Year In Review: July

We’ll be looking back at the year in Foobooz. July, 2009, was obviously the month of the burger.

News

• Supper’s deviled egg happy hour served up 1,080 eggs.
• The Oceanliner of a restaurant, Oceanaire was a victim of the economy on July 6th.
• Jennifer Carroll and Jennifer Zavala are announced as contestants on Top Chef.
• Old City Cheese Shop gets  a couple mentions as a hidden treasure.
• Johnny Goodtimes’ hunt for Philadelphia’s best pizza took him to Chuck E. Cheese.
• Philadelphia gets a roving cupcake truck.
• Our own Kirsten Henri goes off to write Grub Street Philadelphia. Silver lining for us, we see her more often.
• Meal Ticket features Foobooz in their Good Word segment. We stand by our Dolphin Tavern answer.
• There was a lot of hand wringing over the closure of Ansill Food+Wine.
• We spot Michael Schulson’s liquor license on what has opened as Sampan.
• Ekta fails to renew its domain name and the old URL winds up as a midget porn site.
• Everyone runs out and writes about Brauhaus Schmitz.
• Grub Street starts off with a bang of 22 delicious burgers including the forthcoming Whiskey King.
• We try out We Said, Us Said where our internal monologue tries to make sense of Daniel Stern’s fall openings.
• Trey Popp digs Noble’s braised short rib above all else.
• It’s a media frenzy for the opening of SquareBurger.
• July saw an unprecedented number of restaurant openings announced. In fact we mapped them.
• Beer cocktails become a summer trend.
• Tommy Up goes all Clubber Lang on Stephen Starr’s Squareburger.
• Georges Perrier whips up a cheesesteak.
• Suzy Woods steps in for a few days and gets the Cease Operations order that was plastered to the front of Drinkers Pub.
• Butcher & Singer’s burger wins Best of Philly and the price gets slashed to $5.95.
• The Bite and Foobooz were in Portland, OR where foie gras profiteroles with caramel and sea salt is only the second most decadent dish eaten.
• Oscar’s gets in hot water for serving fake Maker’s Mark.
• Stephen Cook, Michael Solomonov and Erin O’Shea bid farewell to Marigold Kitchen.

Dish of the Month

Hanger Steak at Bibou

It’s difficult to upstage perfect, double-seared hanger steak, but the depth that green peppercorn, red currant gelée and a touch of cream brought to the dish’s red wine bordelaise sauce (a Georges Perrier recipe Pierre tweaked) had me asking for more house-made bread to mop one of my companions’ plates. David Snyder, City Paper

Notable Openings

Azie on Main, Buttercream Cupcake Truck, P.Y.T., SquareBurger, Shank’s Original, Yogorino

Notable Closings

Ansill Food+Wine, Carmine’s, Marigold Kitchen, Ocanaire, Pearl & Akoya, Taquet