City Winery Philadelphia: Emmylou Harris opens the new Fashion District venue, where only the brave get up and dance | Concert review
The attendees are seated, the wine flows, and the sound could use some work at the new Fashion District music venue.
“You can have just as much fun sitting down as standing up,” counseled Emmylou Harris at the tail end of her grand-opening show at City Winery Philadelphia. And besides, added the 72-year old alt-country legend, “who likes looking at all those butts?”
Clearly, the SRO (sitting-room-only), predominantly boomer crowd who filled the larger of the club’s two showrooms agreed. Only one brave couple dared to get up and dance on the sidelines of this intimate 300-seater, as the still angelic-voiced Harris and her talented six-piece band delivered the likes of Buck Owens’ waltzing ballad “Together Again,” the jitterbugging countrypolitan classic “How High the Moon,” and the zydeco-laced country two-steps “Roses in the Snow” and “Born to Run” (not the Springsteen song). The dancers sat out more reverent gospel country numbers like Bill Monroe’s “John the Baptist,” though it was a toe-tapper, too, scorched with surging organ, fiddle, mandolin, and gee-tars.
Like the sister clubs that share the name in seven other cities, the two-floor, multi-room City Winery newly carved out of a corner of the Fashion District mall has a different kind of vibe than we’re used to seeing in Philadelphia music rooms.
The multilevel, two-venue World Café Live at 30th and Walnut is structurally similar to this 10th and Filbert newbie. But WCL more often offers a stand-up party atmosphere in its big room, wherein beer is the drink of choice and food is not pushed nearly as much.
City Winery is a sit and relax (but don’t schmooze during the show) “supper club” in the traditional sense, closer to the likes of Chris’ Jazz Café and the Bynum brothers’ South, and long-lost relics like the original (Walnut Street-based) Latin Casino, South Philly’s Palumbo’s, Feltonville’s Sciolla’s, and the Cadillac nightclub on Germantown Avenue (run by the Bynums’ parents), where a Scotch- and martini-swigging “swinger” set would make a night of it, starting with cocktails then dinner and a show.
» READ MORE: Chris’ Jazz Cafe is celebrating its 30th anniversary three years after its 25th
At City Winery, no maitre‘d shakes you down for a good table -- you just pay extra online to reserve a down-front location. (Tickets for Harris, benefiting her favorite animal rescue charity, Bonaparte’s Retreat, ranged from $65 to $150 with “meet & greet” privileges. Most other shows upcoming have top prices between $26 and $55.)
Instead of “try the veal parm,” you’ll be encouraged to go for braised duck tacos ($16) or the $26 seafood alfredo (my choice, and pretty good). Flatbread pizza ($16-$18) is not too big and well-crisped on the bottom. and burgers ($16-$19, real meat or “Impossible”) are available any way you want so long as that’s well-done.
Instead of flocked wallpaper and plush banquettes, you get a neo-rustic (but posh) Northern California wine maker’s “hacienda” interior -- with lots of bare wood and brick treatments, arched window openings, and functional, wine-aging oak barrels dominating the décor and underscoring the “house made” drink menu. Even the wooden clouds suspended from the ceiling for sound-baffling purposes are carved out of oak-barrel remnants.
Truthfully, it will take at least six months, said City Winery founder/CEO Michael Dorf, before any grape varietal now beginning to age locally in the casks will be ready to serve, and others could be “a few years away” from ideal. So for the interim, they’re importing the house wines from other CW facilities. The California grape-sourced 2017 cabernet sauvignon I tried was quite respectable -- as well it should be at $14 a pour. Other imbibers were pleased by the house-brand rosé and merlot, the white wines not so much. Dorf has said that wine constitutes “80 percent of the drinks” purchased on the premises and “60 percent of the wine we sell never sees a bottle.”
And that’s key to City Winery’s successful bottom line. The club “has to make it on food and beverage sales,” said Dorf. And maybe a little with T-shirts and his new memoir available at the merch stand. To attract artists accustomed to playing larger venues, “we offer them 100 percent of the ticket sales, sometimes even 105 percent.”
For an opening concert night, the operation ran super smoothly. Waitstaff was plentiful, attentive and knowledgeable about the wines, not so much about the food. The enterprise has actually been open with food and beverage service for a week, both in its upstairs, street-level Barrel Room and adjacent sidewalk patio and at a lower-level wine bar outward facing into a Fashion District promenade. There’s also a 150-seat performance space (“The Loft”) on street level with some good draws like Macy Gray on the way.
While longer tables (holding as many as 12) are set up perpendicular to the main stage, there’s ample aisle room to shift your seat at showtime. Sight lines are good, wherever, in the wide but shallow room layout. Windows into the adjacent shopping court are well-obscured by wine casks, though I found that bright white light spilling into the darkened concert room when patrons moved in/out through the entrance doors was a little distracting.
Some fine-tuning of the Meyer Sound system is needed, too. While the band had a warm and rich sound down front in the “select” and “premier” seating zones, Emmylou’s vocals weren’t quite as crisp as her longtime pal and Philly DJ legend Michael Tearson would have liked from even that vantage point. And this listener found the sound dry and vocals sometimes muffled in the elevated (three steps up) rear “mezzanine” — where a second set of speakers, maybe hung a mite too close to the ceiling, didn’t even appear to be on.