Grika Dreams of Fusion: Inside East Passyunk’s New Italian-Asian Restaurant

Some of the dishes available at DaVinci & Yu / Photography courtesy of DaVinci & Yu

“It was six years, yeah. Six years. A month shy of six years.”

That’s how long chef Marc Grika ran Flannel on East Passyunk, all comfort food and Southern-fried charm. Before that, he did everything else. Everything a chef can do. Big restaurants and small ones. Chains and indies. New York, L.A., San Francisco, Hawaii, Chicago. Dude helped to open Stephen Starr’s very first restaurant, Shake Burger and Roll (which might be the worst name for a restaurant ever), and ran kitchens for the Cheesecake Factory. He worked FOH at Pod back when Pod was still Pod and in the kitchen at Cafe Fiorello and Trattoria Dell’Arte in NYC. His career was largely (but not exclusively) Italian. And then, early in 2019, he opened Flannel, and it became six years of biscuits and gravy, brisket grilled cheese sandwiches, and eggs benny. Six years of fried chicken and waffles. Six years of brunch.

“I really got tired of frying chicken,” he says.

He still did it. He did it well, he tells me. He still cared. But six years of doing the same thing, day after day, night after night, is a long time. It can become … tedious.

“Look, if you’re any kind of …” Marc pauses. “I don’t want to say artist, but …”

“No, it’s fine,” I tell him. “I get it.”

“If you’re like that, you have all these ideas. You always have new ideas. We — chefs — have so many ideas in our heads. Passion projects. Things we want to try.”

Normally, in this game, new ideas mean finding new spaces and opening new restaurants. And Marc had been trying for years to open a new restaurant. “I’ve been looking at other restaurant properties since the second year of Flannel,” he tells me, but none of them worked out. He’d get close, but something always seemed to go wrong at the last minute. And in the meantime, there was still all of that chicken to be fried.

Inside DaVinci & Yu

Then, in August of last year, Marc was in Italy. He’d traveled to London on business and had a couple days free, so he bopped over to Rome and found himself at a restaurant near the Spanish Steps. This is how the experience was described in the press materials I was sent before Marc and I talked:

Back in August, chef was at an Asian restaurant with Italian influences in Rome next to the Spanish Steps, and his mind was exploding while eating combinations that his American chef’s mind had never contemplated. Each course was better than the next, and he was now open to an entirely new array of ingredients that seamlessly blend together to form a new synergistic cuisine.

The restaurant was Zuma, in the Palazzo Fendi — one of a chain of high-end, luxury Japanese izakaya-style operations that tend to exist in the fanciest zip codes in the world: London, Hong Kong, Dubai, New York, Cannes, Ibiza, and St. Tropez. Founded decades ago by a German chef who’d spent some years working in Tokyo, Zuma takes Japanese techniques and Japanese recipes and bends them around local ingredients and tastes. So in Dubai, there’s tempura langoustine wrapped in kataifi. In Istanbul, salt-grilled sea bass with burnt tomato and ginger. And in Rome, a piece of marinated black cod with a Taleggio cream sauce that blew the top of Marc’s head clean off.

“I’m like, holy shit! This can be done?”

It was an epiphany. An obsession. He ate his way through the menu at Zuma, got on a plane, came back to Philly, back to Flannel, looked around at the drop lights, the giant rooster mural, and thought to himself, I can do this. And if there weren’t any other spaces available to him? Well, then he already had one that he’d gotten pretty comfortable with over the past six years.

A dragon mural twists around a column next to the newly renovated bar

Marc started the transformation immediately.

While Flannel was still up and running, he started doing some of the small, interior work that no one would really notice: painting the ceiling and the baseboards. In his head, Flannel was already becoming something new starting in August of 2024, the minute he got home. He kept Flannel running until January 26th, then closed and locked the doors and got down to the serious business of turning it into something completely new. He painted. He hung lanterns and commissioned murals for the walls. He installed a whole new bar. The blonde wood tables? He kept those. He’d gotten them from Zama back in the day. He and chef Tanaka were friends, and he wanted to keep that connection. But everything else about Flannel had to go.

