Pretzels

THE RESTAURANTS and merchants of Rittenhouse Row are gathering again on Walnut Street this Saturday, and that means about 50,000 area residents and guests will be joining them for one of Center City's largest street fairs. The Rittenhouse Row Spring Festival will close Walnut from Broad to 19th streets (from noon until 5 p.m.) and feature food, fashion, entertainment and fun for children. It's big. It's crowded. It's fun. And this year there's a lot of new stuff. * Dunkin' Donuts will be giving out free iced coffee on the 1400 block of Walnut.

In honor of National Pretzel Day - for real - Philly Pretzel Factory is handing out free soft pretzels today at its more than 100 locations. Sixty are in Pennsylvania, 38 in New Jersey, with a handful in Delaware, and one or two in five other states. Locations can be found at www.phillysoftpretzelfactory.com/#/locations . No purchase necessary, the company says. Lancaster pretzel-maker H.K. Anderson also has a kind of giveaway. "The contest is simple," says spokesman Steve Robinson.

What we like about it: These large, soft pretzels, generously sprinkled with salt, and warm from the oven, hit the spot. Customers can drop by almost anytime - 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. - and see the pretzels hand-twisted and put in the oven in the small retail shop. Regular pretzels are 55 cents each, or $5.50 for a dozen. They're also available in four flavors - butter, garlic, cheese and cinnamon sugar. Flavored pretzels are 75 cents each. Owner Jim Stewart has been making pretzels since he was 14. He bought the business in 1993.

It's bad enough being a human in Philadelphia in the summer. Imagine being a soft pretzel: Twisted, sprinkled with salt, baked, thrown in the back of a delivery van, and set out on a steamy street corner. Yes, pretzels sweat, too. And since a city Health Department crackdown on vendor sanitation, combined with the usual July humidity, soft pretzels are sweating like never before. Sweaty pretzels? What's next? Hoagies with morning breath? Cheesesteaks with ring around the collar?

You won't find Herb Rosa's pretzels on any sidewalk pushcart or corner store counter. Won't find them hawked at parades or ballgames, either. Nope. The only place you can buy Herb Rosa's pretzels - as well as his pinchos, pastelillos and rellenos de papas - is in a little store at 5th Street and Girard Avenue in North Philadelphia. It's the same place the pretzels have been sold for the past 90 years or so, ever since a man whose name nobody recalls came to America from Germany with a pretzel recipe that down through the years hasn't changed an ounce.

ENRON, TOBACCO, HMOs, pharmaceuticals, airlines, Star Wars, conglomerates and other wealthies, what is their common bond? The answer is "Geo. Dubya" - their Santa in the White House - who will gift them with hundreds of billions in tax cuts, while the working stiffs and senior citizens on Social Security who can't afford health insurance, medication, food, utilities or entertainment get a $300 tax rebate. Then we are told to spend, fly and party to revive the economy. Who is Dubya kidding, especially in regard to his pretzel-and-fainting gig, Enron and who knows what else?

I've had an interesting adventure since we last spoke - a family trip to exotic Queens, one of the most diverse counties in the country, as tasty as I remember - and still mostly untainted by Brooklyn-style hipster-fication. We ate great Greek in Astoria at Agnanti Meze (rooster in sauce, anyone?) and dove into Flushing's vast Chinatown. But it was the Thai food at Ayada in Elmhurst that was a revelation. Wow! Such vibrant flavors. Homemade Issan-style "sour" sausage. Ground pork larb that radiated chile heat.

On a recent sunny morning deep in South Philly, the three Nacchio sisters - Norma, Florence, and Gloria - are sitting in the front office of their Federal Pretzel Baking Company, 638 Federal St., happily recalling great moments in soft pretzel history, when the confusion suddenly arises over Frankie Avalon's 40th birthday party pretzel. It arises somewhere between Florence's memory of the 300 soft pretzels that Federal baked for Sylvester Stallone's bachelor party and her sister Norma's recollection of the 100 soft pretzels that Federal baked for then-mayor Bill Green to send to the mayor of Kansas City after losing a bet on the Phillies in the 1980 World Series.

Police here are mounting an investigation, complete with drive-bys and stakeouts, to root out the culprits in a rash of predawn thefts. The crime? Crates, boxes and bags of fresh-baked soft pretzels have been disappearing from sidewalks and stoops near the shops where they are sold. The epidemic, as some here are calling it, has led merchants to change their routines in an effort to thwart the thieves. "Once in a while, merchants would complain that a delivery had gone awry, but nothing this regular, this consistent," said Deputy Chief Charles Brooks of the Haverford Township Police Department, which is investigating six incidents of pilfered pretzels reported since late November.

