Table Talk: Mount Airy's Black Olive is stuffed with wellness
Six Mount Airy professionals - seeking to serve the nutritional needs of the community - have opened the Black Olive, billed as a health and wellness marketplace.
Six Mount Airy professionals - seeking to serve the nutritional needs of the community - have opened
the Black Olive
, billed as a health and wellness marketplace.
The Black Olive (7122 Germantown Ave., 215-247-5100) was developed for the anonymous benefactors by Carolyn Hines, who practices naturopathic medicine.
The shop offers lectures on diet and lifestyle and has a vegan/vegetarian prepared-foods case (apps, mains, desserts), grocery and frozen-food section, and smoothie bar. "I believe in people being educated consumers - not just purchasing off the buzzwords, or if [a product] is the latest trend," says Hines, who does nutritional counseling.
Though most of the foods (salads, soups, sandwiches) are intended to go, there's seating for eight. It's open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, till 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 8 p.m. on Thursdays, and from noon to 4 p.m. Sundays.
What's new
Sign of spring: A
Swallow
sighting. New this week, Swallow (1030 N. American St., 215-238-1399), in the Liberties Walk development in Northern Liberties, is a sexily candlelit 38-seat Euro-style BYO bistro owned by the husband-and-wife team of Jason and Cindy Caminos, who met a dozen years ago at Culinary Institute of America. Mains on the menu are $18 to $24. It's open nightly now, with lunch and brunch due soon. See the menu at
» READ MORE: http://go.philly.com/foodanddrinq
.
What's coming
Victor Fellus, a partner in Old City's Soho Pizza, is cooking up
Garlic
to occupy the ground floor of the RiverWest condos at 21st and Chestnut Streets. The 50- to 60-seater, which he'd like to open in May, will be a combo coffeeshop, salad stop, and brick-oven pizzeria with a bar. Think Cosi meets Saladworks meets Bertucci's.
An update on
Prive
, bound for the Lena/Bluezette space at 246 Market St. in Old City: Partners Nick and Bill Lavdas - Nick owns the Corner Bistro in Haddonfield, while cousin Bill owns Victory Lane Bar & Grill in Berlin - hope to open in mid-May after a total renovation. (The timing may be ambitious, as the liquor-license application is about to be filed.) Chef Peter Karapanagiotis will do Greek-influenced Mediterranean tapas. Karapanagiotis says he started cooking five years ago at his family's George's Place in Cape May and at the nearby Pier House. He spent a brief stint as a saute/saucier at Buddakan, followed by two years at Brasserie Perrier, most recently at its cafe at Boyds. The Lavdases are shopping for furnishings in Italy and Greece.
The former Bob Evans on Street Road near Route 1 in Bensalem is getting a redo. Mario Longo and his son, Riccardo - who own the Italian Bistro chain, Toscana in Cherry Hill, Tuscan Tavern in Blackwood, and Tuscan Brick-Oven Pizza in Mullica Hill - are readying
Toscana 52
(4602 Street Rd.), a northern Italian with large bar, for a late-March/early April opening. The "52" stands for the menu concept; each week will feature a different menu. Expect moderate prices and a patio.
A neat feature
You can go to the City of Philadelphia's Web site and wade through PDF files of the Department of Licenses and Inspections' printed database of restaurant inspections.
Or you can check out a restaurant's inspections on a nifty utility crafted by local tech whiz John Ellingsworth, at
» READ MORE: http://welcometophilly.com/food
.
Just type in the name of a restaurant or street and press return. It comes back with city inspection reports, plotted on a Google map.
How'd he do this? Ellingsworth wrote a Perl script that checks for new versions of the reports from the city Web site. It extracts the data from the PDFs and dumps it into a database, which he then geocodes and maps using the Google API. Glad you asked.