Jose Garces will put on a private show for you
He'll have a special kitchen at his new Kimmel Center restaurant.
You've read here and here how Jose Garces is taking over the catering operation at the Kimmel Center (Broad and Spruce Streets), and will open a restaurant where the venue's gift shop was.
Buttonholed at his new Amada location on the eve of its opening in the Revel resort in Atlantic City, he insisted that he didn't have a name or concept for the Kimmel project, due to land later this year.
But he did tell me that in addition to the restaurant, the space is being equipped with what Garces calls "my perfect kitchen." That is, a 16-seat section built around a cooking space "that only I will use." Garces will cook there as his schedule allows. When he's not there, that portion will be dark.
How theatrical of him.
Philly's Iron Chef turns up Sunday, April 8 on Chopped All-Stars (9 p.m., Food Network). It's a charity performance and Garces is competing for the St. Christopher Foundation's Farms to Family initiative - $50,000 is at stake.
Further on the JG front, if you're asking him about Frohmans Wursthaus - the beer and brats house he's been talking about at 13th and Chancellor Streets - well, sit tight. Garces says it may be on, it may be off - he's not entirely sure right now.
At any rate, it will wait for the shake-out period of his four dining locations at Revel, he told me. Revel has Amada, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean; a Village Whiskey, off the casino floor; and a Distrito bar with a regulation Guapos Tacos truck parked next to it.