For those whose lives would have been diminished by not being able to pick up a Les's Pretzel along with a full tank of gas at Nolan's Exxon . . . And those who would have missed spotting the avuncular Les Hall behind the wheel of his silver Ford Granada, tooling around town on a delivery run . . . Be advised that the pretzels that captured the 1994 Best of Philly award will not be forced into extinction. They will not even be shoved underground. In an about-face, the borough and the Rittenhouse Homeowners Association have made a deal with Les and Debbie Hall, allowing the just-off-the-welfare- rolls couple to continue baking their nougat-filled, olive-oil-soaked pretzels.

I HAVE watched with interest the actions or, better yet, non-actions of the leaders of the Phila school system. Knowledge has a cost, but the only ones benefitting from that mindset are the superintendent and his generals. They need to implementing a more comprehensive strategy aimed at the majority of the students who have a desire to learn. They have placed too much blame on disruptive students, but when should the actions of a few supercede the desire of the majority? Get a backbone.

On Friday, visitors to Philly Pretzel Factory stores can pick up a free soft pretzel. Early birds can even win a month's worth - one free pretzel every day in May - if they're among the first 100 to stop by any of the more than 100 locations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Florida and Colorado. It's all in celebration of National Pretzel Day. No purchase necessary. For more details, including store locations, go to www.phillysoftpretzelfactory.com . No signs, by the way, of a similar Pretzel Day giveaway at Auntie Anne's pretzel locations.

Olivia Dorsey was in her bedroom early Wednesday when commotion from the sidewalk startled her - voices that sounded like a man and woman arguing, she recalled, then an instant of silence, then the gunshot, "loud as a cannon. " Dorsey, 80, made her way outside to discover her gracious neighbor, Jose Ortiz-Diaz, shot down by a robber and dying in the arms of a friend. "Jose was lying flat on his back, and his head was in this woman's lap, and she was rocking him like she was trying to wake him up," Dorsey said Friday, looking over her shrubs toward where Ortiz-Diaz fell.

Friday night's episode of Undercover Boss will have a distinctly local flavor — the salty, loamy taste of soft pretzels. That's because the subject of the show is Bensalem native Dan DiZio, the CEO of the Philly Pretzel Factory. The drama on the CBS reality show promises to play out differently as well. Usually, the corporate chieftains haven't lifted anything heavier than a phone their entire careers. So they tend to experience trouble once they take on disguises to perform their companies' most physically demanding, entry-level jobs.

When Dan DiZio sold pretzels on Roosevelt Boulevard and dreamed of opening his own pretzel bakery, he didn't know what the word "franchise" meant, or that having one store could ever happen. But now with 120 locations nationwide, the CEO and co-founder of the Philly Pretzel Factory will be on "Undercover Boss" Friday night (8 p.m., CBS 3). DiZio, 40, said he thinks every CEO should go undercover at his business and see how his employees work. "I was sleeping on bags of flour when we first opened up, but I became a corporate guy," DiZio said.

I've had an interesting adventure since we last spoke - a family trip to exotic Queens, one of the most diverse counties in the country, as tasty as I remember - and still mostly untainted by Brooklyn-style hipster-fication. We ate great Greek in Astoria at Agnanti Meze (rooster in sauce, anyone?) and dove into Flushing's vast Chinatown. But it was the Thai food at Ayada in Elmhurst that was a revelation. Wow! Such vibrant flavors. Homemade Issan-style "sour" sausage. Ground pork larb that radiated chile heat.

LANCE LEMPERT is a Philly guy. A Northeast High grad who grew up on Tastykakes and soft pretzels. So why will he be wearing a San Francisco Giants jersey to Citizens Bank Park in late July? Glad you asked. Lempert won a chance to meet Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum after entering a video in a contest sponsored by Red Bull in which contestants had to imitate the "Freak's" unorthodox pitching style. Lempert, who was a Daily News honorable mention in 2009, met with Lincecum in a 45-minute session in Scottsdale, Ariz., on March 2. "He was great," Lempert said.

ConAgra, the Omaha-based food-processing giant that owns Chef Boyardee, Peter Pan, Snack Pack, and other supermarket brands, says it has purchased Lancaster-based National Pretzel - which bakes private-label pretzels for chain groceries at its bakeries in Lancaster and Hanover, Pa., and Visalia, Calif. - from investor Michael Torporek's New York buyout firm, Brookstone Partners. Neither buyer nor seller named a price, but a Wall Street Journal report said a ConAgra official confirmed the total was more than $100 million.

Here's something you might not know about those two-for-a-dollar pretzels you just bought: They've most likely been dipped in a liquid solution of baker's lye. Baker's lye is caustic soda, a/k/a sodium hydroxide, a chemical that's been used to: relax hair, strip paint, unclog drains and (feel free to stop reading now) digest flesh. For pretzels, it adds a golden-brown finish and a surface that makes salt stick. Baker's lye is diluted in water, a concentration that's "very small parts per million," said Marty Ferrill, vice president of franchise development at Mayfair-based Philly Soft Pretzel Factory.