Mike Solomonov and Steve Cook will open Jaffa Bar, an Israeli-inspired oyster bar, this fall
Jaffa Bar will "take the tradition of the Philadelphia oyster house and look at it through the lens of Israel," said Steve Cook, a partner in the Kensington oyster bar and restaurant.
Mike Solomonov and Steve Cook, best known for Zahav, Dizengoff, Goldie, and Federal Donuts, are opening their long-awaited Kensington restaurant — an oyster bar they say will combine the flavors of Israel with the spirit of Philadelphia.
Cook said Jaffa Bar is likely to open in early fall.
Jaffa, kept under wraps for more than a year, is CookNSolo’s takeover of the former 19th-century firehouse at 1625 N. Howard St., at the cross streets of Cecil B. Moore Avenue and Turner Street. It’s a block from a Goldie location and their event facility, Lilah, and four blocks north of their skewer house Laser Wolf, amid a Fishtown-Kensington restaurant cluster that includes Suraya, Kalaya, LMNO, and the International Bar.
Why an oyster house? “With everything we’ve done so far, we never really got to work super-extensively with fish and seafood,” Cook told The Inquirer. “We thought it would be interesting to take the tradition of the Philadelphia oyster house and look at it through the lens of Israel and the flavors and ingredients that we work with a lot.”
Cook said the vibe would be “cozy, like a neighborhood bar.” Boxwood Architects, which designed most of CookNSolo’s current restaurants, is working with 5,000 square feet on two floors of the Romanesque revival-style brick building with a dramatic front fire tower. There will be, all told, 120 seats, with a 10-seat oyster bar, 15-seat first-floor bar, and an 11-seat second-floor bar.
Two CookNSolo veterans will oversee Jaffa as partners: manager Kailey Jenkins and chef Andrew Henshaw, both instrumental in creating Laser Wolf, the kebab house. Ryan Mulholland, CookNSolo’s director of operations and a former director at Vernick Food & Drink, is also a partner.
Jaffa Bar’s menu will feature seafood dishes such as oysters with passion fruit mignonette, yellowtail pastrami, and mussels escabeche in pine nut tarator, as well as bar food like fried chicken thighs with amba honey mustard, and the Jaffa burger, topped with green chiles and schug mayo.
The cocktail program will be designed by bar manager Sean Byrne, previously bar manager of Dizengoff and Abe Fisher, paying homage to Jaffa, the Mediterranean port city known for its citrus. The Jaffa Orange will be a riff on the Orange Julius, for example. The wine list, designed by CookNSolo beverage director Steven McAllister, will focus on natural wines as well as wines from across the Levant.
CookNSolo is partnered with Boka Group on a restaurant called Jaffa at the Hoxton hotel in Brooklyn — along with locations of K’Far and Laser Wolf — but the two Jaffas are unrelated, with different concepts. CookNSolo will next open a Miami Beach restaurant called Aviv at the 1 Hotel South Beach this fall.