A Center City office building has opened a restaurant complete with bar — but it’s for tenants only

This is not exactly the golden age of the downtown office building. Even with return-to-office mandates, vacancies remain high and real estate values have plummeted.

To address that, building owners are engaged “in what we call the amenities race,” said Joshua Sloan, Philadelphia-based international managing director of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., a real estate services company. “Everybody’s got to have a gym, everybody’s got to have a coffee shop.” Landlords are tacking on services such as dry-cleaning pickup, while tenants themselves are adding features to encourage workers to hang more at the office; one Philadelphia daily newspaper, for example, recently put a vintage pinball machine in the break room.

“I joke sometimes that I used to be a real estate guy and now I’m a summer camp director,” said Henry Gross, whose family owns One Penn Center, the 20-story Art Deco tower over Suburban Station at 16th Street and JFK Boulevard. Ownership did the usual: adding a fitness center, swapping in operable windows for fresh air, and renovating the lounge, whose balcony overlooks City Hall. Its 90% occupancy rate is about 10 percentage points greater than the Center City average, according to recent figures from CBRE.

This month, One Penn Center is opening a private restaurant, with beer and wine taps, accessible only to the building’s workers — who typically number about 1,500 a day — and their guests.

Neither company cafeteria (such as Ralph’s at the Comcast Center) nor public restaurant (such as any number of restaurant tenants in buildings), Station Brake Lounge on the 17th floor is a first in Center City, say local real estate observers.

Shanghai-born chef Aihua “Flower” Zhou offers a healthful, daily-changing menu: smoothies, vegetable salads, quinoa salads, baked salmon, dumplings, roasted butternut squash with lentils, garlic butter shrimp served with baby spinach. There’s no deep-fryer, and prices are low by Center City standards, with entrees under $15, as one might expect from a restaurant partly subsidized by the building.

Zhou likes to cook healthfully. “We had this early conversation with Flower and said, ‘All this great stuff you’re doing is wonderful, but you’ve got to have the basics, like a tuna sandwich,’” Gross said.

“I said, ‘I can do a tuna salad sandwich, but there will not be any mayo in my kitchen,’” Zhou said. She mixes tuna with onions, pickles, and her own hummus.

No deep-fryer, no mayo. Not a lot of sugar, either.

“This started off a year and a half ago being just a place to hang out — a couple of microwaves, bring your own food,” Gross said during a recent tour. “And then we said, why not do a restaurant?” The dining room was expanded and a full kitchen was installed, taking nearly 5,000 square feet. Management also bought a liquor license for wine, beer, and cider ordered through a self-pour system. Including equipment and ventilation system, Gross said, the project cost $1.2 million.

Food can be ordered on the web, through a kiosk, or via the building’s app. Orders can be delivered or eaten in the lounge. Aside from breakfast and lunch, Gross said, tenants can book the space, and the building itself will host events. Gross said the restaurant may be opened to the public sometime in the future.

“Everything’s fresh and the Asian dishes are awesome,” said Patrick Trunfio, an electrical engineer with Hatzel & Buehler, a union contractor who works in the building. “And the prices are low for downtown. You should be able to get lunch, drink, and dessert, maybe a fruit salad, for under $20.”

The other day, Sloan, the JLL executive, was at Station Brake with prospective tenants and decided to take home a piece of chocolate mousse cake. “I’m sitting there and [Flower] says, ‘Who are you going home to?’ And I said, ‘My wife.’ She said, ‘Here another piece for her.’ So now I have two pieces of chocolate cake, and that’s the highlight of my day.”