Options grow as Walnut St. dining fades

With the impending loss of Susanna Foo, the Asian fusion palace that is one of the city's marquee restaurants, another fine-dining jewel is departing Walnut Street's Restaurant Row.

But this is hardly the grim commentary on Philadelphia's dining health that it might at first appear. Rather, as one era winds down, another phase of the city's restaurant identity has been maturing to replace it.

In the six areas of most rapid growth in the city, no fewer than 20 restaurants have opened in the last year, and 17 are scheduled to launch soon.

From the glitz of luxury steak and cutting-edge Latin fusion on Chestnut Street to a surging revival on East Passyunk Avenue, from new ambitions along Sansom Street to continued growth in Northern Liberties, at least a half-dozen strips are pulsing with restaurant energy.

Naturally, Walnut Street's latest loss evokes melancholy for a grand era ended. After the closings of culinary landmarks Striped Bass in June and Brasserie Perrier in January, the coming sale of Foo's building is just another high-profile blow to a strip that for the last quarter-century defined Philadelphia's national reputation as a serious restaurant town.

A combination of soaring rents geared more to retailers and tastes trending away from formal dining leaves the strip's days as a gourmet mecca numbered.

"We expect every other restaurant to ultimately leave Walnut Street . . . as leases expire within the next five to seven years," said Larry Steinberg, a Center City real estate broker with Michael Salove Co., which specializes in retail and restaurants and is brokering the retail space for Foo's restaurant.

But with a vibrant and thriving restaurant scene emerging in more diverse areas than ever before, diners are not likely to look back for long.

"To my mind, the fact that you have depth and breadth now in restaurants is much more powerful than a single restaurant row," said Eugenie Birch, codirector of the Penn Institute for Urban Research. "It's a mark of a more sophisticated city.

"I've been looking at 45 to 47 downtowns around the country," she said, "and with some of them, all they have is a restaurant row."

Those cities, she said, "would die" to complement their high-end strips with Philly's growing repertoire of strong neighborhood restaurants, a testament to its rising residential population.