C.L.: Smart restaurants think of their music choices every bit as much as they do the design or color of the walls. It's another expression of personality - and it's changeable, like a nightly special. So in theory, it's a wonderful tool for them to shade the ambience or mood of a restaurant. Of course, like bad design, bad music can have the wrong effect. And loud bad music, in particular, is its own problem.
Reader: Are you surprised at all that there's a rash of restaurant openings in such a down economy where capital/loans are supposed to be much harder to come by? C.L.: There are a TON of new restaurants coming on line right now, something like 20-plus in the month of November alone, which my colleague Michael Klein, who's been following these things for years, believes is the most EVER. I have no obvious explanation for this, except that there's a lot of pent-up capital out there coming from outside of banks for smaller investments, and many of these projects are small - thanks to Philly's naturally cozy landscape - so restaurant investments are doable.
Reader: Is David Ansill still cooking in Philly? This weather reminds me of the osso bucco that I had at his restaurant at Third and Bainbridge a few years ago. It's crazy that a place like that and a place like Adsum couldn't stay open. I feel like they're the slightly more adventurous types of places that Philly needs to keep pushing the envelope.
C.L.: Last I heard, Ansill was still cooking at Ladder 15, on the 1500 block of Sansom St. As for Adsum, there were a lot of factors there - the menu's daring edge only one of them. People loved Matt Levin's cooking there, but for some reason, that was not a sustainable situation. We'll see how many of the new places really take those kind of menu risks.
