Author Archive

Last year, Chris’ Jazz Cafe debuted the world’s first-ever crawfish cheesesteak, and it was pretty dang good, as Councilman Bill Green can attest. And so the other day, when I heard that the first of the live crawfish had arrived at Chris’ from Louisiana, I wondered what strange concepts might be on the horizon.

Well, in addition to a new four-course crawfish tasting menu–which may include items like crawfish dauphinoise or ravioli and a Franklin Fountain-made mayhaw berry ice cream (mayhaw berries being indigenous to Louisiana), there’s also a “crawzone” (yes, a crawfish calzone) as well as the Mudbug Mary: A Cajun twist on the Bloody. Of course, if you just want to kick back and suck some heads, boiled crawfish are $10 per bucket.

And if you think that crawfish are some disgusting bottom-feeding animal more suited for people like this than someone with your highfalutin palette, you still have time to get here.

Chris’ Jazz Cafe [official website]

Less than one week after receiving a crushing two-bell review from Inquirer food critic Craig LaBan, legendary Le Bec-Fin founder Georges Perrier has signed a deal that will yield control of his 42-year old French restaurant to Nicolas Fanucci, a former Le Bec general manager and current GM at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in Napa Valley. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday night, I made it into Route 6, Stephen Starr’s new seafood eatery on North Broad Street. As one of the Bookbinders dined nearby and Mr. Starr sat next to me, telling me some of his plans for the future (and that Robert DeNiro had recently been in), all I could think about was getting out with a couple of these stainless steel lobster picks. And so, after my meal–which was highlighted by the killer raw bar–I slipped two of the six-and-a-half inch utensils into my jacket pocket. Read the rest of this entry »

I just read this nonsense about Jason Sheehan being accused of bribing a waiter with $50 for a table at some restaurant, in some city other than Philadelphia. Apparently, this is worthy of national news—or at least the food blog version of national news. Jason went on to issue a denial of the horrendous charges, but wait a second, it’s not bribery, and it’s not wrong.

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Yesterday, Farmers’ Cabinet co-owner Matt Scheller–not to be confused with Farmers’ Cabinet co-owner Matt Swartz, whose legal problems continue to pile up (more on that later)–sent an email to Foobooz stating that chef Jason Goodman, who got the job in August after Craig LaBan hit the restaurant with one bell, has been “dismissed,” which I am pretty sure is another way of saying he was fired, terminated, shown the door, etc.

But then, someone emailed at 3:24 a.m. today, saying that no, Goodman actually quit due to “abuse by owners”–though from what I gather, it’s Goodman that had a particularly harsh tongue with staffers. Read the rest of this entry »

David Ansill has had quite the career in Philadelphia. He started out bartending for Stephen Starr at the Bank (remember the Bank?!). He’s worked at Serrano, Continental, Lucy’s Hat Shop, Judy’s and the South Street Copa. Then he developed a cult following at Pif in Queen Village, closed that to open the doomed Ansill on Bainbridge (where Judy’s once stood), and somehow landed at meat-market Ladder 15 on Sansom Street, where he works today. And now, he’s ready to bid us farewell and take up residency in Jamaica. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like just months ago that I was telling you about Sansom Street sushi joint Raw getting an outpost at Bart Blastein’s mixed-use 80,000-square foot revolving door aka The Piazza at Schmidts, replacing Shola Olunloyo’s ill-fated Speck project. Oh wait. That’s because it was just months ago. Well, after what I hear was one helluva New Years’ Eve party at the complex (even my Enterprise car rental guy in Upper Darby said so), word comes that Raw is no longer open for business. Read the rest of this entry »

In case you missed it, City Council recently passed Bill No. 110341, which Councilman Jim Kenney introduced last spring to stop the common practice of restaurateurs deducting small percentages from servers’ credit card tips to help cover the transaction fees assessed by credit card companies. Hundreds of Foobooz readers expressed their support for that bill in our informal poll, which was a landslide. One guy who stands firmly planted on the other side of that argument: Marc Vetri. He called me this morning to discuss.

Just to be clear, because I think there has been some confusion out there, you don’t make servers pay the entire credit card fee, right?
Nobody does that. It would be illegal. If the bill is $100 and a customer leaves a $20 tip, we are charged basically around 2%. So we would pay the fee on the bill. And the waiter would pay the fee on the tip.

I thought that Amex was more like 4%.
That is true to some extent. When you’re smaller, like when we had only Vetri, the Amex was like 4%, but then once we started opening the other restaurants and there were more sales, the numbers got lower. Once you are grossing more than $1 million a year, you can make deals.

But it sounds like it can really add up.
Oh yeah, it can be quite a burden. When we had just Vetri, it was a ton of Amex. Monday through Thursday was all corporate. When I saw all those Amexes at 4%, I thought jeez. For a small business guy who’s got 30-40 seats and doing less than a million a year, 4% in a world where you’re making 10%, or whatever the industry average is, well, that’s a lot of money.

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I went to Passyunk Avenue’s new Birra this weekend with the intention of trying the pizza. I did try the pizza. And it was very good. But the real star of the meal had to be the $18 bowl of to-die-for shrimp, which are now officially my favorite version of the crustaceans in town. (Sorry, Sid Booker.) Read the rest of this entry »

Want to know how to tell if your turkey is actually done? (Don’t trust that pop-up thing!) Not sure if you’re supposed to take that bag containing the weird looking stuff out of the cavity before putting your bird in the oven? (You are.) For queries like these, there’s the tried-and-true Butterball Turkey Talk-Line, 1-800-BUTTERBALL. But if you want advice from Jose Garces, Marc Vetri and some of our other favorite Philly chefs on how to spark new life into America’s biggest food holiday and not go totally bonkers in the process, you’ve come to the right place.

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