All winter, and into late spring, the residents of Spruce Hill walked past the fresh white stucco building with bright blue awnings on a corner of 45th and Chestnut and wondered, "What is going on?"

A new restaurant - Demetri's Pizzeria & Mediterranean Cuisine - had been in the works for more than a year. The owners, Dimitri Maroulis and his son Michail, had attended meetings of the community association and listened to the zoning committee's concerns.

Yes, they would make sure the Dumpster was sequestered. Yes, they would take down the huge billboard that the previous owner had left. They would use only subdued lighting and discreet signage and serve high-quality food at reasonable prices.

This West Philadelphia neighborhood of city workers and university professors and students and middle-class families and tradespeople had been looking forward to getting a nice, little, sit-down restaurant. Sure, five streets east they could find everything from Ethiopian to Tex-Mex. But Spruce Hill, which stretches roughly from 38th to 46th Streets and Market to Woodland, is one of those urbane residential enclaves in which daily sustenance means eating out or ordering in. And the closer the restaurant, the better.

By May, the natives were no longer impatient.

They were worried.

"We were asking ourselves: Is this thing really going to happen?" said Barry Grossbach, chairman of the zoning committee for the Spruce Hill Community Association.

Grossbach, a retired history professor who has lived in this neighborhood since 1970, had met the Maroulis family, who had run seven pizzerias over the last 25 years in Philadelphia and its suburbs.

Along with his neighbors, he had watched them last summer, gutting the place, throwing out the shovels full of crack vials and decrepit mattresses and years of filth.

"It was a dump," said Jasmine Maroulis, Michail's wife and comanager of the restaurant. "A dump, dump, I mean dump."

Everyone heard the drills and hammers as the father and son laid down a hardwood floor and put up wainscoting.

People watched through the windows approvingly when trucks unloaded sueded beige banquettes and tables for two and four.

"But the economy like this, we were afraid to open it," Jasmine said. "So we waited." Finally, on the last Friday in May, they put out a "grand opening" sign and unlocked the doors.

The sign, however, was misspelled "Demetrios." They put up with it for a few days, then took it down.

Maroulis the elder had made enough compromises with his name already.

The city has a long list of places called Dimitri's in various variations and didn't want to issue a business license unless Maroulis came up with a unique name. So Demetri's had to do.

A former butcher, Maroulis had moved to the United States in 1988 when his mother-in-law needed surgery unavailable in the family's native Greece.

After his mother-in-law recovered, she went back home, where she remained until she died two years ago at 95.

But Maroulis and his wife stayed.

"My parents always worked very hard," Michail said. "I hardly ever saw them unless it was at the restaurant." After school, he and his older brother, Ed, helped make pizza.