Danny DiGiampietro’s parents owned a pizzeria at Fifth and Watkins streets in South Philly. Every morning, his dad worked his day job for United News, a periodicals distributor, first as a deliveryman and eventually as vice president of distribution. He’d come home, take a 20-minute nap, then go into the pizza shop and sling dough until 11 at night.

“He was a fucking worker,” DiGiampietro says. “Worked himself to death.”

It was a heart attack that killed him at the age of 47. DiGiampietro was 16. He’s 47 today. He owns a pizzeria, Angelo’s. It’s arguably the most popular pizzeria in Philadelphia not named Beddia, busy the from the day it opened last January and exponentially more so since November, when Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy popped into Angelo’s and declared it the best in Philly on his one-bite pizza reviews Instagram channel. The account has more than 80,000 followers, and the Angelo’s review has been watched nearly 40,000 times. At peak hours, it can seem like that many customers are crammed inside Angelo’s snug waiting area. There’s no phone number to call ahead. Whether you’re Eagles center Jason Kelce, actor Bradley Cooper, or just Joey from down the block, you come, you order, you wait.

Behind the counter, DiGiampietro and his staff work at time-lapse speed, shuffling square and round and upside-down pies in and out of the gas-fired deck oven, packing chicken cutlets into house-baked rolls with fresh mozzarella and stuffed long hots, stretching customers’ names like accordions — TOMMMMY! RIIIIIIITA! MICHEEEEELLE! — as they holler for pick-ups and count out cash like casino dealers. Even when the rest of the team is in the weeds, DiGiampietro is at ease, living up to his dad’s nickname for him, Danny Disaster. “My whole life has been chaos of my own doing,” he says. “I’ve always been comfortable in it. The world is a fucking tornado around me, and Lauren, my wife, says, ‘You walk in the middle of it just whistling while everybody else in your life is a nervous fucking wreck.’”

DiGiampietro — white apron, tight silver hair under an Angelo’s cap, diamond stud in his ear — and I are on the second floor at Angelo’s, the above-ground man cave furnished with three 65-inch TVs, a retail beverage fridge, sofa, and dining table ringed in cherry-red aluminum chairs. The third story has the offices, where Lauren coordinates catering orders and does the books. DiGiampietro yells up to her, “Am I a fucking mess, Lauren, for real?”

Lauren comes down the steps — jeans, hair as black as her chunky knit sweater, boots, laughing. “You are the biggest mess I know.”

Even when the rest of the team is in the weeds, DiGiampietro is at ease, living up to his dad’s nickname for him, Danny Disaster. “My whole life has been chaos of my own doing,” he says. “I’ve always been comfortable in it. The world is a fucking tornado around me, and Lauren, my wife, says, ‘You walk in the middle of it just whistling while everybody else in your life is a nervous fucking wreck.’”

Theirs is a real South Philly love story. Lauren is a Sarcone, which probably means nothing to you unless you’re from Philadelphia, in which case you’ll recognize her relation to one of the city’s great baking dynasties. In 1918, her great-great-grandfather, Luigi Sarcone, founded Sarcone’s Bakery, famous for their crusty sesame-seeded rolls and still in operation today. DiGiampietro, like his father, always had a delivery route, but instead of news, he delivered bread. He used to pick up at Sarcone’s every morning at 5:30. “I pull up one morning, and there she is. I was like, ‘Who are you?’ She was like, ‘Who the fuck are you, with your Howard Stern blasting? Don’t you know it’s 5:30 in the fucking morning?’” DiGiampietro was stunned. “I was like, ‘Oh shit, wanna go out?’”

The DiGiampietros have been married for 10 years. They have two kids, Luciana, 8, and Angelo, 7, for whom the pizzeria is named. The pizzeria that may put both of them through college. “Last Sunday, we had 500 pizza doughs,” says DiGiampietro. “We were sold out at 5 o’clock. We had 400 loaves of bread — 800 sandwiches. We made it till 8.”

Or maybe not. DiGiampietro has a history of Seinfeld-ing, shutting it all down at the peak of success. He did that with his sneaker truck in the ’90s. He did that with his cheesesteak stand at the Cowtown Rodeo in the South Jersey sticks, taking that business from 15 dozen rolls a week in 2001 to 120 dozen rolls a week in 2007. “But I also joke that I like to go broke every five years,” says DiGiampietro, whose next business, his dream bakery on Eighth and Watkins, three blocks from his parents’ old shop, turned out to be a “financial fucking nuclear bomb.”

With Lauren pregnant, he leased the bakery out but kept his bread route, which took him through Haddonfield, the well-heeled Jersey suburb most famous for lending its name to the fictional setting for “Halloween.” One day, he passed a boarded-up pizzeria. “Now I don’t know nothing about pizza,” he told Lauren, “but I know how to make bread.” They leased the space, started making pies from dough fortified with a vivacious sourdough starter, and the original Angelo’s was open, slowly building strong word-of-mouth business, and making money.