Fishtown's Frankford Avenue Is Making Two Very Different Bets This Fall

Greg Vernick waited six years between restaurant openings. A Washington, D.C. bagel chain is opening two Philadelphia locations at once. Both bets are landing on the same stretch of Frankford Avenue this fall, and that overlap tells you something about the neighborhood that a list of new menus alone won't.

A Six-Year Wait Chose Frankford Avenue

Vernick built his name on patience. After opening Vernick Food & Drink in 2012, the restaurant that helped anchor Philadelphia's last dining renaissance and eventually earned him a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic, he didn't open anything new for six years. When he finally did, he debuted two projects at once inside his existing Center City footprint: Vernick Coffee Bar and Vernick Fish.

This January, he broke that pattern again, and this time he left Center City entirely. Emilia, his first restaurant in a new neighborhood, opened on Frankford Avenue inside a new apartment development after three regulars approached him and his wife about the space. It's also his first restaurant without his name on the door. Vernick handed the kitchen to Meredith "Meri" Medoway, his longtime chef de cuisine at Vernick Food & Drink and a fellow Cherry Hill native, and built the menu around her Emilia-Romagna training rather than his own résumé.

That's a specific kind of bet. A chef who takes six years between moves and has spent his career building restaurants around his own name just spent his next chapter on someone else's vision, in a neighborhood he'd never operated in before.

The Same Corridor Is Also Where National Chains Start

While Vernick was making a deliberate, personal bet, other operators were treating Frankford Avenue as the fast lane. Stella's, a national ice cream chain, chose Fishtown for its first East Coast location this summer. Ricci's, a Philadelphia hoagie shop with more than a century of history, picked Fishtown as one of its newest expansion points earlier this year. And per the Inquirer's August restaurant column, the D.C.-rooted bagel chain Call Your Mother is targeting a September debut in Fishtown, opening the same month as its Rittenhouse location, treating the neighborhood as coequal with Center City's core rather than a secondary market. One month after that, New York's Unapologetic Foods is targeting October for the Fishtown opening of Adda, its next stop after building a following in Manhattan.

Here's the corridor as it stands right now, sorted by what's already serving and what's still on the calendar:

Liguria, the pizza spot from brothers Amro and Sherif Nagud, draws on Italian Riviera recipes and the owner's cheesesteak experience from Verona Pizza, a suburban favorite in Maple Glen, Pennsylvania. LeoFigs pairs small-batch wine tastings downstairs with a menu of tuna sashimi and porchetta sandwiches upstairs. Neither needed a national rollout plan to open. They needed a landlord willing to rent to them on Frankford Avenue, which is a different kind of confidence than Call Your Mother or Adda are showing.

What It Means When Both Bets Show Up Together

Neighborhoods usually get one kind of restaurant momentum or the other. Either they're still proving themselves, drawing scrappy independent openings from chefs and owners willing to take a risk on unproven foot traffic, or they've already been discovered and start filling in with chains that only move once the data is safe. Fishtown is getting both signals within the same year, from a chef who spent six years deciding where to spend his reputation next and from multi-market operators in D.C. and New York who didn't need anywhere near that long to make the same decision.

That's not a contradiction. It's what it looks like when a neighborhood stops being a bet and becomes a baseline, while still having enough room and energy left to reward someone willing to take a real swing. Residents who've watched Frankford Avenue evolve over the past several years are living inside that shift right now, whether or not a headline ever spells it out.

The Street Runs Its Own Calendar

The restaurant openings aren't happening in isolation. Fishtown has built a recurring rhythm of street-level programming that turns the corridor into something closer to a running calendar than a collection of storefronts:

• The Fishtown Music and Arts Festival took over the streets under the Market-Frankford El at Front and Palmer on May 2, spreading into late-night sets at LMNO, Percy, and Warehouse on Watts.
• The Now + Then Marketplace Fishtown Fair filled the triangular block at 1201 Frankford Avenue on May 9 with more than 50 vendors, wrapping around neighborhood anchors like Johnny Brenda's and Two Robbers.
• Under the El Bazaar's "Chalk of the Town" brought chalk muralists, live music, and food from LMNO, Percy Diner & Bar, and Evil Genius Beer Company to the 1700 block of North Front Street on June 27.

Notice how often the same handful of businesses show up twice, once as a restaurant and once as an event host. LMNO and Percy aren't just places to eat. They're doing double duty as the neighborhood's informal event infrastructure, which is its own kind of evidence that the corridor has enough density now to support both a sit-down dinner crowd and a street festival crowd on the same weekend.

Getting to the Water Got Easier Here First

The restaurant wave has company on the infrastructure side. The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation runs a "connector street" program aimed at closing the physical and psychological gap that I-95 and Columbus Boulevard create between neighborhoods and the river. The first of these connectors opened on Race Street back in 2011. Since then, the corporation has completed similar projects on Spring Garden Street in Northern Liberties and on Columbia Avenue in Fishtown, giving residents a more direct, better-lit path from the neighborhood core down to the Delaware River Trail and Penn Treaty Park.

Fishtown got that upgrade before most of the rest of the waterfront did. The corporation is only now finishing the same kind of project on Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia, a $9.5 million effort expected to wrap later this month. That means the model that's currently making national news for South Philly has already been quietly running in Fishtown for a while, which is easy to miss if you're not the one walking or biking it every week.

What a Regular Week Looks Like Right Now

Put it together and a typical week on this stretch of Fishtown right now might mean an Italian dinner at Emilia on a Tuesday, a scoop from Stella's on the walk home, a Saturday spent at whatever pop-up market has claimed the triangular block that month, and a Sunday ride down the Columbia Avenue connector to Penn Treaty Park because the route actually makes sense now instead of dumping you onto a highway on-ramp. None of that requires knowing that a six-year gap in one chef's career and a national bagel chain's expansion math happen to be pointing at the same corridor. But it's worth knowing anyway, because it's the clearest read available right now on where this neighborhood actually stands, not where it stood two years ago or where a headline says it might be heading next.

If you're already living this version of Fishtown and have started wondering what your own place on Frankford Avenue or one of the side streets is actually worth in this market, The Josh Allen Team can walk you through it. Get Your Home Valuation whenever you're ready to see the numbers behind what you already know about the neighborhood.