Dozens of bakery customers line up for a South Philly turkey roasting tradition

Dozens of foil-wrapped turkeys in roasting pans covered the floor early Thursday morning at Cacia Bakery in South Philly, awaiting their turn in the blazing bread oven.

For decades, residents have been lining up outside the Ritner Street bakery on cold Thanksgiving mornings to drop off their birds for roasting.

“We’ve been coming here since they started years ago,” said Joseph Conti of Packer Park, who was one of the later arrivals at about 7 a.m. “The main thing is it’s a brick oven, so the turkey comes out, like, real crisp, but it’s still moist and all that. The brick oven is the secret.”

This year’s visit was the second for Craig Dwyer of Collingdale in Delaware County. He said the perfect roasting — and the convenience of not having to cook a 50-pound bird himself — more than made up for the two trips he made to drop it off in the morning and pick it up in the afternoon.

“This is going to be my turkey home from now on and probably forever,” Dwyer said. “It’s very easy. It’s very convenient.”

Customers carrying turkeys happily jostled with bakery staff and several TV reporters and camera operators who were on hand to document the tradition. Fourth-generation baker and turkey roaster Joe Cacia chatted with customers, tied a number tag to each bird, and noted their weights to determine where they’d go in the shop’s two ovens.

“I thought that was the norm when I was a kid, that everybody cooked turkeys and everyone got interviewed. So when I found out people don’t actually work [on Thanksgiving], I was confused,” Cacia said.

“This is all I’ve ever known, this is all my dad’s ever known because my great-grandfather started it 70 years ago,” he said.

On the floor and then in the oven, small turkeys go on the left and big ones on the right, where it’s hotter, Cacia said. They’re first roasted until they have just a little color on top, then carefully pulled out with a long wooden pizza peel to have the foil removed for the final hour of cooking, he said. The whole process takes about 3 hours.

Other than a younger member of the family taking over every couple of decades, one of the few parts of the process that has changed over the years is the charge for roasting.

“When I was a kid, I remember it was like $14, $15, and then when I was a teenager, it was like $20 and $25. Now it’s $30. Same thing with flour — when the price of flour goes up, you have to increase your prices for bread,” Cacia said.

As of 7:30 a.m. a little over 100 turkeys had been dropped off, and he said he expected a few more customers to trickle in. They’ve had as many as 145 and saw the number drop to around 80 during the pandemic.

Some people start lining up before 5 a.m. to make sure their bird gets a spot, but he said there’s always enough room in the ovens and people don’t need to rush.

“We enjoy being a part of people’s tradition,” he said, “because we know for a lot of people, this is their Thanksgiving tradition.”