We talk for a while about this change — about reshaping one thing into something else. About the temerity it takes to burn your safety net in pursuit of a dream. Because Marc could’ve waited. He had a successful restaurant right in the middle of East Passyunk. He could’ve (eventually …) found a second space, a second crew, and opened a second restaurant while keeping Flannel running as a back-up — a guaranteed money-maker.

But Marc tells me he couldn’t wait. That dinner at Zuma? It’d changed him. And there’s a manic edge to his voice when he talks about it — a sense that he was all-in from the minute he’d stood up from that table in Rome. That his new restaurant, DaVinci & Yu (which opened Thursday in the space at 1819 East Passyunk Avenue, formerly known as Flannel), was already coming together in his head somewhere halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, fully formed by the time his plane touched down again in Philly.

“This is their thing,” he says, meaning Zuma’s thing, meaning a kind of deep Italian-Asian fusion. “Or this — this — is part of their thing.” Because DaVinci & Yu doesn’t have a sushi bar. It doesn’t do robotayaki. Where Zuma Rome was a Japanese restaurant that used Italian ingredients and inspiration for some dishes, D&Y is an Italian American restaurant informed by Asian technique, ingredients, and flavors. It is “their thing” on a purely psychological level. “Their thing” made for East Passyunk Avenue.

Sweetbread bao

And so there are duck meatballs in a ginger-spiked Sunday gravy served over udon noodles; sweetbread bao cooked in brown butter with bacon, onions, and capers, dressed in an XO sauce; Italian wedding ramen with shrimp dumplings and long hots; a smoked mackerel pizza with shishito peppers and agrodolce-pickled mustard seeds; and the aforementioned orange chicken parm, which, honestly, is the dish that caught my eye because, on paper, it doesn’t work at all. Thinking about it, I just can’t see how it comes together.

“It works,” Marc tells me. Then he takes me, step-by-step, through the entire process: the chicken breast in a chow-mein-noodle crust and Italian seasoning, pan-fried, glazed in an orange demi, topped with ricotta, parm and mozzarella, then served with an orange tomato sauce.

“But cheese and orange?” I ask him. “I just can’t imagine it.”

“Italian cuisine has a lot of orange in it,” he explains. “Oranges and cream? Think creamsicle. You know, those ice cream bars? That’s cream and orange together.”

Marc brought on a sous chef to help him work through all this. Lee Richards used to cook at Cheu Noodle Bar. He’s a guy who’s very comfortable with fusion and the deliberate, modern fusion of classical cuisines. And Marc explains to me how they came up with an idea for a nori lasagna (that isn’t currently on the menu), and went through a dozen iterations of their maki arachini (called “Aran-Sushi”) before hitting on the fried sushi rice/nori salt/sesame seed version they serve now, all of which is wild to me because they’re taking these things — these sacred, immutable things like sushi rice and chicken parm — and just gleefully smooshing them together like kids messing around with Play-Doh.

And Italian-Asian fusion isn’t unheard of. Versions of it have existed for decades, and Japan had an entire boom in quasi-traditional Italian cuisine made with Japanese ingredients that lasted for years, but DaVinci & Yu is pushing the boundaries of traditional fusion. In experimenting with form and one-to-one ingredient substitution, it’s messing with the fundamental DNA of classical cuisines. And that’s risky. It’s also very cool.

Orange chicken parm

“It seemed like one of those natural, synergistic things to me,” Marc says. Which is probably why the very first thing on DaVinci & Yu’s opening menu is a riff on the dish that first popped his cork in Rome — a plate of fresh black cod dumplings, marinated in sake, mirin, soy and ginger, pan-seared like gyoza, and topped with a veil of Taleggio cream sauce.

DaVinci & Yu is open now in East Passyunk, serving dinner only for the time being. Weekend brunch will come just as soon as the staff get comfortable with the new menu and redesigned space. And when it does, guess what’s going to be on the menu?

Fried chicken and waffles. Because who doesn’t love chicken and waffles?