Opinion
Gone but not forgotten: Jason Sheehan revisits the ghosts of Philly restaurants past.
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We spend a lot of time talking here about the newest restaurants, the hottest menus, the most interesting openings, and the best dishes in the city. And that’s as it should be. We cover the news, after all, and Philly is absolutely booming right now. Our restaurant scene is growing at a ridiculous (and possibly unsustainable) pace. The industry is full of a thousand different stories, a hundred different cuisines, and dozens of chefs who you need to know about right now.
But sometimes I worry that we’re forgetting our history. That with all the bright and shiny new things to focus on, we can sometimes lose track of the fact that Philly’s restaurant landscape was not always like this, and that the price of today’s glittering excess has been the loss of so many classic restaurants and neighborhood favorites over the years — places like McGlinchey’s, Pod, Kelly’s Seafood, Bistrot La Minette, and a hundred others that barely get talked about anymore in our rush to fawn over whatever hotspot just switched on the lights.
But that question — If you could bring back just one — has had me thinking ever since I first saw it posted on Threads a few nights ago. And the 500-plus comments let me know that I’m not the only one who’s been feeling a little nostalgic lately. I read through all of them (or most of them, anyway), and taken in total, they form a kind of collective history of Philly’s rise across the decades. Of how we ate before eating became a spectator sport, and a record of what we value by naming those things that we miss most.
Mad Mex was a big one. The University City spot was beloved for its big-ass jalapeño margaritas and plates of nachos. It was also the first spot mentioned, so it got a lot of love in the comments, but, in fairness, people really seem to miss that place. For those margaritas and wings alone, there is a very loud, very dedicated fan base still holding out hope for a return. After that it was Ms. Tootsie’s. And Warmdaddy’s for its skillet cornbread and open mic nights. Knave of Hearts, Dmitri’s, and Spaghetti Warehouse on Spring Garden Street, which people recalled with an incredible fondness. “I don’t even remember if it was good or not,” one commenter said. “But just to circle da block on that time in my life.”
Eras came and went over the course of hundreds of comments. Styles bubbled up in the thread, then vanished. Le Bec-Fin was followed by memories of Striped Bass and Bookbinder’s. Little Pete’s by the Melrose and the old South Street Diner. Zanzibar Blue and the Astral Plane. And all of it got me thinking about what would make my list. I know there’s no way I could choose just one, but there are a few (both from this list and not) that I’d give almost anything to have back, even just for a night.
Owner-chef Georges Perrier, photographed at Le Bec-Fin in 2011 / Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images
Le Bec-Fin
An obvious choice, sure, but I was there for the last night of service on Walnut Street, and by then it’d already been sold and changed chefs at least twice. It was already only a copy of a copy of a copy — a place that lived by its famous name and the space it occupied in the psychological real estate of Philadelphia’s fanciest diners. But the Le Bec I’d want back was the one that represented the peak of Philly’s last restaurant renaissance — the five-star Le Bec with its grand chandeliers, unapologetic Frenchness, and Georges Perrier at the helm. It was before my time in Philly (I was still a cook then, working my way through kitchens up and down the East Coast), but Le Bec at its height did more to shape the arc of this city’s modern restaurant industry more than maybe any other single location, and memories of it still echo through the scene to this day.
The Original Cheu Noodle Bar
Of all the restaurants opened (and closed) by partners Ben Puchowitz and Shawn Darragh, I miss Nunu the most — though that’s largely because I really want just one more order of its spicy tuna dip. But it’s their original Cheu Noodle Bar that I want back because it was the opening of Cheu on 10th Street back in April of 2013 (weirdly, just two months before the final closure of Le Bec-Fin) that, in retrospect, marked the start of something new in Philadelphia. It was an absurd place, with Jewish-Japanese fusion on the menu and dumpling porn on the walls. It was loud and crowded all the time, served ridiculously good wings and wildly inauthentic matzo ball ramen, broccoli jumped-up with Vietnamese five-spice sausage, and deep-fried scrapple. There was an undeniable energy there that said all the old rules were being thrown out, and to get a seat at the counter was to know you were in the middle of something exciting — even if you didn’t know exactly what it was. I miss the kind of chaotic heart that place had and the risks it was able to take. I’m not sure if I’ve felt anything like it since.
