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For a drink, a bite, a dream

M Restaurant is a leafy, open-air oasis tucked in with the Morris House Hotel on S. Eighth Street.

The tables of M Restaurant are in the bluestone courtyard of the Morris House Hotel on Eighth Street. (Akira Suwa/Staff Photographer)
The tables of M Restaurant are in the bluestone courtyard of the Morris House Hotel on Eighth Street. (Akira Suwa/Staff Photographer)Read more

A tidy, brown-paper-covered booklet sold in the office of the intimate Morris House Hotel, a "boutique hotel" ("We say boutique so we can charge more," says co-owner Gene Lefevre), offers an eloquent summary of its venerable, if mildly defiant, history.

When it was built in 1787, you learn, it was beyond a meadow at the edge of the potter's field that would later become Washington Square, putting it at unfashionable remove from the grander homes going up on Second Street.

Though its sturdy brickwork - which remains admirable today - alternated red stretcher and black header bricks, the architecture was resolutely out of step, as well, with the tenor of the times: In this postwar moment when Frenchification was in vogue, the Morris House reached backward, employing retro-Colonial styling, so plain and staid, so frumpishly, well, yesterday.

All of which, if you happened to be strolling down Eighth Street south of Walnut last week, adds to its current appeal - and to the appeal of the airy dining garden tucked behind its wrought-iron gate.

After sundown, you could see torches fluttering, the genteel magnolias and towering holly softened to shadow above the open-air patio tables.

Passersby didn't quite know what to make of it: Two summers ago, a promising eatery called M Restaurant that had risen in the ivied precincts had gone suddenly kerplunk.

And ever since, save for the occasional weekend wedding or private soiree, the walled garden had been fallow - generally closed and off-limits to the public.

But yes, the young lady at the gate assured, M Restaurant was back in business, as of days ago, albeit as a wholly different enterprise. (New chef, new concept: "A good place to have a martini and bite to eat after work," volunteered that chef, Pascual Cancelliere, his Argentine-Italian heritage traced in his name.)

The hostess offered a look at the menu - simple bruschetta of sweet gorgonzola with fig marmalade; a refreshing salad of arugula with beets and red onions, almonds and ricotta salata; small, rustic pastas; and empanadas, yes, empanadas, hand-stuffed each morning by the chef's mother, Dora, who makes them the very same way she did at home in Buenos Aires.

If the Morris House had started life as an independent-minded address, the restaurant re-flowering in its bosom was certainly not now going to be a slave to culinary convention.

The modest dining venture is a marriage of convenience. The garden's schedule of special events had thinned this year as the economy sagged.

Lefevre and his business partner, Michael DiPaolo (they also own the Dark Horse and Black Sheep pubs), were looking for a way to reanimate it and get a small return to boot.

Since they'd already engaged Cancelliere to open another project - an Italian-Argentine cafe in a building being remodeled on Ninth Street in the Italian Market - having him provide simple plates in the garden in the interim (and later in tandem) seemed like a plan.

Cancelliere did some of his first cooking on Ninth Street, learning at the knee of his late father, John, who ran, among other dining rooms, the Butcher's Cafe at Ninth and Christian Streets, Volare in Manayunk, and a pioneering Argentinian restaurant 30 years ago in Old City called El Gaucho.

So the abbreviated menu at this reimagined M Restaurant is a sampling of the fare teed up for the yet-to-open Italian-Argentine cafe on Ninth Street.

It is, indeed, more of an after-work snacking menu - braised short-rib sandwiches ($7), spinach tortillas, a hearty small plate of bucatini with spicy red sauce chunked with pancetta. And, of course, the crisp empanada pockets (three for $6).

There's a chunky vegetarian empanada. But my favorite is the savory (ungreasy) ground-meat-potato turnover, said to include raisins, though Dora Cancelliere tends to skip them, "because I don't like raisins."

The star here is the serene space - a low concentric brick wall framing the bluestone courtyard, the hotel's beveled-glass lobby a jewel at the end of the pendant.

At one edge, the delicate sprinkle of a fountain seems to invite a wood nymph. The plantings are informally sylvan and soothing.

Tranquility has returned now that the dust has settled from the construction of the 45-story St. James residential tower immediately to the north. (The sheer Indiana-limestone spine of the 13-story Ayer Building rises to the east, blocking the old views of Washington Square, but at the same time helping sheath the garden in one more layer of silence and secrecy.)

There are urns of petunias at the perimeter, and a skirt of boxwood. Squat Palladian windows spy from the hotel, hooded eyes. A cream-colored balcony hovers.

Just off the garden, opposite the original hotel building, is a standing bar, faced in fluted and bowed woods crafted in the French art nouveau style.

It is a fine little pocket itself, and, yes, it is a perfect spot to order an after-work martini (or an icy negroni), though later, at dusk, the outdoor torches ablaze, is an even better time; and you are missing out on one of the loveliest moments in the city if you do not walk outside and have your drink and your bite to eat while the moon begins its rise in the fading sky.

Contact columnist Rick Nichols at 215-854-2715 or rnichols@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/ricknichols.

M Restaurant
255 S. Eighth St., (Morris House Hotel)
215-625-6666

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