A Sneak Peek at Cicala’s New Pizza Spot

A sneak peek at what Cicala is cooking up in their new pizza space. / Photography by Robyn Muse

Howdy, buckaroos! And welcome back to the Foobooz food news round-up. We’ve got everything you need to get yourself caught up on the week’s news, all right here in one convenient place. And this week we’re talking about hot chicken, Liz Grothe, Chez Panisse and also looking into an update on Starr’s plans for the former Rittenhouse Square Barnes & Noble.

Before we dive, we’re doing something that we’ve never done before: answering your questions about Philly Mag’s 50 Best Restaurants, and we’re doing it LIVE! Submit all of your burning questions here and watch us on Facebook, Instagram and here on Foobooz this Friday, February 23rd at 12 p.m. for our live discussion.

A Pizza Preview From Joe Cicala

Cicala at the Divine Lorraine is one of those restaurants that doesn’t get talked about as much as it probably should. It is a brilliant and deeply considered Italian restaurant in an absolutely gorgeous space, helmed by husband-and-wife team Joe and Angela Cicala, offering everything from a solid Italian wine and cocktail list to tiramisu french toast on the weekend brunch menu. I really liked the place when I reviewed it, and the Cicalas have been refining and sharpening the experience ever since.

One of the things they’ve done to keep things fresh and interesting? Dozens of pop-ups, most of them focused on Joe’s experiments with pizza. He’s got another one coming up tomorrow, February 21st, from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., and the menu looks excellent, with something like 10 different Neapolitan pies, antipasto, a full bar list full of Italian cocktails, desserts from Angela, and “a sneak peek at our new pizza and event space in the Divine Lorraine Hotel.”

I’m not sure exactly what Joe and Angela have cooking for this new space. They’ve got patios and penthouses and all sorts of different rooms available at the Divine Lorraine to handle everything from kids’ birthday parties to full-on wedding parties. But this looks like something different — a permanent pizza menu and dedicated “pizza counter” seating with a focus on Joe’s ongoing pizza obsession.

As always, You’ll know more when I know more. But for now, you can get reservations for tomorrow night’s preview dinner right here.

Starr Moves Forward With Plans to Conquer Rittenhouse Square

Starr’s newest Italian restaurant will be taking over the space that used to be the Barnes & Noble at Rittenhouse Square. / Photograph via Google Maps

He’s already got Parc, and Parc is Parc, right? Parc is a fixture. A benchmark for Philadelphia dining that has stubbornly refused to change because, honestly, it’s kinda perfect just the way it is.

Next door, he’s got his steakhouse, Barclay Prime. Around the corner, he’s got The Love, which is like Parc, but for people who couldn’t get a table at Parc, and for those who prefer fried chicken to steak frites. A block away there’s the Dandelion which, for a long time, was one of my go-to Center City restaurants, my office-away-from-the-office. And two blocks away, there’s the Continental with its Astronaut martinis, matzoh ball ramen, and shoestring fries with Chinese hot mustard.

To say that Starr owns Rittenhouse Square might be overstating things a little but not, you know, a lot. The couple square blocks we’re talking about here have a concentration of restaurants that both circumscribe Philly’s modern restaurant scene AND define it: French food, thick steaks, Asian fusion, American esoterica, and a gastropub. The spread is notable. The breadth of options impressive.

And Starr isn’t done with the neighborhood yet.

As we’ve talked about before, he and his restaurant group have had their hooks in the former Barnes & Noble space at 1805 Walnut Street since last year. It is a great location — three stories right on the north side of the Square, housed in the historic Alison building. It will seat over 200 people. It will have some of the best foot traffic and street exposure of any address in the entire city. And last week, plans for building out what is currently looking like a new, two-story Italian restaurant in that space were put before the city Historical Commission.

