LUHV brings vegan food, including dinners to go, to a South Philadelphia corner
Silvia Lucci's new location sells hot and cold foods as well as prepared foods that can be popped into the microwave oven.
South Philadelphia, the birthplace of the hoagie and cheesesteak, is dotted with sandwich shops, pizzerias, and bodegas.
As for corner stores selling vegan food, most of it organic, served in 100% compostable containers?
Not so much.
When customers at LUHV Food’s deli stand at Reading Terminal Market requested a second location in Center City, owners Daniel and Silvia Lucci and their children looked beyond 19103 and 19107, into the Point Breeze neighborhood.
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They opened a LUHV Bistro last weekend in a former dentist’s office at 19th and Ellsworth Streets.
“We wanted to bring healthy food to a city neighborhood,” said Silvia Lucci, LUHV’s matriarch.
The menu borrows from the LUHV Bistro in Hatboro and the LUHV counter inside Weavers Way Co-Op in Ambler. There are made-to-order sandwiches, soups, wraps, and salads for dine-in and takeout — all plant-based and mainly nut- and gluten-free.
What’s different at the new Point Breeze location is its market-like approach. Besides the counter, there’s a fridge with packaged foods, such as one-pound containers of LUHV’s chick’n salad and kale-lentil potato salad and such vegan deli-style “meats” as ham, capicola, corned beef, and bacon. It’s sort of the corner deli approach. “We thought that you maybe might want to just buy the bacon and make a sandwich on your own bread,” Lucci said.
This LUHV location, which also has dining rooms on the ground and second floors, also offers complete meals to go from a freezer case. Among the microwavable varieties priced at $12 are saffron risotto with crab cakes, Mediterranean pasta, and cheese ravioli with puttanesca sauce.
LUHV frozen products such as the 8-ounce “meat” packs, which are sold in larger grocery stores such as Mom’s Organic Market and Whole Foods, are there, too.
She calls the approach “a mix of Panera and Wawa.”
The takeout packaging is fully recyclable; LUHV is a partner with rePurpose Global, an organization that champions ethical waste management. Unlike most similar eateries, LUHV serves food for dine-in service on washable plates.
The Lucci family, immigrants from Argentina, started in the restaurant business in Bucks County a quarter-century ago — first with Cafe Con Leche in Newtown and then Patagonia in Richboro.
After Silvia Lucci suffered a stroke in 2012, her husband the chef set out to make vegan foods to aid in her recovery. Among David Lucci’s dishes was “energy soup,” combining kale, quinoa, beans, seaweed, and flax seed.
Silvia Lucci said she is now in excellent health.
The family pivoted away from those restaurants and opened LUHV in a Hatboro storefront in 2016. LUHV started producing frozen foods — in particular the energy soup as well as a vegan burger made of black beans, plantains, and roasted poblano — onsite. Recently, LUHV expanded its wholesale operation and opened a 6,000-square-foot kitchen in Bucks County.
To add interest to the second-floor dining room, Silvia Lucci commissioned artist Jilly Juniper to create three painted doors, which are hung against a wall.
“This is a story I tell. When you come into veganism, you come through one of those three doors — environmental door, the health door, or the ethical door,” she said. Behind each door is a message explaining the impact of a vegan diet.
“The idea is that anybody should have access to these kinds of foods without having to go to a fancy market,” she said.