How did restaurant get a sidewalk café outside the permitted area?
Was it monkeyshines at Moonshine?
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TODAY, LET'S TALK about Moonshine and monkeyshines and how things happen in Philadelphia.
Moonshine is a craft beer bar and restaurant in the deep heart of South Philly, at 1825 E. Moyamensing Ave., outside the city-established zones where sidewalk cafés are free to open.
Yet it has a sidewalk café, notes one local resident, who asks not to be named for fear of retaliation. I'll call him Good Citizen.
He was disturbed by the sidewalk café being where it should not be, and also by the restaurant's putting up some not-permitted permanent design elements, and also by loud noise.
He did some checking and was told by L&I that the Moonshine license "was issued in error," and "the license has been closed so it cannot be renewed."
Since Moonshine is operating openly, Good Citizen suspects monkeyshines and gets in touch with me, the enforcer of rules, large and small.
Right off, I learn the L&I guy is wrong, and I won't embarrass him by using his name.
Had he done some further checking, he would have learned that Moonshine's owner in 2014 got legislation passed to operate a sidewalk café outside of the normal boundaries.
That sounds like monkeyshines - a restaurant owner getting special legislation written just for him.
Not so fast, says Councilman Mark Squilla, who introduced the legislation for Moonshine and "hundreds" of others.
When a restaurant outside the sidewalk café zone wants a permit, Squilla says, it first must get a green light from the community, in this case the Pennsport Civic Association.
Next, if the neighbors are on board, the request goes to the Streets Department, which prepares an ordinance. That gets introduced at City Council, there are open hearings, and then a vote of the full Council before it goes to the mayor for signature. In Moonshine's case, it was Mayor Michael Nutter, Squilla says, who never failed to sign such ordinances. It's a long but routine process.
Moonshine requested the ordinance because "we wanted to get additional seating for the community," says owner Sam Arbitman, who opened the restaurant less than three years ago.
As part of Good Citizen's due diligence, he wrote to everyone in city government he could think of, stopping just short of Cheetah's hairdresser. He sent more than a half-dozen people the same letter, with all their addresses on it.
For future Good Citizens, when you send a bunch of people the same letter - and they all see everyone it's been mailed to - each may think someone else will reply. And no one does.
You can send the same letter to many people, but let each think it's going only to him or her.
Meanwhile, as a result of Good Citizen's efforts and my poking around, the Streets Department sent out inspectors Wednesday and notified Moonshine it was in violation.
Regulations say everything on the sidewalk must be movable, and inspectors found a flower box and a bench they said were too large and ordered them removed.
That was done by the time I spoke to Arbitman on Thursday.
He disagrees with the Streets inspectors, but says he is happy with the outcome - and recommends the chicken piccata ravioli, $10.50.
Everything is made fresh, he says. "We don't even have a freezer."
No freezer? Isn't a restaurant required to have a freezer?
I call L&I. The answer: No.
No monkeyshines at Moonshine.
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