New cuisine heard from

You have to start somewhere. For Cafe Lift, born on the ground floor of a loft-conversion building, it was at 13th and Callowhill, in the middle - no, make that on the edge - of nowhere. That was in 2003. The start was shaky and the crowds thin; now five years later, it has its sea legs, serves a great lunch to a full house, and its owners are about to open a second spot featuring craft beer and solid, farm-fresh pub fare.

The point is, you can't always predict the future of a place from its first few faltering steps. Sometimes it finds its groove with a new chef. Sometimes there's dumb luck: Cafe Lift really took off when the city moved its school district offices to Broad Street, just a block away. Sometimes a competitor goes belly up. Or you get in early on a craze: Small plates, anyone?

I've eaten at several indie upstarts recently, as fresh and wobbly as newborn fawns. One is Cafe Estelle, in another loft building, hidden even deeper away between Northern Liberties and Old City, just north of Spring Garden on Fourth Street. Our esteemed food critic has a far more detailed report on the subject. Suffice to say, the food has been astonishingly accomplished - flatbread pizzas with homemade sausage and oyster mushrooms, beautiful vegan vegetable soup, meats smoked over hickory outside, gnocchi worthy of far-tonier climes.

But Cafe Estelle bit off a little more than it could chew: A key cook left for brighter lights. A leap to serve dinner (besides breakfast and lunch) proved too much to handle. So we shall keep our fingers crossed and see.

Also fresh out of the box is Root, an austere BYO at 10th and Spring Garden. Its owner boasts experience in Prague and Los Angeles. The room is intriguingly spare (with a gnarled root on one wall). I had terrible gazpacho there, so bitter I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. And terrible shrimp tacos, an insult to Baja and shrimp, so overcooked they were inedible. Even the tortilla was weirdly toasted and brittle. Still, I'm rooting for the place. It could get better. We shall see.

Which brings us to a tiny, earnest newcomer in Chinatown, a spot called Zhi-Wei-Guan, or as the menu adds, Magic Kingdom of Dough. Why Magic Kingdom of Dough? Helen Xu, the charming owner, says it is to establish a niche, a cafe for wheat noodles and dumplings, though its noodles, apparently, are rarely made on premises, and suffer by comparison to the exquisitely tender hand-drawn noodles at Nan Zhou, the noodlery next door.

The Magic Kingdom purports to specialize in the cookery of Hangzhou, the subtropical eastern Chinese city south of Shanghai. I've had a stewy hacked Hangzhou duck, a mustardy-brown color with a sweet currylike flavor. And "juicy buns," also known as soup dumplings, said to be fresher and in the Hangzhou tradition of less grease and sugar. In fact, what they have less of is the juicy soup that is the signature of a far tastier, and thinner-skinned, rendition at Dim Sum Garden, the glaringly bright box of a place on 11th Street.

Xu says other features of her hometown cookery are fresh bamboo shoots, which she is trying to procure. And certain sweet-and-sour lake fish, and a special shrimp dish flavored with tea leaves. Those, too, are said to be on the way.

For now, there are her dreams of a Hangzhou haunt in a sea of Cantonese-oriented rooms (though Chinatown has diversified with Chiu-Chow cuisine, and tastes of Sichuan, Shanghai, the style at Dim Sum Garden), and the eagerly anticipated visit in November of a Hangzhou master chef to further instruct her hard-working cook.

So I will be back to retry the juicy buns and fragrant rice-ball dessert soup, for the bright fried rice and spicy pork noodles. You have to start somewhere; where it ends, no one knows.

925 Race St.

215-873-0808

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