after dinner sneeze

t says:  sr, ha, and j came to visit us for my bday last month, and I chose to go to Percy Street BBQ.  Now, I didn’t choose to go there because it’s the absolute best food in the city.  I chose to go there because it is our Father’s Day tradition!  As I’ve mentioned before, Percy Street is probably my dad’s favorite restaurant in Philly.  It’s pretty spacious, it has large television screens, there’s a lot of tasty meat, he gets to use his fingers, and he loves the root beer float dessert.  This year, though, things are different … it turns out that Percy Street is no longer doing it up like before – gone are the platters of meat – now things are served with accompaniments so that the dishes more resemble dishes that you could find at a normal restaurant.  For example, the pork belly entree is now a sandwich with accompaniments that emulate a banh mi … it’s no longer a few hunks of pork belly and some sliced white bread.  So here are the plusses and minuses of what they’re doing:

Minuses:  1) The above is the free “starter” course, kinda like bread for the table.  As a note, crackers and cheese that has the consistency of squeezy cheese should never start off any meal, ever …  2) The Lockhart is changed forever – pork belly is NO LONGER INCLUDED, thus meaning that my family will never order the Lockhart ever again (*sadface*).  3) There’s no more whitebread.  This is saddening.  Now Percy Street is operating more like a real restaurant and less like a meatery (is that a real thing? i have no idea).  This is dangerous because I never thought of Percy Street is a real “restaurant” before …

plus: So I can only think of one “plus” and that is that because things are going to be classed up, you have access to dishes like the above: wondrous pork belly, maple syrup, egg yolk, and toast that was so divine, I would have traded in my main sandwich for another two of these (maybe a sandwich made of the above concoction?).  It is true – O’Shea can cook for sure and showed Philly back when she was at Marigold – I hope that the menu, now that it’s more than just meat, is going to show off her panache like this.

bonus photo: as you can see, dishes are more composed, but now you can appreciate the various pickled items (g had a pickled watermelon rind that was quite delicious!)

Overall, the family and I are shocked about the changes at Percy Street.  In general, I liked a lot of what we tasted, but we still missed the pork belly in the Lockhart, which was a super-critical meat for our family.  While Percy Street will probably still be the place we go for Father’s Day, I do have to confess that without the Lockhart, it misses that little bit of “fun” that it used to have.  Maybe by next year, it’ll be back!