A historic brewery is coming back to life as a wine shop and restaurant from the hitmakers behind Kalaya and Suraya

During the pandemic, partners from Defined Hospitality spent a good deal of time driving around, looking for spaces that might complement their portfolio of hit restaurants, which includes Kalaya, Suraya, Pizzeria Beddia, and Condesa. Down a side street in East Kensington, they saw an abandoned building, part of the long-gone Weisbrod & Hess Brewery.

A vast space with 35-foot ceilings, intricate brickwork, curved windows, and keystones bearing the flourishes common in industrial buildings 140 years ago, it looked perfect.

Except that everything was crumbling — the smokestack, the walls, the steel girders.

“The smart move would be to buy the building, let it fall down, and put up condos,” said Defined’s Greg Root.

But Root and his partners, Al Lucas, Nick Kennedy, and Joe Beddia, thought otherwise. They bought it in December 2021. “The question was, ‘Can we make something great here that we would be passionate about?’” Root said. “And the answer is yes.”

In late June, 2½ years later, it is expected to open as Picnic, a restaurant specializing in wood-fired cooking with an attached oyster display and a wine shop by the front door. Defined says it is aimed at the neighborhood — a fast-growing slice of town off of Frankford Avenue where nearly a dozen bars and restaurants have opened in the last decade. Across the street, Martha and Philadelphia Brewing Co. occupy buildings that were also part of Weisbrod & Hess’ property.

Picnic’s building was Weisbrod & Hess’ loading facility and boiler house. The German-born George Weisbrod and Christian Hess founded their brewery in the 1880s during the height of Philadelphia beermaking. Architect Adam C. Wagner designed it in the Rundbogenstil, or round-arch style, a German variation of Romanesque.

When Prohibition began in 1920, Weisbrod & Hess turned to producing soda, according to a narrative accompanying the application for historical certification. Weisbrod & Hess resumed beermaking after repeal in 1933, but in 1938 the company went bankrupt and the brewery closed in 1939. Martha Street, and much of the neighborhood, was neglected for decades.

With seating for at least 225 on a courtyard-like main floor as well as on a new mezzanine, Picnic will take on a casual air. Root and Lucas, both former executives with Stephen Starr’s restaurants, cite their work 13 years ago helping to create Frankford Hall, the Fishtown beer garden, as inspiration, as well as the courtyard dining at Bacchanal in New Orleans and the wine-garden setting of Lagniappe House in Miami.

Though Picnic is indoors, “we also designed it to bring in some ‘outside’ elements,” Root said, like plantings and custom street lamps. Stokes Architecture and Katherine Lundberg of Briquette Studio, who have worked on Defined’s previous restaurants, handled architecture and design. The building’s historical certification added a layer of red tape to the renovation. (The partners declined to specify the level of investment; the purchase price was $1.8 million, according to city records.)

The signature dish at opening will be rotisserie chicken, made in what Kennedy called their “luxury purchase” — a high-tech Josper wood-fired oven. Sliced meats and cheeses, sandwiches, small plates, and East Coast oysters will make up the rest of the menu. “It’s about curating your own experience,” Lucas said. “That’s critical to our philosophy. Sometimes, you just want a salad and some oysters.”

Lucas said that from Pizzeria Beddia, about a mile away, “we’ve learned that people know their wine around here.” The wine list includes 75 low-intervention labels; there will also be a few cocktails and a full zero-proof program including house-made NA cocktails, birch beer, kombucha, and NA wines.

Service at Picnic will be what is becoming known as “low-touch” — a hybrid of full service and fast casual. After buying wine, customers can walk out the door, or take their bottles and wine glasses into the dining room, which will have four picnic tables along with reclaimed tables and chairs. Tables will have QR codes, and servers carrying devices can also place orders and interact with customers.

“We don’t want it where you have to get up and go order at a [counter],” Lucas said. “We feel like once you’re seated here, we want to let you relax. It’s as if you’re in somebody’s backyard. You can go to the bar and get a drink, you can go to the wine shop, you can order your food.”

The backyard vibe and DIY-ness of the restaurant’s experience sold the partners on the name early on. At the time, they were unfamiliar with the recent discourse about the racist connotation of “picnic,” which stems from the history of Southern whites regularly lynching Black people as a form of entertainment during the outdoor gatherings. Awareness of that history, and the fact that the word had a different meaning for Black Americans, grew during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, as reported by Inquirer columnist Elizabeth Wellington. “The word, picnic, carries with it the memory that there was a time when white folks gathered to eat outside, burning black flesh would be on the menu,” Treva Lindsey, a professor at the Ohio State University, told Wellington.

The restaurant partners, who are white, said they learned about the issue as they began sharing information about the restaurant. After consulting with Black academics — whom they declined to name — they say they were told that their use of the word was clearly in line with mainstream usage, such as the annual Roots Picnic, and decided to keep it. “Our intention about this space has always been about bringing people together and that’s our meaning,” Root said. “That’s the energy that we’re bringing from it.”