Philly

I spent a few nights this week in the city of Philadelphia, just a hop, skip, and jump down from Princeton. I think the last time I spent some time there was in high school, when the intrepid N and I attended an environmental conference and slept on the floor of a cafeteria with assorted dirty hippies.

This time I had less idealistic, less petuli-scented goals: to visit my college friend A, who sings the city's praises, and to evaluate said praises for myself. For some time now Philadelphia has been generating buzz as a cool, cutting edge place, with a small but robust assortment of music/art/food/bla bla bla. Some might even call it the sixth borough.

I decided I needed to be the judge of that.

A and J were fantastic hosts. Upon arriving I was whisked to a restaurant called Cochon (no relation to its more famous New Orleans and New York cousins of the same name) where I ate some delicious duck cassoulet.

This pretty much set the tone for my eating throughout the visit. Heavy, tasty food, skillfully if not particularly imaginatively prepared. Places like NYC or San Francisco have moved away from the "New American Cuisine" label, but in Philly it is alive and well--and accurately describes what one finds on the table. Not that it's a bad thing. It just feels slightly 2002. Sort of like eating Gourmet magazine.

One reason so many restaurants have sprouted up is the cheapness of real estate. A+J inhabitant the top two floors of a lovely townhouse, complete with terrace, and pay, together, less than I pay for my half of the attic hovel. Sigh.

A, who was always a bit mature for his age, has taken advantage of the costs savings to buy himself a little toy. Most people wait until their midlife crisis to ride around on fast, powerful, deathtraps.

A, of course, is ahead of the game. I got to ride on the back, which was somewhat terrifying but also a bit silly. Clad in black leather and wearing helmets, I thought we should go to some biker bar and get into a fight. Here we are preparing to go fuck shit up, just because we're bad like that.

Instead we went to a chi-chi chocolate shop and split a mocha cake with glasses of milk. Bitchin'!!!!!!

Other highlights included the food market,

and running along the banks of the Schulykil.

But I think I can definitively say: Philly is not the 6th borough. It is an aged, provincial city undergoing a renaissance. Nothing less, but also nothing more.

Of course, I'd always trade Staten Island for it.