Over in Cherry Hill, Craig LaBan tracked the transformation of the former Cherry Tree Diner into Greek restaurant Onassis and found a “purist ode to Greek seafood.” He wants you to come out and support:
Yes, these fish can be expensive - $18 to $26 a pound - but the large ones, from 1.6 to 2-plus pounds, easily feed two. And you’re paying for real quality and a rare selection of special fish. It’s a proposition that seems to work comfortably at Estia, the estiatorion beside the Academy of Music that is the region’s most elegant Greek fish palace. Whether it can work in Cherry Hill is an open question. This is more of a Cheesecake Factory kind of crossroads, a nexus of big-box stores and chain-restaurant feed halls, where a lack of beeper-toting customers waiting hours to be seated for glorified chicken fingers can only be looked upon with suspicion.What is something genuine doing here? The beeper hordes must wonder.Konidaris and Papougenis are doing their best to swim against the tide, but it isn’t easy. There is a large Greek church nearby, St. Thomas, that fills the back dining room with occasional church-lady banquets. Otherwise, the tables have been sparsely occupied during my visits.
Meanwhile, an old-school North Philly seafood joint, Kurth’s Seafood was profiled. Open since 1936, the restaurant has seen the decline of the neighborhood but is still around:
There was much more in North Philadelphia, circa 1936, the year Jacob Kurth began selling his 35-cent fish platters (fried flounder, hand-cut fries, and choice of cole slaw or potato or macaroni salad) to workers who’d line up outside. Places were making burlap bags and lamp shades and Stetson hats and Phillies cigars and Dawn Donuts and cornmeal mush and mayonnaise.[…]So much else has changed. The block-long trolley works is sealed up like a tomb. Where the bindery stood, grassy lots are fenced (anomalously, with wood horse-country fences) to keep out short dumpers. Elestine Ashlock plants flowers at the fences’ edge.But Kurth’s endures, its witch’s-hat turret askew, its sign no longer lit, the white-tile walls chipping, its exhaust hoods looming like undersea beasts. Friday nights they still line up outside, eager for fried oysters and shrimp. (Forget phoning. They take the phone off the hook when the place gets busy.)
Meanwhile, an old-school North Philly seafood joint, Kurth’s Seafood was profiled. Open since 1936, the restaurant has seen the decline of the neighborhood but is still around:
