erasingclouds

Such a great time this weekend - nice to meet everyone! Sometime I'll maybe gather some more specific observations/memories on the two days I participated (Thursday and Saturday), but everyone else seems to be doing a good job of recounting. I'm enjoying seeing the pictures, wishing I had brought a camera along. Saturday was quite the feast - I keep thinking about that cheese array alone, not to mention everything else.

Vadouvan, I thought your account of eating at Bar Ferdinand was great because of how specific you were, down to the ingredient-level. It made me wish my post was better actually, that I had the memory and attention (plus closer knowledge of Spanish food) needed to give a more detailed account. So please let the criticism of it slide off you, and don't hesitate to write accounts, good or bad, that are that descriptive in the future, because it was definitely useful. It'd be a different thing if you'd just made some blanket negative statement without backing it up, but your complaints were as specific as can be.

I was there opening night as well, and agree with this assesment (though I havent been to Amada yet, so I can't compare). I liked the atmosphere of Bar Ferdinand a whole lot; a very snazzy looking bar and the other rooms were quite comfortable. And the service was good, especially considering it was opening night. The food we had was good but not great. Between me and my wife we had six tapas, I dont know that I can remember what they all were: tortilla, mariscos, some sort of asparagus flan, some sort of fried potatos, the cheese plate, and...something else, something with tuna. Everything was good, the tortilla was probably my least favorite, not as good as I've had at tapas places in other cities, and my favorite might been the cheese plate, or the tuna dish that I cant quite remember. Oddly, at least two, and maybe three, of the dishes incorporated the same cream sauce in some small way, and the sauce wasnt especially distinctive. That was probably my biggest complaint, but it wasnt a very big complaint, especially since some of these tapas were only 3 or 4 dollars, and the most expensive was $8 (the cheese plate). Their house white wine was quite good for $2 a glass (a slightly smaller glass); I dont remember what the wine was. And their beer selection looked good too, fairly many on tap and in bottles, and cheap prices, many in the $3-4 range. So yeah, it seems like a nice place to hang out, more than a destination place for dinner, but I'm sure we'll be back.

It's clear you're getting plenty of Philly advice, but I still wanted to quickly mention one place that came to mind from the reference to "places where people that work in the city and make the city run eat". In West Philly there's a Pakistani restaurant called Kabobeesh. Its atmosphere is unique 'cause it's in a diner car, and the parking lot is always filled with taxis, especially late at night (they're open fairly late). Great, relatively cheap food - big kebabs of lamb, chicken, beef, etc.