Category: Michael Klein

Since moving to Glenside in 2016, Brooklyn transplants Damien Graef and Robyn Semien have frequented the Evergreen Cheese Shop in Chestnut Hill, located in a charming courtyard that fringes a parking lot off East Evergreen Avenue, steps from Germantown Avenue. As time went on, the couple took note of two empty buildings next door to the cheese shop, the former homes of Top of the Hill Market, which closed in 2019, and Mimi’s Cafe, which closed in 2022.

As entrepreneurs— the couple own a Williamsburg wine shop together, and Semien runs the podcast company Placement Theory — their gears started turning. “We’d always had this loose idea that maybe someday we’d open [another] wine store, but the logistics are hard,” Semien said.

In 2023, they chatted up John Ingersoll, the Evergreen Cheese owner, who referred them to the landlord for the space at 184 E. Evergreen Ave.

Graef and Semien were not entirely sure what they wanted to create. “We said, ‘Let’s put one foot in front of the other and see how far we get,’” said Graef. “Turns out, pretty far.”

After sitting dark for four-plus years, the Evergreen Avenue courtyard will light up again this week with the opening of Lovat Square, which the couple plan to unfold in stages: first as a bottle shop, then as a garden restaurant, and eventually as a full bar and dining room.

Lovat Square’s bottle shop and tasting room opens Thursday, with about 30 seats, wines by the glass, and a small menu of snacks. The wine selection — just under 400 labels, with about 200 more on the way — doubles as both retail inventory and will become the backbone of the restaurant’s wine list.

Thursday’s opening is a hopeful sign for Chestnut Hill, stung from the recent closings of Iron Hill Brewery and Campbell’s Place. Other coming attractions in the near future will be the Blue Warbler, a day-into-evening restaurant at Germantown and Willow Grove Avenue, and a reopening of Fiesta Pizza on Germantown Avenue near Gravers Lane.

Before relocating from New York with their two children, Semien and Graef opened the Brooklyn wine shop Bibber & Bell in 2013. Since 2022, Graef has been lead sommelier at Jean-Georges at the Four Seasons Hotel. Semien spent 16 years at This American Life and now executive-produces Question Everything, a show focused on journalism in America.

Lovat Square — pronounced “love it,” named after a shade of green often used in tweed — will start with a by-the-glass program of about 15 wines, though Graef expects that number to fluctuate as additional bottles are opened for tastings, events, and informal pours. Snacks — house-made pickles, focaccia, sour cream soubise with potato chips (with optional trout or ossetra caviar), and a cheese plate created by Evergreen’s Ingersoll — will accompany the wine during the initial phase. More substantial food will come later as the outdoor and indoor dining spaces open.

“I think of the wine-shop phase as a cocktail party: small bites while we build toward the main course,” he said.

Graef is focusing on independent winemakers. “You’re not going to find Josh or Caymus [wines] here,” Graef said. “But we’ll have something for the person who likes that style. The through-line is small producers who are serious about their land and what they’re making.”

The shelves skew European, with a particular emphasis on Italy and France, but also include wines from the United States, South America, and Eastern Europe. There’s a long table devoted just to Champagne and other bubbles.

The spring opening of the courtyard garden will expand the menu into full dinner service, with seating for about 70. Just under half of those seats are expected to be under a canopy by late summer, extending usability into the shoulder seasons.

Lovat Square’s final phase, targeted for late fall, will bring a full-service restaurant and cocktail bar, including an 18-seat bar and counter seating along the front windows of the former Mimi’s, a separate building in the courtyard.

Graef, born in the Bay Area but raised in New Jersey, has spent his career in restaurants, beginning as a dishwasher at 13 before moving through kitchens and into front-of-house roles. In the early 2000s he worked at Il Buco in New York, where he met Semien (also a Bay Area native) and Lovat Square manager Patricia Jo Peacock. “I thought I knew something about wine [then], but that was very short-lived,” Semien said.

At the time, Graef was a beer-only drinker — and “not like great beer or anything: Negra Modelo and Yuengling.”