There were issues. The staff didn’t love some of the proposed changes to the 100-year-old building’s facade, but that’s all just negotiation. It’s going to take some work to turn a former bookstore into a massive Italian restaurant, and there will be lots more meetings between now and then. But talking to the Inky last week, Starr confirmed that the new spot was going to be a trattoria-style Italian restaurant (possibly to be called Borromini) and that’s interesting to me for two reasons.

First, because, other than Pizzeria Stella (which is really more of a pizza place than anything else), Starr doesn’t have any other Italian concepts in his portfolio. And in his Rittenhouse Square stronghold, the closest he gets is a ravioli in mushroom sauce or a lemon risotto with leeks on the board at The Love. This would be something new for Starr. Or at least new-ish. And dropping this concept into a monster space right in the heart of the city is a big swing.

Second, while I would argue (eloquently) that another big Italian restaurant is the absolute LAST thing this city needs right now, it might be exactly what Starr needs in this location. With the density of restaurants he already operates in Rittenhouse Square and the combined number of butts he needs to fill all those seats every night, a big, beautiful, approachable Italian restaurant is one of the only things he could do that wouldn’t simply cannibalize the business he already draws. This new project would be different enough from everything else he has in the area (an English pub, a French cafe, a retro martini bar, etc.) that it wouldn’t draw business away from his existing properties but will, conceivably, bring new bodies into the equation. Plus (and this is no small consideration), with the number of seats that a double-decker dining room in a large location must add to the market, Starr is going to have to depend on out-of-town guests to bulk up his head counts. And what’s more attractive to someone visiting Philly than a big ol’ Italian restaurant in a gorgeous neighborhood owned by the guy who already operates most of the restaurants in this town that someone from outside of it may recognize?

So anyway, Starr is returning to Rittenhouse. That’s the takeaway here. He told the Inquirer that he’s looking at January 2025 as a possible opening if things go smoothly, but since things never go smoothly these days, I’d bet on Spring on ‘25.

Moving on …

Couch Surfing

Expect Italian-inspired dishes at Liz Grothe’s residency at Forîn. / Photograph by Mike Prince

Couch Café’s Liz Grothe has been in the news a LOT lately. And that’s because in a scene that lives for pop-ups, collaborations and one-off event dinners, hers are some of the most fascinating.

She’s done a Filipino/Spanish collab dinner at Oloroso (where she used to cook), an ode to the Western Sizzlin’ steakhouse chain at High Street, another one at Lacroix. Every menu seems both personal and biographical, deeply felt and kinda goofy. It’s a killer vibe to be able to nail, and Grothe seems to have a sixth sense for how to get it just right.

So now, guess what? Forîn Cafe just announced that they’ve got Grothe for a three-month residency starting March 1st. The residency (which is a trend that’s serving Philly very well) will be Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at Forîn, from Friday, March 1st through Saturday, May 25th. It will lean heavy into Grothe’s experience cooking Italian (she was sous at Fiorella before re-locating her talents to her home kitchen in NoLibs for her Couch Cafe supper club) and will serve as a kind of “tour of Italy” with menus changing monthly. The first one will be Toscano (think panzanella, rabbits, tiramisu), followed by Calabrian, then Sicilian. And this new residency program will also be an excellent excuse for Forin to show off the new bar they just added to the space, so they’ll be crafting a cocktail program to fit Grothe’s menus. Think espresso martinis and amaretto margaritas, plus beer and house-made fruit wines.

Grothe will be doing two seatings a night — 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. — and reservations are required, so get yours here.

A New Jersey Chez Panisse?

Scenes from Finnbar. / Photograph by Emily Gass

Well, not quite. But if you’re down for a little drive, Frenchtown, NJ is getting a new restaurant called Finnbar with some serious links to the famous California restaurant.

And yes, I know. Frenchtown is a haul. It’s up there in Central Jersey, north of Doylestown, maybe an hour from Center City. And I wouldn’t really be mentioning this at all except that the name Chez Panisse still swings some weight in certain food circles, and the guy running the kitchen at Finnbar is Cal Peternell who was the chef at Chez Panisse for 22 years.

