza in Allentown’s West End.
Sal Dewalt, 37, had never made a pizza. But he stepped up to run the shop.
“To me, it’s part of the family at this point. We’ve been on this corner at
19th and Allen since as long as I can remember. I remember being a little kid in here, playing with my toys in one of these booths. It’s where I spent a lot of my time in my childhood,” he told me during a lull after the lunch rush Wednesday.
“I didn’t want to see something happen to it. I was lucky enough to take it over.”
Dewalt is named after his grandfather, Salvatore Ruffino, who opened the
shop bearing his name in 1968. It was one of dozens of pizza shops he owned in the area at the time.
Ruffino immigrated from Italy. He lived in New York City, running pizza parlors there before moving to Allentown.
In 2000, the family business rebranded as Salvatore Ruffino’s Grill and moved across 19th street into a former CVS. It offered an expanded menu for dine in and had banquet facilities. In 2009, it moved back to its original location.
Dewalt’s father eventually took over. Dewalt and his brother spent a lot of
time there as kids.
“It’s always been like a second home to us. When my mom went out shopping on a Saturday afternoon with my grandmother, this was the babysitter, this was the place.”
By the time he was in high school and college, Dewalt was a delivery driver and helping out behind the counter and in the kitchen — just not making pizzas.
He attended Moravian College
(now Moravian University). He was a two-year captain of the Greyhounds football team. An offensive lineman, he won all-conference and all-region honors and was an honorable mention
All-American in 2005.
Dewalt later was an assistant coach at Moravian, at Lehigh University and at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. He later became head coach at Alderson Broaddus University in West Virginia.
The long hours — 60-to-70 hours a week — he puts in at Salvatore Ruffino’s aren’t anything new, considering the life of a college football coach.
After he moved back to Allentown, the shop was shorthanded during the pandemic. So Dewalt helped his dad. He liked it. He inherited the love for preparing and serving food. During one of his coaching stints, he had worked a side job at an Italian restaurant.
“I always thought if I got out of football I would find myself back in the restaurant business somehow,” Dewalt told me.
He would have preferred it happen under different circumstances, of course.
Occasionally, a customer who isn’t aware that his father passed away will ask where he’s been. It happened while I was there Wednesday, while I was enjoying a slice of pepperoni Sicilian after talking with Dewalt.
The customer pointed to the photo of Salvatore Ruffino near the cash register and said he’d known him, too.
That’s the kind of place it is. Some customers have been going there for decades, through the generations of ownership.
I can see why it was important for Sal to take the reins.
He told me business has been good. The core of the staff who worked for his father have stayed on. He has tinkered with the menu, but only slightly, experimenting with a few new desserts, a deep dish and a thin crust Sicilian.
When you’ve been in business as long as Salvatore Ruffino’s, why mess with success?
“I was here enough to see how it was run. It was just a matter of physically doing it,” Dewalt said.
His wife, Kristina, helps out on weekends.
Their sons, 5-year-old Alex and 2-year-old Christopher, now are running around the shop regularly, just as he did as a youngster.
And Alex is interested in making pizzas.