This splashy new restaurant ‘isn’t meant to be full of regulars’

To get inside chef Nicholas Bazik’s Provenance restaurant, opening next month in Society Hill, you will need to punch in a code on a keypad at the dining room door.

“People often just walk into a restaurant, not realizing that it has changed hands or concept,” Bazik was saying the other day.

Better to stop them before they see that Provenance is not its predecessor: Xochitl, a Mexican restaurant that ended its 15-year run in 2022, offered short rib tamales and late-night margs in a colorful setting. Provenance has a seafood-focused menu informed by French technique in a sleek setup incongruously inhabiting a 200-year-old rowhouse at 408 S. Second St.

The door lock also means “we’ve left the outside world out there,” Bazik said. How better to define exclusivity?

In his debut as a restaurateur after cooking for 15 years at such restaurants as Fork, Bistrot La Minette, La Peg, the Good King Tavern, and Lacroix at the Rittenhouse — including two years as culinary director for 13th Street Kitchens — Bazik, 38, wants to make special-occasion dining special again. “We have 100 fantastic restaurants [in Philadelphia] that fit that bill, but they also try to fit other bills because they have to,” Bazik said. Provenance will be a space “that can’t be replicated anywhere with food that can’t be reproduced — because it shouldn’t be. It isn’t meant to be full of regulars.”

In spirit, Provenance will be a flashback to the days of Le Bec-Fin, for decades the ne plus ultra of Philadelphia special-occasion dining — but now without the gilt trip. “I’m channeling this vibe that was really brought to the scene by Pierre Gagnaire and the older guard of Parisian chefs during the 1990s,” Bazik said. “We’re just continuing it.”

In doing so, Bazik seems intent on flipping what he thinks is the usual restaurant business model. “Without disparaging anyone, it just seems as though the focal point has always been, ‘How do we make money?’ The secondary things are: ‘How do we improve the guest experience and then how do we make sure that the employees are working in a comfortable, culturally satisfying environment?’”

“I’m not the guy that’s opening a stuffy French restaurant that will cost a lot of money that I’m trying to take from you,” Bazik said. “I am trying to show that there’s a process behind everything that’s being done and there’s people that are involved in that. The reason things cost a lot of money is because things cost me a lot of money and the labor costs a lot of money — not because I need to pay it, but because I should pay it because we’re skilled craftspersons.”

He’ll be working with luxe ingredients, with an eye toward sustainability. Some pantry items are from Korea. Rather than Japanese miso, for example, he uses doenjang.

Seating 25 people across three areas, Provenance will exclusively offer tasting menus: Officially, they are four courses but with 25 bites served, such as crudites with trout roe taramasalata, tuna with foie gras mousse and black truffle gastrique on brioche Pullman toast, squid with zucchini, and farmer’s cheese agnolotti with whey and black truffle. Then comes a “pre-dessert” nibble before pastry chef Abigail Dahan delivers dessert. Prices in the main room will be $225, and $195 in the side dining room and downstairs.

Every bottle on the wine list will be available by the glass. The standard beverage pairing will be $140 per person. But you need not go for a full pairing. “I want our guests to be able to fully recount our experience,” he said. Bazik is also offering a pairing ($115) that is half nonalcoholic beverages and half premium wines. A “temperance pairing” of nonalcoholic drinks will be $90.

The main room, whose walls are clad with matte-finish Venetian plaster by Zack Bird of Bird Studio, opens into a black soapstone counter that seats 11 people. (Why not an even number? “It’s important to serve solo diners,” Bazik said. “Not every spouse or significant other will want this kind of experience.”) There are eight seats at two four-tops in a second dining room (decorated with ceramics by the artist Sunkoo Yuh), and a six-top table downstairs, along with a wine cellar and the bar, which will be used only for full service, not hanging out. “He wanted it to feel alien to the context that you’re on Headhouse Square in this quaint little strip of historic buildings,” said Lance Saunders, design director of Stokes Architecture & Design, which worked on the project. “It’s transportive.”

At their initial meeting, Saunders recalled, “the first thing he said was, ‘You know, Michelin isn’t in Philly, but if Michelin was here, we’d be going for a star.’”

Bazik, who grew up in Harleysville, Montgomery County, was inspired by such two-star destinations as Pineapple & Pearls in Washington, Atomix in New York, and Saison in San Francisco. Three years ago, while expecting their son, Emile Eu-Jin, Bazik and his wife, Eunbin, an accounting professor at Widener University, had dinner at Le Clarence in Paris. After meeting the chef de cuisine at the time, Joshua An, Bazik returned to stage at the restaurant.

There, Bazik cooked on a bespoke Molteni stove for the first time. “It’s just the most consistent piece of cookery possible,” Bazik said. “Heat radiates throughout the entire unit, meaning I can transfer any pot or pan to a different part and it will hold its temperature.”

He had to have one for his restaurant. Provenance’s Molteni, measuring 4½ by 9 feet and weighing 1,700 pounds, is the first of its kind in Philadelphia. Moltenis cost $50,000 to $400,000 — “mine is on the way lower end of the spectrum,” Bazik said. The challenge was getting it inside the restaurant. Removing the front windows, even temporarily, would have forced hearings with the Historical Commission as well as hiring riggers and using specialized equipment, at a price tag of $25,000 to $30,000, he said. Instead, his contractor enlarged the back door and they shlepped it in one day in May, over the course of five hours, for $800. “Some people might wait till they make a lot of money and then buy a Porsche,” Bazik said. “I’m just buying the Porsche now, and letting everyone drive it.”

(Bazik declined to divulge Provenance’s budget, other than to say it would cost “about the same as if I was building a 60- to 80-seat restaurant.”)

Besides his experiences in France, Bazik has spent more than a year on a series of preview dinners at such restaurants as a.kitchen, Le Cavalier, Fork, and River Twice. In February, he flew back to Paris to partner with An for a sold-out, two-night dinner at Mokoloco.

Otherwise, Bazik has been on site almost daily since November 2022 as the restaurant space — once home to such long-ago spots as Borgia Cafe and Lautrec — was stripped to the bones, then rebuilt. “I could have gotten another job through this, but my being able to spend time with our son and my wife’s support have been the biggest blessings I could have ever hoped for,” Bazik said.

Bazik assembled his team from Philly’s fine-dining world: Pastry chef Dahan, born in France, made her mark as executive pastry chef at Parc; sous chef Nicholas Piwinski was sous at River Twice after his time as chef de cuisine at Serpico; sous chef Zac Cohen left an eight-year line cook’s job with chef Greg Vernick; and general manager Benjy Satlow worked with Bazik at Lacroix. He’s offering staff a four-day work week and three weeks’ paid vacation. “This might not be your average Philadelphia restaurant, but I am the average Philadelphia chef, and I want to create the experience that I think everyone in the kitchen deserves.”

“I’ve never felt that Philly was a second-rate city,” Bazik said, “so the idea that a restaurant like mine doesn’t really exist here is strange to me.”