Fiore relocates to Kensington as a cafe with pastries and sandwiches

It’s only four miles from Queen Village to East Kensington, but there is now a world of difference for chefs Justine MacNeil and Ed Crochet.

Last spring, the married couple closed Fiore Fine Foods, their 4-year-old restaurant on Front Street that, at its peak, was open from breakfast through late night. This week, after a month of soft openings and pop-ups, they’ve opened at 2413 Frankford Ave., in a fast-growing section of town also home to Forin Cafe, Martha, St. Oner’s, and Brewery ARS.

The move from a full-service, 78-seat restaurant with bar to a 20-seat cafe has come with abbreviations of both the concept (daytime only, Friday to Monday and, soon, Thursday to Monday) and the name (it’s now simply Fiore).

The menu, still Italian in spirit, is much more streamlined: MacNeil’s baked items, some sweet and some savory, such as bomboloni, tortas, cornetti, ricciarelli, tomato pie, and schiacciate, plus Crochet’s decadent sandwiches (on MacNeil’s breads), such as braised brisket with garlicky broccoli rabe, and thin-sliced spiced pork topped with giardiniera and Fontina cheese.

Fiore opened in early 2019 to acclaim at the short-lived Kanella South, which previously was the Village Belle and Frederick’s.

The pandemic shuttered in-person dining , and they instead started making quarts of soup (with the proceeds given to staff) and pints of gelato for pickups, which paved the path to dinners to-go. Pastry and breakfast sandwiches returned, followed by the return of dinner service. Then came the second shutdown, which they said gave them the push to think outside of the box of what a restaurant is.

Then came their baby son, born in February 2022.

Moving to daytime hours, MacNeil said, “will help a lot of team members and give everyone a better work-life balance, allowing them to do stuff with their families, which is just kind of impossible with a p.m. restaurant.”

“The pandemic forced us to focus on what we were doing,” Crochet said. The couple said they were open to scheduling occasional dinners.

Crochet, who grew up in Maryland and Italy and attended L’Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda, and MacNeil, who grew up in Jackson, N.J., and graduated from the French Culinary Institute, met at Craft, one of Tom Colicchio’s restaurants. They both worked for Colicchio until MacNeil went to work at Del Posto and Crochet left to work for Starr Restaurants at Storico on the Upper West Side, and later Rat’s, the fine-dining restaurant at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton Township, N.J.

Their goal was to buy a home and run a business in New York, but when Starr Catering wanted Crochet to move to Philly, the couple realized that they could buy a home and run a business more affordably here.

Just as they did in Queen Village, their goal is to serve their neighbors. And themselves.

Though the restaurant’s hours are shorter, “Justine and I are both naturally inclined to just work 85, 90 hours a week,” Crochet said. “But I think that we have a kid now and we want to spend some time with him.”