Bastia, from chef Tyler Akin, will be an all-day cafe in a new Fishtown hotel

The chef, now at Le Cavalier in Wilmington, will open Bastia, a Mediterranean restaurant in the Anna & Bel boutique hotel in Fishtown, this winter.

Sample dishes from Bastia, the new restaurant from chef Tyler Akin (clockwise from top right): burrata with blood orange, pomelo, hazelnuts, dark chocolate; clams with fregola, wild fennel, savory; amberjack crudo with whipped cannellini, finger lime, clementine; veal tail with olives, vin de Corse; ratatouille with Calabrian chili, grilled sourdough, marjoram; gnocchetti with green garlic, fava beans, pea shoots, bottarga; tuna tartare with pickled peppers, pane carasau; skewers with monkfish, artichoke barigoule, cucumber yogurt, piadina; and grilled lobster (center) in saffron shellfish stew, pastis, fresh chickpeas.Read moreStuart Goldenberg

by Michael Klein

Published Nov. 28, 2023, 9:20 a.m. ET

More than three years after transforming the regal Green Room at Wilmington’s Hotel Du Pont into the modern brasserie Le Cavalier, chef Tyler Akin has a new restaurant on the way in Philadelphia.

Akin is partnering with Foyer Project on Bastia, a Mediterranean-inspired all-day cafe, opening inside the forthcoming Anna & Bel boutique hotel in Fishtown. He and his partners are saying “late winter” for the restaurant’s opening.

The hotel’s historic property at Susquehanna Avenue and Belgrade Street, portions of which date from the late 18th century, was, for many years, Penn Asylum for Indigent Widows and Single Women. It was a retirement home when it closed in September 2020.

Akin said Bastia will have 60 to 70 seats in the dining room, plus about 15 bar seats and 25 to 30 outdoor seats, weather permitting.

Philadelphia’s Fishtown and Kensington neighborhoods are seeing a spike in boutique hotels, as The Inquirer reported in March. “It’s exciting that there’s all this momentum, interest, and hopefully demand in that neighborhood for this kind of property,” Akin said last week.

Bastia will mark a return to Fishtown for Akin, who opened his first restaurant, Stock, in 2014 on Girard Avenue near Marlborough Street after working at Zahav. “It’s incredible how far [Fishtown] has come, and I’m excited to be back in the mix there,” he said.

Akin went on to open a second Stock location, near Rittenhouse Square, which closed during the pandemic. He also co-owned the now-closed Res Ipsa in Center City.

Bastia is named after the Corsican port, to which Akin has traveled previously. “Ultimately, we were trying to find a name that was appealing to the ear but evoked some of that maritime Mediterranean tradition that we’re going to be looking for in the cuisine,” he said.

The restaurant will feature a vegetable- and seafood-driven menu, using seasonal Mid-Atlantic ingredients, low-intervention wines from the coastal Mediterranean, and session cocktails and N/A drinks, with an emphasis on spritzes and aperitifs. Akin said service would start in the morning with coffee and breakfast and segue to lunch and dinner. There will be weekend brunch.

It’s being designed to be “a bit luxurious with marble countertops and bar tops, but definitely not a tablecloth sort of situation,” Akin said. “We want it to feel lived in.”

Some of the century-old plaster work, for example, is “imperfect in some places,” he said. “We’re going to be working with that and using paint finishes that lean into that imperfect state that it’s in. Our goal is for it to feel like a place that has been there for some time. I think it’s important, as it is a historic property, that we don’t just kind of feel like a shiny orb on day one.”

Foyer Project is building Anna & Bel with 50 apartment-style guest rooms ranging from studios to two-bedrooms. Some rooms overlook an interior courtyard. There will be a heated pool, lounge/co-working space, bar, treatment room, and sauna.