Dining Out Annual 1995 | Philadelphia
January 1995
Walnut Street vs. Manayunk
by Janet Bukovinsky Teacher

If any single restaurant can be credited with igniting a new energy on Walnut Street, it's Striped Bass. In the ten months it's been open, this $2.5 million eatery established by Neil Stein and Joe Wolf in the 1920s-era Butcher and Singer building has redefined fish restaurant in a city where, for decades, the term has been synonymous with the name Bookbinder's. Now it means simple high-ceilinged elegance, with power tables upfront amd sexy banquettes half-shaded by giant potted palms off to the side. The bar is four deep most nights, but the crowd satst mellow.

And then there's the food: green Sicilian olives in scarlet-peppered olive oil to start, with a hunk of high class peasent bread. Impeccable, pedigreed oysters and clams on the half-shell, brought forth in a long-legged steel vessel. More oysters coddled to plumpness in horseradish sauce. Sweet pompano, earthy white halibut, sea bass, monkfish, Jersey tuna, crabmeat hash. Everything hinges on availability, and how a storm at sea or a fishing-boat crisis can affect what's on your plate. With luck, there will be the best crab money can buy, smooth nuggets of jumbo lumpfish, big and pearly as a Liz Taylor bauble.

"When Neil and Joe first interviewd me for the job, we came to this place and it was completely empty. They kept talking about how they wanted a glamorous sexy, restuarant but there was nothing here," recalls Alison Barshak, the 30-year old executive chef, who left the top post at Bryn Mawr's Central Bar and Grill to take charge of the kitchen. For this Lafayette Hill native who once cooked at Rollers and Apropos, "the job" meant not just brainstorming recipes but ordering seafood that arrives from New England, Florida, Nova Scotia and innumerable other waters worldwide from a dozen different purveyors. Barshak, prepared by enrolling in a crash course in fish preparation at the Culinary Institute of America. It including buying, storing and butchering, though the well-traveled chef notes that "Fish butchering and fileting is a total American concept. It's only in this country where everything around food is so sanitized, that people freak out when they are served a whole fish with the head on."

Hands on her waist, hair pierced with crossed chopsticks and a frown of concentration on her face, Barshak is a harsh mistress of the walk-in refrigerator when it comes to the quality of the seafood she accepts. After passing her inspection, great white makos the size of boogie boards and white plastic tubs of of the tiny farm-raised thumbnail clams called Walkers repose in the fresh smelling, bank-vault quiet two floors below Striped Bass' gleaming dining area, in rooms that flaunt the original art deco detailing of their previous, and quite boring by comparison, life as a brokerage headquarters.

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