While Graef was at Il Buco, wine director Roberto Paris demystified wine for him. “Getting to meet winemakers for the first time and having them eat family meal with us and get to taste their wine and talk about these little corners of Italy that they were coming from made it more accessible for me,” he said. “That really turned me onto all of this, and then I just fell deep down that hole and have not gotten out since. And it’s only got worse.”

Graef later worked at Chanterelle in TriBeCa before running Aurora in Brooklyn, known for its Italian wine list. As Lovat Square ramps up, he is transitioning to a part-time role at the Four Seasons.

The Chestnut Hill project, the couple said, reflects both their professional histories and their lives in the neighborhood.

“We’re trying to build our favorite place,” Graef said.

Lovat Square, 184 E. Evergreen Ave., lovatsquare.com. Initial hours: noon to 10 p.m. Thursday to Sunday.

At Shiroi Hana last Thursday at noon, plates, bowls, and ramekins filled the dining room tables. But this was not lunchtime at Center City’s longest-operating Japanese restaurant. It was a tag sale.

Owners Patti and Robert Moon were cleaning out the place in advance of the building’s sale in coming weeks. The kitchen was silent and the sushi bar cleared out.

Shiroi Hana served its last meal in January after 41 years. “It’s sad. Very sad,” said Patti Moon, who with her husband, Robert, took over in 1998. In 2010, the couple also opened Doma, a Japanese-Korean restaurant, at 1822 Callowhill St.

The modest Shiroi Hana opened in 1984 at 222 S. 15th St. — across from what was then Bookbinders’ Seafood House — as part of a nationwide group of restaurants owned by Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church. (Many of the restaurants shared the name “Hana,” meaning flower.)

In the late 1990s, Patti and Robert Moon, in their early 30s, were running Grill Master Deli at 17th and Spruce Streets when they heard that the restaurant was for sale. Given their last name, “for some reason that mattered to [the church],” Patti Moon said. “There were other people trying to buy it, but they gave it to us. We were young. I guess it was luck. It was meant to be.” (Robert Moon said he was not related to the self-proclaimed messiah, who died in 2012.)

The restaurant, modest at first but bearing a quiet elegance after the Moons gave it a 1999 makeover, had a small brush with fame under its original ownership. In 1989, Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall rolled in with a bodyguard and manager, “gobbled about $100 worth of sushi,” signed autographs for the staff, and left a 25% tip, according to a Philadelphia Daily News account.

Shiroi Hana was a favorite among Inquirer critics. Shortly after its ’84 opening, Elaine Tait praised an offering called sushi heaven — “a generously and artistically filled lacquer tray crammed with sushi and sashimi” — and proclaimed it “almost too much of a good thing.” It was priced at $20 (about $61 in today’s dollars).

Last week, critic Craig LaBan said Shiroi Hana “remained a favored hideaway for an intimate lunch until the end, especially beloved by Elizabeth,” his wife. “My kids grew up eating there, and it was always her choice for lunch with a particular friend because the food was great and they knew just how we liked it, down to the tiniest details. She’ll forever miss their chicken katsu bento box.”

Patti Moon said they closed because of shifting trends. Japanese dining has increasingly moved toward chef-owned omakase restaurants, she said, a model that is difficult for non-chef operators to sustain. “For a long time, we were lucky,” she said. “Our head chef, Hiroshi Abe, had been there since 1984. He stayed almost 35 years. When he left about three years ago, people noticed. Business wasn’t the same.”

Longtime manager Michiko Kadekaru — who started in 1990 and became, in Robert Moon’s words, “the heart and soul of the restaurant” — has indicated that she would retire, though the Moons hope that she will continue working for them at Doma.

“She started in her 30s and now she’s in her 70s,” Patti Moon said. “She was crying on the last day — and so were we.”

Zsa’s Ice Cream hasn’t closed permanently, after all.

Founder Danielle Jowdy announced in December 2024 that she planned to end her 14-year run at the end of 2025. She called the wind-down a “grand closing” to allow customers to enjoy a final full season of scratch-made scoops and staff time to prepare for transitions. But as Jowdy considered the future, she decided to try selling the business to someone with roots in the neighborhood.

