Inside Fishtown’s New Piano Bar Where Patrons Get to Play

Caletta cocktail lounge and piano bar / Photograph by Suzannah Zee

Howdy, buckaroos! And welcome back to the weekly Foobooz food news round-up. We’ve just got a few quick things to get to this week, including (but not limited to) new late-night happy hours, Little Walter’s in the New York Times, and the suburban resurrection of a beloved Philly restaurant. But let’s kick things off this week with this…

There’s Gonna Be SO MANY Bad Billy Joel Impressions

Back in August, when I was letting y’all know about the opening of Tyler Akin’s new Bastia at the Hotel Anna & Bel in Fishtown, I also told you that Bastia had a sister space that Akin was developing, with plans to open once Bastia was comfortably settled into its groove. That place was called Caletta, and it was described as “a cocktail bar and lounge with bar and poolside seating, [and] a menu of Italian bar snacks.”

Well guess what? Bastia has been up and running for a month now and I just got word that Akin and his team have decided to pull the trigger on the second concept. Soft open was this past Friday and Saturday, but Caletta is scheduled to officially open to the public on Thursday, October 3rd.

So what’s Caletta’s deal? It is, and I quote:

“An oasis-like intimate cocktail lounge and piano bar at Hotel Anna & Bel in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood … The 24-seat lounge features an Italian-leaning menu of elevated bar snacks alongside a progressive, seasonally-driven cocktail list that is both inspired by the Mediterranean and incorporates global influences.”

So we’re talking Italian sturgeon caviar and cured egg yolk in a fine herb salad, saffron arancini over black truffle fonduta, and ribeye spiedini with walnut pesto from the kitchen. There’s also a beverage menu (courtesy of Benjamin Kirk) that is just … bonkers. The signature “Caletta Spritz” has seven ingredients. The “Saturn Descent” includes aged rye gin, yuzu sake, a pomegranate and umeboshi cordial, shiso and BBQ bitters. And there’s another drink with honey nut squash and Aquavit in it. And that alone seems like reason enough to check the place out. Because, on paper, that all sounds horrible and I am dying to see how Caletta’s bar staff makes it work.

Oh, and as if the BBQ bitters and mad-scientist spritzes weren’t bait enough to get you through the door, the place has a piano. No big deal on the surface, sure. Plenty of bars have pianos. But Caletta is planning on having nights where they just let any old weirdo who wanders in play for the crowd. Can you imagine how spectacularly badly that is going to go? Because you get three squash-and-Aquavit cocktails in me and I am ABSOLUTELY going to convince myself that I — a man who has not touched a piano since the fourth grade — am a virtuoso pianist who needs to share his gift with a tightly-packed bar full of strangers. And I can promise you I’m not the only idiot in Philadelphia who’s gonna feel that way.

Caletta will be open Thursdays through Saturdays, from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m.

I’m gonna start practicing the lyrics to “Piano Man” right now.

Federal Donuts Expands Into Radnor (and Beyond)

Federal Donuts & Chicken / Photograph by Ed Newton

As we all know, Federal Donuts & Chicken — the new(ish), official, all-business name for the FedNuts brand — has been on something of a journey lately.

Originally founded as this tiny little fried chicken-and-doughnut shop in 2011 by Michael Solomonov and Steve Cook, it quickly grew beyond its boutique, passion project roots. It’s the kind of operation that would announce the opening of a new location and see lines snaking down the block; that could mess up parking in an entire neighborhood just by releasing a new doughnut flavor. It went from a single location to three, then five. The spaces got bigger. The menus, though always focused on the holy trinity of doughnuts, fried chicken, and coffee, have gotten more complicated.

There are 10 locations now, with shops in Philly, two stands at the stadiums, another at a Whole Foods in Wynnewood, one at a casino in Las Vegas; and two years ago, the company took some investment money from a Radnor-based franchise investment firm called NewSpring Capital in order to fund further expansion plans.

Those plans hit their first benchmark last week with the opening of FD&C’s first suburban location: a 20-seat space at 232 Radnor Chester Road, right by Radnor High School and Villanova University. It’ll be open seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and is offering a breakfast combo special, fried chicken sliders, and a menu of fancy doughnuts that includes a maple-cinnamon bun variety, biscoffee, spiced pear à la mode, raspberry-ginger, turtle, and pumpkin pie.

This location is owned by three local entrepreneurs: Chris Magarity, Michael Sloane, and Michael Heller. And they’re not stopping with Radnor. They’ve already got dibs on a space at 4021 Welsh Road in Willow Grove, another at the Plymouth Square Shopping Center in Conshohocken, and plans to get both of those locations open by the end of the year. And along with an extra partner, Mark Heinz, they’ve also got eyes on a space in Marlton, which would mark the first South Jersey location for FD&C.

So yeah, it’s a great time to be a fan of fried chicken and doughnuts. Especially if you’re out in the Philly burbs. Or Vegas.

