Mulherin’s Pizzeria Is Closing, According to WARN Notice

Inside Mulherin’s Pizzeria / Photograph by Gina DeSimone

Howdy, buckaroos! And welcome back to the weekly Foobooz food news round-up. Two things to keep in mind for this week. First, there’s not a ton of news right now, so we can make this quick today. But, second, most of today’s news is a bummer — including (but not limited to) a fire shutting down one of the best restaurants in the city and a surprise closure for one of the newest restaurants in Market East. It’s not all crap news, though. We’ve also got a bagel expansion, a wine and cake party at New June, and more. But let’s kick things off this week with …

Mulherin’s Pizzeria Is (Already) Closing

This place was kind of a big deal. It was the first expansion of the Wm. Mulherin’s Sons brand from Method Co. and represented a serious investment in Philly’s complicated pizza scene — a place where the antiquarian cool design aesthetic (and heavy kitchen focus) of Mulherin’s could be tested against a tighter, more casual menu and presentation. The place had wood-fired ovens, serious talent in the kitchen, and a good location on Ludlow Street in Market East. I wrote about the place a couple different times, and it seemed like things were going well …

… until I got word that its Instagram page had vanished. And that it had been listed on the state’s WARN website, which, as part of the state’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, “mandates that employers give a 60-day notice before closing plants or conducting mass layoffs.”

For the record, Mulherin’s Pizzeria lasted less than a year. After countless delays and opening night pushbacks, it finally began welcoming guests on April 18, 2024. And now, according to the WARN notice, it will be closing permanently as of April 16, 2025 — putting 39 staff out of work.

This is all complicated by the fact that Mulherin’s Pizzeria is associated with Method’s ROOST hotel/apartment concept in the Girard building at the same location. I’ve reached out to the folks at Mulherin’s to see what’s up but haven’t heard anything back as of this morning. As always, you’ll know more as soon as I know more.

Weekend Fire Shuts Down Kampar in Bella Vista

Firefighters putting out the fire at Kampar on Saturday morning / Photograph courtesy of Kampar

In January, Ange Branca’s Kampar Kongsi was named a semifinalist for one of the best bars in America by the James Beard Foundation. In February, we put Kampar at #8 on our list of the 50 Best Restaurants in Philly. And on Saturday morning, a fire shut the whole place down.

The fire started early Saturday upstairs at Kampar Kongsi — the main dining room and excellent bar for Branca’s second swing at bringing her brilliant Malaysian (and Hakka Chinese) cuisine to Philly. Originally, it was just that night’s dinner service that was canceled, but Branca soon had to make the announcement that everyone was fearing.

“We have to close temporarily to fix the damages that the fire caused. We are working hard to get it done as quickly as possible and are fortunate to have some amazing contractors helping us do so. Our beautiful bar is unfortunately gone. But our Guinness sign survived and is still a symbol of invigorating strength.”

So yeah: closed for the moment, but not forever. And as if manifesting a speedy reopening, the very next post on Kampar’s Instagram was about a Muhibbah collab dinner planned for March 25th in support of Esperanza Immigration Legal Services involving a half-dozen of Philly’s best chefs as well as Philly Mag’s food editor, Kae Lani Palmisano, who will be the emcee for the evening. Even if I hate to see this (or any) crew going through these kinds of troubles, I love this kind of confidence.

For now, it looks like the Muhibbah dinner is still a go. In fact, they’ve already sold half of their tickets, so if you want to attend, get your tickets now because they sell out fast. But they are looking to relocate the event. According to Kampar’s publicist, Kerri Sitrin, it’ll still happen in Philly, and they’ll announce the new location as soon as they figure it out.

Losing that bar at Kampar Kongsi hurts. JBF award semifinalist and 50 Best nod aside, I adored that place. Just sitting there, it had an energy unlike almost any other bar in the city. It was perfect for so many things — exploration, invention, celebration, drinking alone, dining alone, and last-minute plans with friends. It worked for any occasion, under almost any circumstance, and (much like Branca’s original Saté Kampar), it made you feel cool just by hanging out there. Show up early, while the staff was still putting the place together for the night, and it was like you’d discovered something that was five minutes away from becoming the hottest spot in town.

But like Branca said, they’re rebuilding as we speak. And if she and her contractors were able to get the vibe right once, here’s hoping they can do it again.

Ange Branca outside of Kampar / Photograph by Kerri Sitrin

In the meantime, her staff is out of work, and capitalism doesn’t stop for disasters. They’ve got rent to pay and bills that will come due, and often (read: always), community is all there is to help us get through. So Kampar has set up a GoFundMe to help everyone get through until Kampar can reopen and everyone can start earning again.

“Here at Kampar, we champion the ideal of Muhibbah, a Malaysian term referring to cross-cultural harmony and community,” Branca says. “Today, we humbly ask our community to support the incredible people who make Kampar all that it is. Our staff needs immediate assistance paying bills, rent, and other financial obligations. If you have ever spent a night chatting with the team over a few cocktails, sharing nasi lemak with loved ones, or celebrating important moments at Kampar, we ask that you consider helping to support our team.”

