Divo Diva Cafe, the Hillcrest coffee-and-opera concept run by Victoria Robertson and Rosario Monetti, announced this week that its second location will open at 750 W Fir Street, Suite 105, in Little Italy. The soft opening is targeted for early August 2026, with a grand opening set for September. The space is the former home of Influx Cafe, and the new location will feature a cafe, bakery, and dessert section.

I’ve known Victoria and Rosario for a while now, and this one is personal. They’re two of the most welcoming operators you’ll meet in San Diego, genuine and down to earth, generous with their time, and the kind of hosts who make a small room feel like a supper club whether you’re a regular or a first-time walk-in. When people ask what a small independent cafe is supposed to feel like, I point them to what they’ve built in Hillcrest.

The original room at 3650 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 5th and Pennsylvania, is a 22-seat venue that took over the former Pappalecco space. Their format there is coffee and pastries during the day, with monthly ticketed opera dinner shows featuring homemade Italian meals. They also host a weekly Italian Conversation mixer on Mondays. The concept has its origins in the pandemic, when Victoria was singing weekly Sunday porch concerts from her North Park home, and Rosario, who had recently purchased the Meshuggah Shack coffee shop in Mission Hills, joined her to launch “Concerts at the Shack,” a free weekly performance series that ran for two years before they took the format into a brick-and-mortar Hillcrest room.

Victoria’s opera resume runs deep enough to matter for how the room presents. She performed with San Diego Opera for 12 years and soloed with the San Diego Symphony and the La Jolla Symphony, and she founded the Opera4Kids nonprofit. Rosario has served as president of House of Italy in San Diego and was voted most influential Italian by the local Sons and Daughters of Italy chapter. Their credentials show up in how the Hillcrest performances feel, two trained opera voices working a 22-seat room.

Two Years of Format Testing Before the Second Room

The details of the Hillcrest room matter for reading the Little Italy move. A small independent taking a second location tends to get judged on square footage or seat count, and the more useful signal is how many hours a proven single-unit team has already spent stress-testing the format. In Divo Diva’s case, that’s two years of free performances at Meshuggah Shack plus the ticketed Hillcrest dinner series and a working daytime cafe. The concept has already been run against a paying room, a mixed menu, and a live-performance schedule, three different revenue lines being managed by the same two operators.

The biggest failure mode I see with small operators moving to a second unit is underestimating how much of the first location’s success was the founders being physically present. A concept where the owners are the show, literally singing to the room, sits on the higher end of that risk. It also means these two have thought about the labor question harder than most, because they’ve had to plan for two rooms where they can’t both be everywhere at once.

Why 750 West Fir Fits the Format

The Little Italy space sits in a corridor with an active walking community and strong evening foot traffic, which is exactly the kind of foot pattern the Hillcrest room was built for, walk-in coffee during the day and ticketed events at night. It’s a cafe format going into a former cafe address, which means the tenant improvement math is not starting from raw shell, since the plumbing, hood, and coffee equipment envelope is already there for a like-for-like use.

The expanded menu at 750 W Fir will lean broader than the Hillcrest room. Alongside Italian coffee and freshly baked pastries, the Little Italy location will serve croissants, avocado toast, acai bowls, paninis, pizzas, bruschettas, charcuterie boards, wines, and beers. That’s the kind of daypart layering, coffee through late-evening wine, that Little Italy’s foot traffic actually rewards. Divo Diva is walking into the corridor at a moment when several other operators are recalibrating around rising rents, and a proven small-format team with a lower fit-out lift has an advantage over a first-timer signing a similar lease.

Victoria and Rosario are worth watching because they’ve spent years building rooms that people come back to, and they’re taking that format into a second neighborhood without changing the character of it. After enough visits to Hillcrest to have opinions on the pastry rotation, the reasonable expectation is that the Little Italy location will feel like the first one, and that’s exactly the point.

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Businesses Mentioned

Divo Diva Cafe Meshuggah Shack Influx Cafe Pappalecco