That someone is Liz Yee, a pastry chef at the nearby Catering by Design who also creates desserts for Doho restaurant, also in Mount Airy. Yee plans to reopen Zsa’s (6616 Germantown Ave.) on Saturday, Ice Cream for Breakfast Day.

For Yee, the opportunity was both personal and professional. From the moment she saw the sale announcement over the summer, she began exploring the idea of keeping Zsa’s alive, not just as a retail store but as a community hub.

Keeping the business in Mount Airy was a major part of the appeal for Yee, who lives in Roxborough. “I work down the street, and I’ve always loved coming here,” she said. “It’s just special.”

She plans to keep it as Zsa’s — a nickname that Jowdy and her sister, Rebecca, shared since childhood — and will offer the same menu, plus twists and specials. Yee also wants to bring back the wholesale business.

For Saturday’s return, Yee will lean into her pastry background, offering fresh croissants paired with cereal-milk ice cream. She’s also bringing back favorites such as Black Magic (coffee ice cream with chocolate cake swirled in).

“I know when people sell a business, there are often mixed feelings, but I’m honestly over the moon right now. It feels terrific,” said Jowdy, who will work with Yee during the transition. Jowdy said she was still deliberating her next professional steps but hopes to stay involved in food and community work.

Jowdy fell into ice cream years ago. When she and her mother were packing up the family home in Connecticut for sale, they found a hand-cranked ice cream machine the parents received as a wedding gift in 1980. As kids, Jowdy and her brother, Christopher, poured in skim milk and Hershey’s syrup “and we’d have at it,” she said.

Jowdy brought the machine back to Philadelphia and, armed with a 1980s-era Ben & Jerry’s cookbook, began making ice cream to take to parties and cookouts. She was working at a stained-glass studio as her dessert hobby grew. When she was laid off 14 years ago, she went professional.

Yee’s path to Zsa’s is equally windy. Back in the 2010s, she was studying math at Drexel University when she decided to turn her baking hobby into a career. She headed the pastry department at the Rittenhouse Hotel and in 2018, she joined Walnut Street Cafe as executive pastry chef and baker before she joined Catering by Design six years ago.

Yee, whose 6-year-old son and 7-month-old daughter enjoy Zsa’s, said she would fit the business in with her personal and professional lives. “I work down the street and I run like a little 10-mile circuit around [the area],” she said.

Zsa’s, 6616 Germantown Ave., 215-848-7215, instagram.com/zsas. Winter hours starting Feb. 7: 3 to 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday, noon to 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, or sell-out.

Twenty years ago this month, chefs Rich Landau and Kate Jacoby opened what they hoped would become Philadelphia’s signature vegan restaurant.

Horizons debuted in Bella Vista in February 2006 in a former nightclub called Goosebumps on Seventh Street near South Street. It was a reboot of their groundbreaking Horizons Cafe, which Landau opened in a Willow Grove strip mall in 1994.

“At the time there was no signature upscale vegan dining experience in Center City, so we decided to go to where our crowd was and make the move downtown,” Landau said last week.

From the start, Landau and Jacoby signaled that Horizons would not resemble the plant-based restaurants many diners expected. It was not meant to be a manifesto or a niche experiment.

“There will be no granola, alfalfa sprouts, or wheat germ anywhere on the menu,” Landau said in 2006. Instead, the kitchen focused on globally influenced, technique-driven dishes, such as spicy red chili-cauliflower rolls and Caribbean udon with caramelized chayote and hearts of palm.

Horizons, which served vegan beer and wine, enjoyed a solid five-year run at 611 S. Seventh St. — earning a three-bell review from Craig LaBan out of the gate — before the couple closed in 2011 to open the far more exclusive Vedge in the grand former rowhouse at 1221 Locust St., which used to house Deux Cheminees.