Cheu Noodle Bar / Photograph by Keith McMenamin for Visit Philly
The Continental, Old City
I once got drunk on gin martinis here, stumbled outside for a cigarette (oh, those were the days), and almost ran into Ed Rendell carrying two bags of groceries down the street. Also, the French fries were really good.
94th Aero Squadron
This one was also before my time in Philadelphia, but my wife, who grew up here, remembered going there with her grandfather. It was one of his favorite restaurants — up in the Northeast, out by the airport on Red Lion Road — and her recollections of the place immediately made me want to go there, too. It was a WWI-themed restaurant, decorated with sandbags, replica biplanes, and military memorabilia, with a view of the runways. And while all of that might make it seem like little more than a perfectly designed dad restaurant (which it most certainly was), take a look at the menu. Escargot and potato skins on the same board. Crepes Normandie for $7.50. Roast duckling, shrimp au Sauternes, French quiches, prime rib with horseradish, and ambrosia salad for dessert. It was French food for the working class. A blue-collar chain restaurant serving the classics of Julia Child-era French food. It was also the first place my wife ever had wild rice, and she remembers it to this day — which is really saying something for a critic’s wife.
Serpico
Like Cheu Noodle Bar before it, Serpico marked a point in history. Stephen Starr had inked a deal with Peter Serpico, one of David Chang’s top lieutenants from Momofuku in New York, that would bring him to Philly to open a restaurant of his own. And while that might not seem like such a big deal today, back in 2012 it was huge. This was a James Beard Award-winning chef, coming from a two-Michelin-star restaurant in Manhattan, to open a joint on South Street in a former Foot Locker. Everything about the place — from the clean, industrial design and chalkboard menus to the duck leg buns and lamb ribs with Japanese eggplant sauce — made promises of a future that Starr (and Serpico) could see coming before almost anyone else could. Granted, it was a future that got derailed by a pandemic that no one could’ve anticipated, but if you look at the opening menu and photos of the place from its early days, you can see in them the core DNA of a style that’s still being echoed in restaurants today.
Tuna bon bon at Jansen. / Photograph by Gab Bonghi
Jansen
I came up in the industry cooking the kind of food that chef David Jansen served at his eponymous restaurant in Mount Airy. A kind of late New Americanism, shot through with hints of French and Asian influences. “Shellfish sauces,” I wrote in my review of the place back in 2016, “slouching ring-molded tartares with sprigs of thyme poking up like tiny trees, food stacked or clenched tight like fists amid the vast white space of plates doodled with sauce.” Every meal here was like going back to visit the best days of my white-jacketed youth. And when it closed, I felt like someone had taken my time machine away.
Mad Rex
Mad Rex
A very different place than Mad Mex, this was the apocalypse-themed, VR-assisted, eat-meat-off-of-rocks fever dream that opened next to the Fillmore in Fishtown back in October of 2017 and closed during an actual apocalypse just a couple years later. This wildly expensive experiment in early vibe dining (the vibe in question being Mad-Max-at-the-Hard-Rock-Cafe) was doomed from the start, but the fact that it existed at all is 100 percent indicative of why I love the restaurant industry so much. Because it’s a place where someone can legitimately say, “I want several million dollars to build a restaurant with a Day-Glo helicopter hanging from the roof, AK-47 replicas on the walls, and cocktails served in IV bags that people can drink while playing VR games and listening to a DJ spinning from a custom War Rig parked out front.” And then someone will give it to them. Someone will say, “I dunno, Gary. Sounds good to me. The kids’ll probably love it. But what if they also had to cook their own meat on super-heated lava rocks?” And then that will become part of the concept, too (insurance liability be damned). There will never be another place like Mad Rex. It was singular in its strangeness. An absolute product of its time. And I hated it, but I miss it, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have been alive to experience it myself — if only to be able to say that I saw the end of the world, as envisioned by a restaurant entertainment group, and lived to tell the tale.
Dining and Cooking