🦪 Philly’s best oysters | Let’s Eat

It’s the height of oyster season, and we share our favorites. Also this week, we tell you about the revival of Pod, take you to a smoothie shop that’s popular among One Direction fans, and answer your food questions.

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— Mike Klein

Philly’s proximity to the Delaware Bay, the Chesapeake, and the Shore have made oysters popular here. From oyster happy hours to raw bar towers, these are the best spots.

No one in the U.S. eats dinner as early as Pennsylvanians, a new report says, and Emily Bloch sets out to find out why. Really, 5:37 p.m.?

Lucca Fresca, the TikTok-famous smoothie shop owned by Mattia Krappa, has been visited by Directioners from all 50 states and 13 countries, writes Beatrice Forman. Krappa calls it a safe space to be a stan.

In the latest tie-in between celebs and delivery food, YouTube Q&A show “Hot Ones” is lending its name to a line of delivery chicken wings and sandwiches. After a New York test, Hot Ones landed in parts of Philadelphia. Hmm. Will it fly?

Once a grimy ironworks in Fishtown, this space will become a vast bar-restaurant called Starbolt (1936 N. Front St.) from the team behind The Goat Rittenhouse, Garage, Heritage, and Vintage Wine Bar, with Pat Szoke (ex-Palizzi Social Club, JG SkyHigh, Fork) as executive chef. I popped in the other day for a look-see. The former factory floor is 14 feet up to the wooden beams and 26 feet to the apex of the skylight. One of its three bars is shown below.

Stephen Starr has restored Pod, a year and a half after he tweaked the longtime Penn campus destination into a Korean-inspired variant called Kpod. This time out, Pod’s menu is Japanese, with an emphasis on sushi (like this cedar-smoked shima aji), and there’s a locally famous sushi chef running the counter.

East Passyunk is running a Wednesday happy-hour program that’s a lot like Center City District’s popular SIPS. It’s called Summer Swigs.

Cemita Festival! Cantina La Martina, James Beard finalist Dionicio Jiménez’s place in Kensington, promises the signature sandwiches from Puebla, Mexico, made by an assortment of vendors from 11 a.m.- 4 p.m. Sunday on the restaurant’s patio. It’s under the Market-Frankford Line’s Somerset Station, at 2800 D St. Info is at the restaurant’s Instagram.

Trestle Inn, the cool nightspot at 11th and Callowhill Streets, continues its series of retro programming with something called the PBJ Dance Party — “PBJ” being Prince, Bowie, and Jagger — with DJ Lola Kinks spinning vinyl. It launches Sept. 22 at the nearby Underground Arts but can be previewed from 6-9 p.m. Friday at the Trestle.

The seventh annual Bourbon Bash is set for 6-9 p.m. Sept. 7 at Bank & Bourbon at the Loews Philadelphia. It’s a fundraiser ($75 per person) for DonorsChoose, which supports educational programs in the region. The spread by executive chef Thomas Harkins and chef Craig Meyers will include hors d’oeuvres; charcuterie; a crudo station with tuna tartare, hamachi, and oysters; dry-aged steak; honey-brined Duroc pork; and desserts — all paired with cocktails.

Chef Olga Sorzano, kombucha specialist and owner of Baba’s Brew in Phoenixville, started a monthly dinner series called Full Moon Feasts after reading the book by the same title by Jessica Prentice. The idea is to gather 22 people on the evening of the full moon for a communal meal that, as she said, “transforms your daily need for food consumption into something more unique and meaningful.” First one was last week, and the next one will be Aug. 30 and it’ll be organic and vegan ($125 a head, including comp cocktail).

“Delicious City,” the Philly food-centric podcast that chef Eli Kulp hosts with WMMR’s Marisa Magnatta, has picked up a new voice: David Wesolowski, aka @feedingtimetv. Wesolowski, born in Seoul and raised in South Jersey by a Polish-Italian family, got started in the local food scene by filming cooking adventures with a friend. He takes the mic from Sarah Maiellano.

The Wildwood location of Steve’s Prince of Steaks, announced last spring, is now expected to open in September, founder Steve Iliescu tells me. Permitting issues. It’s the Northeast Philly shop’s first franchise.

Love & Honey Fried Chicken, Todd and Laura Lyons’ popular Northern Liberties shop, has signed its first franchisee, who is searching for a location in University City.

Remember those burgundy Zagat Survey books packed with a thousand mini-restaurant reviews? From 1993 till the last one in 2013, I edited the Philadelphia edition, turning the volunteer surveyors’ comments into pithy reviews. Ten years later, let’s hop into the wayback machine. Below are screenshots of two Zagat reviews, with the restaurants’ names removed. Know what they are? (Hint: They’re still open.) I’ll shout out the first correct responses in next week’s newsletter. Send me your answers.

Hey Mike: My father was a line cook in the ’70s at the original Frankie Bradley’s off of Juniper Street, and I have great memories going there with him as a kid. They let me be a junior hostess for the day and they’d give me $5, which of course felt like $100 to me and was quickly spent at Wanamakers! I’ve been to the new “Franky” Bradley’s a few times and really like it. I remember my dad telling me that the original owner was a prizefighter before opening the restaurant and he always mentioned another fighter in Philly that also opened a steakhouse, but I never knew which restaurant that was. Do you know it? — Michelle

Yo Michelle: Prizefighter Frankie Bradley — born Frank Bloch in South Philadelphia — opened the original restaurant in 1933 at 1320 Chancellor St. The other fighter-owned establishment you’re thinking of must be Lew Tendler’s, which held down the northeast corner of Broad and Locust Streets (now The Lucy by Cescaphe and previously Upstares at Varalli) from 1933 to 1970 — a bit before my time. When I last wrote about Tendler’s, in 2016, I asked advertising legend Berny Brownstein about it because his office was right across the street then. Brownstein called it an old-fashioned, rough-around-the-edges watering hole. “It’s what we’d today call a sports bar but Damon Runyonesque ... a lot of tough guys. You never knew who you were going to see in there.” One other pugilistic point: The founder of Donkey’s Place, the Camden-rooted bar whose cheesesteak was immortalized by Anthony Bourdain, was Leon Lucas, a light heavyweight whose punch was likened to a mule’s kick.

Have a question about food in Philly? E-mail your questions to me at [email protected].

Critic Craig LaBan sat down for a Reddit AMA. Check out the transcript as he fields questions on such topics as finding better produce from the grocery store and Philly’s “lesser-known” cuisines. Is Cambodian food, which informs the menu at the new Mawn in South Philly (above), about to surge here?

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