Four months ago, after a false start on another corner, Zbigniew Chojnacki set up shop - which is to say a gleaming food cart he calls La Dominique - not far from the flaring nostrils of the dragon that demarcates Drexel's urban campus.
It is not virgin territory, particularly. Within a few blocks of 33d and Market here, lunch trucks and sidewalk trailers serve vegan burgers and shakes, and falafel, and, at Pete's Lil' Lunch Box, what is regarded as an entirely decent BLT.
But Chojnacki is the first with crepes on this stretch, and while he is hardly what you'd call efficient, or quick, or capable of stepping up his production - even when pressed - he has already added a grace note of charm, even of delight, to this prosaic and decidedly un-Ivy block.
He is 55 now, lanky and rawboned in a Lincolnesque way, and meticulous to the point almost of excruciation: He is reluctant, it seems, to let his crepes go.
Still, the fame of his tiny cart has spread: From offices blocks away, orders come in for six, for eight, crepes that are, quite simply, more elegant than you'd have a right to expect of what passes for workaday street food on the sidewalks of Philadelphia.
The crepe-maker smiles a Cheshire smile beneath his jaunty yellow-and-white umbrella, from the window of the cart that he has named for his granddaughter, Dominique.
"I did not want to be," Chojnacki says, "another one with the hot dogs."
This is not, presumably, the trajectory that Chojnacki (HOY-nat-ski) contemplated when he left - "escaped," he says - Poland in 1984 to pursue his craft, jewelry design and figurative ceramic sculpting, most recently in a studio on the wide flank of York Street in Fishtown.
There were very good years. In the juried craft shows he customarily brought home first- and second-place prizes, says his wife, Krystyna, a painter. Wealthy collectors paid well for his work; he has a piece in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery.
But the recession came early to his part of the art world. Two years ago, sales began slumping. Among his cohorts, he has seen it happen before: In the late '80s, when the economy tanked around Los Angeles, he watched a migration of artist friends to cheaper digs in an out-of-the-way town called Santa Fe.