And now, in more good news for the suburbanites …

Fond Comes Back to Life

Photograph courtesy of Fond

I’ve been doing these news round-ups for a long time now. Years, actually. They started during the pandemic when they were little more than memorials for the restaurants we were losing every week (along with the occasional weird story about vampires) and have continued as a way for us all to keep a handle on the ever-evolving scene here in Philly and beyond.

But one of the unusual side effects of having spent the past several years putting these things together every week is that some of the stories are beginning to come full circle. Take, for example, the closure of Fond in South Philly. I wrote about the end of Fond’s 12-year run just before Christmas in 2021.

“Over the weekend, Lee Styer and Jesse Prawlucki made the decision to close their beloved French-y New American restaurant on East Passyunk and (eventually) make it the new home of Styer’s brunch spot, the Dutch. And look, it’s not surprising, is it? Fond suffered during the pandemic, just as every other restaurant. Styer and Prawlucki did everything they could — serving outdoors, selling household supplies, and hand sanitizer — but no amount of scrounging was ever going to make up for those empty nights in the dining room. And now, going into another uncertain winter, they just decided they’d had enough. The Dutch is an easier beast to run. It’s more approachable. Everyone loves brunch.”

In that same week, I wrote about new vax policies at restaurants in 2022, the closure of the massive Grand Lux Cafe, a charity drag show, and doughnuts (because I always seem to be writing about doughnuts). But the Fond thing is what’s important here because now, three years later, I’m using the same weekly news column to let y’all know that Fond is coming back.

No, for real. Lee and Jesse are taking over the La Cannelle Café space at 21 North Providence Road in Wallingford (out near Media and Swarthmore in Delco) and are slowly going to turn it into a brand-new suburban iteration of their beloved bistro. What’s more, this should all be happening pretty quickly (like in the next couple weeks) because they’ll be taking over La Cannelle as an operational restaurant and overseeing the gradual morphing of what is currently a small French-Moroccan/Mediterranean cafe into a solidly French-American BYO.

Over at the Inquirer, Michael Klein got a few details on the changeover out of the Prawlucki-Styers. But all you really need to know is that if you’ve had a Fond-shaped hole in your hungry little diner’s heart for the past three years, now there’s a way you can fill it. Give Lee and Jesse a couple weeks to find their footing (and probably get some new signage made), then head out to Wallingford to eat and drink like it’s 2020 all over again.

Little Walter’s Makes the Big Leagues

A spread of nostalgic Polish dishes at Little Walter’s. / Photograph by Gab Bonghi

The New York Times just published their annual Restaurant List for 2024, their list of the best restaurants in America right now. And guess who made the cut?

That’s right, Kensington’s own Little Walter’s — a restaurant that I am totally in love with, can’t stop writing about, and just reviewed for this month’s issue of Philly Mag.

Is it because of the pierogi? It is absolutely because of the pierogi. But it’s everything else about the place, too. The space, the crew, the menu, the bar — there’s no facet of the place that fails. And the NYT (via Nikita Richardson) obviously recognized that when it called out Little Walter’s alone, among all the restaurants in this city overflowing with great restaurants.

Do I think it’s right that Little Walter’s was the only Philadelphia restaurant to get a mention? Of course not. But I’m also thrilled that among the many, many options available, Little Walter’s was the one they picked.

Well, I guess Passerine in Lancaster kinda counts. With zero traffic, you can make the drive from City Hall to Prince Street in about an hour and a half, which is by no means too far to drive for a great meal. And the only other Pennsylvania restaurant on the entire list was Fet-Fisk in Pittsburgh and … come on. It’s Pittsburgh. It would take me less time to drive to Baltimore (where Syrian restaurant Ammoora made the list).

Anyway, huge congrats to Little Walter’s for scoring some of that big-time national attention. But just remember: when it comes time to decide who gets that last reservation on a fully-booked Friday night, I loved you before you were cool.

Now who wants some leftovers?

The Leftovers

The upstairs bar at Twisted Tail. / Photograph by Reel Media Agency

Over at Twisted Tail they’re launching a new late-night weekend happy hour. On Friday and Saturday nights, from 10 p.m. to midnight (at the upstairs bar only), you can get $5 crawfish mac and cheese, $6 beer-battered cheese curds, buck-a-shuck oysters and half-off drafts. There are other deals, too, but they had me at half-price beer and fried cheese curds so I just stopped reading.

Deal starts this weekend. See you there.

In Rittenhouse, Belgian chocolatier Neuhaus Chocolates has opened a tiny little jewelbox of a shop at 1616 Walnut Street. It’s offering exactly what you’d expect — chocolates, filled truffles, more chocolates. I mean, it would’ve been weird if the place was selling ninja stars and diesel fuel, right? That would’ve been news. But if you’re looking for a place to score some very fancy chocolate, this is exactly what you’re looking for.

Finally this week, remember that thing I said before about how I can’t stop writing about Little Walter’s?

Yeah, well Little Walter’s is celebrating Pierogi Day on October 8th with an eight-course pierogi dinner. It’s one seating only, starting at 6:30 p.m., and the menu looks like this:

Editor’s note: The title previously mentioned that Caletta is in Kensington. It has been corrected to reflect that it is in Fishtown.