So if you’ve got the means, reach out and help. Because sometimes we’re all we’ve got.

And of course, I’ll let y’all know the minute Kampar Kongsi is back up and running again so we can all go and celebrate together.

Now what else is happening this week …

Also, Pod Has Closed

Which is frankly shocking because who even knew Pod was still open?

No, but seriously … Stephen Starr’s nearly-25-year-old University City restaurant was a spaced-out ode to blobby design, rounded corners, and spaced-out retro-’80s dining. It was a restaurant transported whole from a white-plastic-and-Day-Glo past that never really happened — a fully formed hallucination of a place that was so weird sometimes that you just couldn’t help but love it.

Unfortunately, the last few years had not been kind to the place.

The pandemic hurt it. A kind of cohabitation arrangement with Starr partner Peter Serpico turned it into Kpod for about a year, where it served Korean-inspired pan-Asian cuisine but couldn’t bring in the traffic to make the place feel alive.

After that, it reverted back to just plain ol’ Pod again but became a full-on Japanese restaurant with a “grown-up” sensibility, but that was just a mistake on like nine different levels. “[I]t’s that idea that Pod ever needed to grow up in the first place that makes me worry,” I said when I wrote about the transition back in 2023. “Because Philly has enough serious, ‘grown-up’ restaurants already. Let the weird be weird, man. No one needs to grow up if they’re earning a buck childishly.”

And as it turns out, I was right. The mortal wound of COVID, the following years of identity crisis and genre-shifting, it was all just too much. Pod shut the doors for the last time on February 22nd, and that is incredibly sad to me because Pod was singular. It was unique. It was, almost to the end, a full-throated, unapologetic argument in defense of the weird and the iconoclastic, all full of color-changing dining pods and conveyor-belt sushi. And it worked for almost a quarter of a century. There has never been a restaurant like Pod anywhere in Philly. And I doubt if there’ll ever be another place like it again.

Now who has room for some leftovers?

The Leftovers

Items from Yanaga Kappo Izakaya’s Okimari menu / Photograph by Mike Prince

Spending two hours and dropping over $200 for chef Kevin Yanaga’s omakase sushi dinner in the private dining room at Yanaga Kappo Izakaya is an indulgence that’s out of the question for most diners these days. And Yanaga gets that.

But if you love sushi and you love the idea of that hand-crafted omakase experience, Yanaga is now offering a more comfortable point of entry. He recently launched an “Okimari” menu at Kappo, which offers “a sushi-driven tasting experience that showcases a taste of the omakase experience” without having to go all-in on the whole ride. Also, you can get it in the main dining room without having to fight for one of the eight available seats in the private dining room — which is nice.

There are basically two different tasting menus available now on Kappo’s main floor: a $60 version and an $80. Both feature zensai starters (edamame, miso soup, umami cukes, and a tuna and avocado tartare), then temaki hand rolls, six different nigiri, and 1-900-Ice-Cream soft serve available for dessert. The more expensive version adds a bowl of negi-toro chirashi, and both options have optional upgrades like caviar, uni, or foie gras nigiri. It’s not a bad deal if you’re looking for a quick(er) hit of omakase vibes but don’t want to skip a car payment just to make it happen.

Details (and reservations) are available at Kappo’s website, of course.

Jacob and Alexandra Cohen’s pandemic hustle, Kismet Bagels, is going on a big opening tear this year. They opened their Kismet Bagels Luncheonette at 801 Montgomery Avenue in Lower Merion on Valentine’s Day last year, and 2025 is looking to be huge with four new openings on the books already.

They’ve got a Collingswood location almost ready to go at 747 Haddon Avenue — which might open as soon as April. They’ve already announced a May opening for a new location down the shore in Ventnor (at the former Water Dog Smokehouse at 7319 Ventnor Avenue). And after that, there’s still a Germantown Avenue location set to open over the summer in Chestnut Hill and a fourth in Manayunk (also scheduled for a summer opening) in the former home of Pizza Jawn at 4330 Main Street.

That’ll be eight locations total (including the bialy stand in RTM) in five years. Not a bad run.

And finally this week, how ’bout some wine and cake? Sounds about perfect, what with the … everything going on in the world right now.

On Thursday, March 13th, New June Bakery (which I wrote about at length here) will be teaming up with sommelier Alli DelGrippo for a four cakes/four wines “Girl Dinner.”

DelGrippo will be pouring (and educating) from four hand-selected labels. And New June’s Noelle Blizzard will be slicing and serving four different cakes, including an Earl Grey brownie sundae cake with honeycomb and citrus Swiss buttercream, a PB&J chocolate chip olive oil cake with cinnamon-spiked strawberry rhubarb jam and peanut butter crumble, a cookies and tahini cake, and a cardamom-spiced sour cream cake with Italian pistachio buttercream and raspberry cardamom jam.

All of which sounds awesome. I kinda want to just eat that way all the time now.

If you’re down, tickets are $150, and you can get yours here.