Also this issue:

Sara Spills Some Beans
How to cook with a dirty old Frenchman and other secrets from TV food star Sara Moulton.
-Interview by Marc Kravitz

Icepack
-A.D. Amorosi

March 13-19, 2003

naked city

firstlook

by A.D. Amorosi

Conventional wisdom states, with American sentiment veered away from most things Parisian, perhaps now is not the time to exalt Philly's French Quarter. Or to open a brasserie (Loie) named for the doyenne of the Art Nouveau movement (Loie Fuller) with a French chef (Jeremy Duclut) and apt atmospherics.

To that, I'd like to quote a famous Frenchwoman, Marie Antoinette: Let 'em eat cake.

Avram Hornik -- the man behind boho bars Lucy's Hat Shop, Drinker's Tavern and SoMa in Old City -- damns Gallic gall and takes his act uptown to the Rittenhouse area to what used to be (at least visually) one of the last great delis in Philly, R&W.

While Hornik and principal designer/textiler Kevin O'Brien Studio may have kept the deli's high ceilings and sensationally ornate wainscoting, everything else went out the window with the cooked ham. Fronted by blond wood oversized café doors, a wrought iron arch and a temporary yellow hand-painted sign, Loie sticks out immediately from a block featuring coffeehouses, hairdressers and clothiers.

Once inside -- with walls shadow painted by the café doors -- Loie's first half is all bar, booths and banquettes. While the bar is long, crosscut at the center and mirrored, its neighboring booths are topped with turned wood beams that snake their way up the wall, as well as Franco-philiac posters from an absinthe era. Along with dolling up the booths and banquettes in hand-painted floral-patterned pale mauve-and-purple cotton velvet, O'Brien designed the oddly mod brushed silver iron chandelier that hovers overhead with blue-painted glass flowers. Keep looking up. As you walk toward the back you're unavoidably detained by a dramatically stage-lit blond wood arch that stops you in your tracks; it's almost as if you're expected to perform the dance of a dozen curtains -- the serpentine -- the Lady Loie herself made famous. The strangest part is Loie's back room; a brick-tipped gray fabric room with a pool table and jivey juke box that should seem more at home in the rusted root-y Drinker's than in a sophisticated salon (but it's affordable; see Duclut's menu of Montecristo sandwiches and steak au poivre). But that cool contradiction is part of Loie's quietly disarming, c'est magnifique, charm.

Loie, 128 S. 19th St., 215-568-0808.