Northern Liberties is getting a food hall, high-end restaurant, and a Brooklyn deli

As Northern Liberties swells with new apartment dwellers, its food and dining scene will get a large boost after developer Post Brothers signed three high-end restaurant operators for a total of 30,000 square feet of space.

The lion’s share of the space will be occupied by a food hall operated by Method Co., a Philadelphia-based hospitality company known locally for Wm. Mulherin’s Sons and Hiroki in Fishtown. Gertie, a modern deli that’s been making waves in Brooklyn, plans to open in 3,000 square feet. French-born chef Laurent Tourondel has agreed to lease 8,000 square feet for a high-end restaurant.

The opening is at least a year away, Post Brothers executives said Monday. They hope that their in-house general contractor will be able to speed construction.

“There are plenty of people with real disposable income in Philadelphia,” said Joshua Guelbart, Post Brothers’ co-chief operating officer. “These people live here, and they have money to burn, but there’s nowhere for them to go.”

In the last five years, as almost 6,000 new housing units have been permitted in the neighborhood, renewed attention has been brought to Northern Liberties’ uneven dining landscape. The neighborhood is just south and west of Fishtown and Kensington, whose dining options have expanded greatly in the last decade.

Together, the two restaurants and food hall could add culinary gravitas to Northern Liberties, whose options are mostly destinations with nightlife vibes such as Figo, Añejo, and El Camino Real. A high-end restaurant called SIN — as in “Steak Italian Nightlife” — is due to open this month across the street in the Beverly, a new 51-unit building.

This dramatic expansion of retail offerings is the latest addition to Piazza Alta, the sprawling complex where the Post Brothers built almost 697 high-end apartments units with plans for 434 more. The project is an expansion of the Piazza, the residential project developed by Bart Blatstein and most associated with Northern Liberties’ initial burst of new development almost 15 years ago.

Piazza Alta includes large swaths of public space, with many of the retail offerings fronting a plaza between Germantown Avenue and Second Street that ends at Hancock Street, a quick walk to the Girard station of SEPTA’s Market-Frankford Line.

That courtyard “is going to be the center of the universe in Northern Liberties,” Guelbart said. “My experience living in the city is that if my girlfriend and I don’t have real plans, we’ll just see what’s happening in Rittenhouse Square. That’s what we want it to be like here at any time of day.”

On board are Tourondel, whose posh BLT Restaurants, including Dune and L’Amico, are primarily located in New York and Florida; Nate Adler, the Wharton School alumnus who owns the Jewish-inspired Gertie and Gertrude in Brooklyn; and Method Co.

Post executives said that the concept of Tourondel’s restaurant had not been determined, but that it would be an American grill — “a place you can go to three times a week and you can have a big, broiled lobster or a steak or a burger, martini, etcetera,” Guelbart said. He also said that it may be divided into two spaces — perhaps one smaller concept of about 2,000 square feet with the bar and grill occupying the rest.

Method will operate a smaller restaurant as part of the 18,000-square-foot food hall, whose tenant list is not set. Method would oversee most but not all of the stalls, which will include a food retailer, Guelbart said, hopefully with a butcher.

“We really want to make sure this isn’t like a food court,” Guelbart said. “We want it to be a place where people go many different times, [and] it doesn’t compete with other restaurants that are here. We don’t want to cannibalize ourselves.”

Adler’s restaurant will be a second location of Gertie, his modern deli that offers contemporary spins on classic Jewish luncheonette fare. The original restaurant has been very successful in Brooklyn — despite tough times during the beginning of the pandemic — with drinks and sandwiches that are less gut-busting than such old-school counterparts as Katz’s or 2nd Ave Deli (or Famous 4th Street here at home).

Adler and his wife, Rachel Jackson, founded Gertie in February 2019 in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. The online food site Thrillist named it one of its best new restaurants that year. Adler, 34, got a taste for the restaurant business while a student at the University of Pennsylvania when he started a delivery restaurant called Kitchen at Penn.

“It’s a homecoming for him,” said Guelbart of Adler. “We knew him already. We really liked his product. And we thought it made sense. I mean, there’s just not enough places to get breakfast around here, or lunch.”

Anthony Scotland, Post’s vice president of marketing, said the food operators are weighted toward national restaurateurs partly because Piazza Alta itself is attracting many tenants from outside the region. Almost 60% of those renting at the new apartment complex are from outside Pennsylvania, he said.

“These aren’t just people that have been in Philly and know Philadelphia dining,” Scotland said. “In some ways, it’s almost a global audience.”