Chez Panisse in Berkeley was the cradle of New American cuisine back before “New American” became an absolutely hollow phrase describing nothing. It’s where California Cuisine was invented, where the American farm-to-table movement got its start, where Alice Waters and her chefs (including Dan Barber, Jonathan Waxman, Jeremiah Tower, Suzanne Goin, Samin Nosrat and a dozen others) instigated the slow, quiet revolution in American dining which now informs the creation of pretty much every serious restaurant that opens today — whether they realize it or not.

Anyway, the new joint? It had a packed opening night at the beginning of the month. And the ever-changing menu reads like pure, mainline Chez Panisse. A salad of raw winter vegetables and Pink Lady apples. Duck confit over celery root purée with sage salsa verde. Spaghetti with capers, olives, tomato and anchovy. I kinda dig it, honestly. It’s weird how something so classic can feel like a breath of fresh air after years away.

So yeah, it’s kind of a big deal. The space at 7 Bridge Street was the Frenchtown Inn for almost 200 years (it opened in 1838), but is open right now as Finnbar under Peternell’s command. Plus, if you want to feel good about eating there, it’s partnering with local nonprofit, Studio Route 29, an art studio for adults with intellectual disabilities. Seventy percent of the profits from Finnbar are going right back to Studio Route 29, and the studio, in turn, is providing art for the restaurant (all of which is for sale).

Anyway, if you’re headed north for any reason, maybe check it out. It looks more interesting than anything happening in New Hope these days, so I’m intrigued. If I get there first, I’ll let you know how things look.

In the meantime, how about some leftovers?

The Leftovers

Roasted squash salad at Dizengoff. / Photograph by Michael Persico

Fearless Restaurants — the crew behind all five White Dog Cafe locations — is rolling out a new concept. They announced recently that they’d be opening a new Italian concept called Testa Rossa on Baltimore Pike in Glen Mills this summer. But now it looks like they’re doubling down with a second location announced for the former Bertucci’s at 523 West Lancaster Avenue in Wayne.

It kinda makes sense. Fearless already has three other restaurants in Wayne – Rosalie (which is also Italian), a White Dog and Autograph Brasserie — so they know the market. There’s no hard opening date on either, but I’ll be keeping an eye on them.

The Green Rock Tavern on Lehigh Avenue is doing their annual pierogi fest this weekend. Called Pierogimania, it’ll be happening on the 23rd, 24th, and 25th. There will be beer. There will be pierogies. A battle royale will be had to determine the best pierogies. Undoubtedly, there will be arguments. Sounds like a good time, right? Check it out here.

Back in January, I told you about the big changes at Dizengoff. Cook and Solo’s little hummus shop that could essentially ate Abe Fisher, its sister restaurant next door, and emerged from an extended shutdown as a bigger, stronger and boozier version of itself. It opened as a dinner-only restaurant, but there was a promise that lunch service would be returning soon.

Well guess what? As of today, lunch is back on the schedule. Like at the original Diz, day time service is focused on freshly made hummus and excellent pitas, plus fries with tehina ketchup and boozy frozen lemonana.

Lunch is daily from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and is walk-in only (no reservations), but with 60-some seats now, your odds are better than they ever were before. You can take a look at the full lunch menu now just to get yourself psyched up.

Finally, remember a few weeks back when we talked about the hot chicken wars in Philly? Yeah, well, apparently there’s no sign of things calming down on that front because now there’s another spot that just opened and has people going bonkers.

Baz’s Hot Chicken & Gyro opened on February 1st at 4056 Lancaster Avenue in Belmont. And while, previously, a lot of the hot chicken shops have been concentrating in the Northeast, this one popped up across the river in West Philly and, well, just check out these lines …

I know, right? That’s crazy. And that was on opening day.

Baz’s does just what the name implies — hot chicken and gyros — and also fries, lamb and chicken rice bowls. You can check out the scene on their Instagram. Or you could just show up and check the place out for yourself. That’s what I’m gonna do.

See ya’ll there.