Philadelphia Distilling

On Tuesday, Cook (the collaborative kitchen, classroom and experimental food lab from Audrey Claire Taichman) had its unofficial opening night–a kind of friends-and-family, pre-sold, not-exactly-open-to-the-public event which featured Georges Perrier behind the bright and shiny-new Wolf range, cooking and chatting and generally just being his charming, French-y self. I didn’t go to this event, but did call the next morning to see how things went–wanting to make sure that the place hadn’t caught fire (looking at you, Spread Bagelry), that no SWAT teams had been called, that there hadn’t been a last-minute decision to just junk the whole cooking school idea and turn the place into a sushi bar. On an opening night, that’s really all I expect of a new operation: Don’t catch fire, don’t perform any kind of panicky conceptual U-turns and don’t make the 11 o’clock news in any way that would involve a police captain being interviewed and saying something like, “At this point, we don’t even know how many hostages are inside…” I’ve been through enough restaurant openings in my time to know that no one should really ask for anything more than that. If you make it through the night with no sirens, that should be considered a smashing victory.

Wednesday was a down day at 20th and Rittenhouse. A recovery day. And then came Thursday–the official first night of business, which also happened to be the sold-out Foobooz/Philly mag/Philadelphia Distilling Gin-o-Rama. The real-world version of the Gin Universe guide we did a couple weeks back. And I was there for that, right from the start. Honestly, I’m still recovering today.

Click through the jump for a wrap-up of the opening night festivities and a Foobooz exclusive sneak-preview of Cook’s October schedule…

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