Landau and Jacoby went on to open and close other restaurants, including the casual V Street and Wiz Kid in Rittenhouse and Fancy Radish in Washington, D.C. Last June, they sold their well-received Vedge spinoff, Ground Provisions, in West Chester. (Ground Provisions was on the inaugural edition of The 76, The Inquirer’s list of the area’s most essential restaurants.)

A 2012 Inquirer article by Vance Lehmkuhl, director of the American Vegan Center, credited Horizons alumni with launching some of the region’s most notable vegan restaurants. That piece cited Nicole Marquis (HipCityVeg, Charlie was a sinner. and Bar Bombon), Mark Mebus (20th Street Pizza), Ross Olchvary (the now-closed Sprig & Vine), and Rachel Klein (Miss Rachel’s Pantry) as examples of the couple’s reach. (Disclosure: Rachel Klein is my daughter).

Landau is a six-time James Beard Award nominee for Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic (2015 to 2020), while Jacoby was a semifinalist for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2014, 2015, and 2016, and also a semifinalist for Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic in 2014. In November, Vedge was added to Michelin’s list of recommended restaurants.

“Twenty years later, it’s hard to not look back and smile and feel so much gratitude that the city of Philadelphia embraced us and vegetable cuisine,” Landau said. “It’s amazing to see how much it’s taken off. Sure, there’s lots of new vegan restaurants.

“To me, the most remarkable thing is the change in mainstream restaurants,” he said. “Back in the ’90s and early 2000s, you would go to a restaurant and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the menu, where you would see the gnocchi or the pasta primavera. Nowadays, there are original and creative vegetable dishes in every mainstream restaurant in the city. That was our goal — to have what we do be taken seriously.”

(Horizons’ Seventh Street location became a branch of Nomad Pizza and later became the home of Kampar, now undergoing repairs from a fire in February 2025.)

Also this month in Philadelphia restaurant history

February 1996: Martini Cafe opened at 622 S. Sixth St. on the Queen Village-Bella Vista line, replacing Ristorante Mona Lisa. It closed in the early 2000s. (The building’s most recent occupant was Isot, which closed in December.)

February 2001: Capital Grille opened at Broad and Chestnut Streets, replacing a concept called Heritage that lasted nine weeks. Capital Grille was Center City’s seventh chain steakhouse at the time, following Ruth’s Chris, Morton’s of Chicago, the Palm, the Prime Rib, Smith & Wollensky, and Davio’s. … Chef Yong Kim, previously at August Moon in Norristown, opened Bluefin in a strip center on Germantown Pike in Plymouth Meeting. He moved it in 2012 to its current quarters in East Norriton.

February 2006: Chestnut Grill in Chestnut Hill turned the entire restaurant, including its bar, smoke-free – a bold move at the time. … Flo’s Diner opened at 20th and Arch Streets; it lasted a little over a year. That site (1939 Arch St.) had housed St. George Restaurant/St. George’s Diner in the 1960s before shifting into nightlife mode — Tom Hagen’s Tavern, the Bamboo Lounge, and Cascamorto Piano Bar. After Flo’s, it became the simply named Indian Cuisine. Since 2018, it’s been Thanal Indian Tavern.

February 2011: Chef Pascual “Pat” Cancelliere, formerly of Butcher’s Cafe (where Alice is now, at Ninth and Christian), opened 943, an Argentine-Italian BYOB, in an Italian Market storefront at 943 S. Ninth St. (Paesano’s is there now). Cancelliere, who closed it a year later, shortly after heart surgery, worked at other restaurants (Morgan’s Pier and Route 6) before he died in December 2023.

February 2016: Downey’s, which opened in 1976 at Front and South Streets, closed amid tax problems. … The posh Le Castagne at 1920 Chestnut St. (now Veda), closed after 14½ years; executive chef Michael DeLone now owns Michael Coastal Italian Grille in Collingswood.

February 2021: “Ty” Bailey, who hosted countless romantics over 28 years at the Knave of Hearts on South Street before it closed in 2003, died of complications related to heart surgery at age 69. … The month’s roster of openings included the food hall at Live! Casino & Hotel in South Philadelphia and Stove & Tap’s location in downtown West Chester.