Why Two Guys From Italy matters.
Two Guys From Italy is an enduring Italian restaurant where Glendale's neighborhood dining culture meets house-made pasta, scratch-built red sauce and more than three decades of stewardship under restaurateur Jerry Rossi.
Set along North Verdugo Road near East Lexington Drive and just steps from Glendale Adventist Medical Center, the restaurant occupies eastern Glendale between the residential slopes approaching the Verdugo Mountains, the historic Rancho San Rafael landscape and the commercial corridors descending toward Central Glendale. A long-running dining room establishes the physical character, retaining the scale of a neighborhood Italian restaurant after decades under the same ownership. Pizza and pasta form the principal encounter, joined by calzones, parmigiana dishes and a substantial roster of sandwiches. Takeout and family-sized combinations extend the kitchen beyond seated meals, preserving the restaurant's role as a recurring local gathering point. The result is a deeply established Verdugo Road restaurant where scratch cooking and unusually durable ownership carry the original franchise name into an independent Glendale institution.
What defines Two Guys From Italy.
Two Guys From Italy is best known for preserving a restaurant name created by Joseph Calderone and Luigi Devito, the two Italian founders whose partnership supplied the business with its literal title. Jerry Rossi later bought into the concept, selected the Verdugo Road location and remodeled the property before beginning a tenure that has exceeded thirty years. Rossi's operation subsequently developed into an independently run Glendale restaurant built around preparations produced inside its own kitchen. Pasta, meatballs, Italian sausage and marinara remain house-made components, connecting multiple parts of the repertoire through a common production base. The restaurant has maintained ties with Glendale schools, youth sports and fundraisers across Rossi's tenure, including school pizza events that return proceeds to participating organizations. Its survival under the same proprietor for more than three decades has transformed what originated within a franchise concept into a locally rooted restaurant closely associated with one Glendale block.
Hand-stretched pizza provides the kitchen with its broadest platform, with the Two Guys Special layering pepperoni, mushrooms, Italian sausage, black olives, bell peppers and onions over the house pie. Marinara links that pizza tradition with meatballs, sausage, parmigiana dishes and numerous pastas through a sauce still produced in-house. Baked gnocchi joins ricotta with marinara, and another gnocchi preparation folds tomato sauce into cream with basil and Parmesan, using the same pasta form to move between baked richness and a smoother sauce. Seafood risotto combines Italian rice with shellfish, and linguine con vongole pairs clams with garlic, parsley and olive oil through a choice of red or white preparation. Parmigiana carries the red-sauce repertoire into breaded chicken, veal and eggplant, and calzones redirect pizza dough around enclosed fillings. Cannoli, tiramisu, spumoni and lemon mascarpone cake close the meal through an Italian-American dessert repertoire consistent with the restaurant's expansive neighborhood format.
How Two Guys From Italy fits.
Two Guys From Italy works as the anchor for an outing connecting the surviving adobe fabric of Rancho San Rafael with the place where negotiations helped end armed conflict in California during the Mexican-American War and a Victorian house rescued through one of Glendale's formative preservation campaigns.
Begin at Casa Adobe de San Rafael, built for Tomás Sánchez after the former Los Angeles County sheriff acquired 100 acres from the immense Rancho San Rafael. Adobe blocks formed the walls of the hacienda-type residence around the late 1860s, and subsequent deterioration brought the property close to destruction by 1930. Neighborhood preservation efforts stopped its demolition after the California Medicinal Wine Company acquired the site, allowing Glendale to purchase the property and complete a restoration in 1932. Nineteenth-century furnishings now occupy rooms surrounded by a Monterey-style corridor, brick patio and surviving eucalyptus trees associated with the historic property. Continue to Catalina Verdugo Adobe, built by Teodoro Verdugo and named for his aunt Catalina, daughter of Rancho San Rafael grantee José María Verdugo. The rancho encompassed 36,403 acres, spreading across territory that later became Glendale, Burbank and portions of northeastern Los Angeles. A massive oak on the property became the site of a January 1847 meeting in which Jesús Pico discussed surrender with his brother, Mexican commander Andrés Pico. Those negotiations preceded the meeting between Pico and John C. Frémont at Campo de Cahuenga two days later that ended fighting in California. The original Oak of Peace died in 1987, and a successor was planted in 2023 near the surviving adobe. Conclude at Doctors House Museum, a Queen Anne-Eastlake residence built 1888 and originally standing on East Wilson Avenue. Four physicians owned the house successively, producing the name it retains, before silent-film actor, producer and animal advocate Nell Shipman occupied it with her family during the early twentieth century. Demolition threatened the building in 1979, prompting activists to organize the Glendale Historical Society that October and move the structure to Brand Park. Thousands of volunteer restoration hours preceded its dedication to Glendale in September 1982, preserving the house as Glendale Register of Historic Resources No. 6. The progression moves from an adobe surviving the fragmentation of Rancho San Rafael through ground connected with California's transition from Mexican to American rule and culminates inside a Victorian residence whose threatened destruction helped mobilize Glendale's modern preservation movement.
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