"[at Beau Monde] you'd be hard pressed to find a single false note."

Going Out

Over at the unassuming creperie Beau Monde, situated not far from Philly's famous Italian Market and Antiques Row, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single false note. Partners Jim Caiola, the manager, and David Salama, the chef, have created a handsome neighborhood place where harmony reigns

The inspiration to open a creperie didn't come out of nowhere. Caiola's aunt and uncle (who was born in Brittany, the northwestern French region renowned for its crepes) own a creperie in Chicago. Caiola and Salama journeyed to Brittany to study the art of the crepe. Although the Bretons may be the world's foremost practitioners of crepe making, their fillings consist of about a thousand-and-one variations on the ham/egg/cheese theme. "We wanted to go a little bit further," Salama says. We doctored up the concept, but we stayed pretty 'traditional with the batter ingredients and the way the crepes are folded."             The savory buckwheat flour crepes can have fillings as spare as mushrooms or as complicated as shrimp, spinach, roasted leeks and seafood sauce. At brunch, I tried a stupendous savory crepe stuffed with chicken hash, sunny-side-up eggs and crème fraîche and a wonderful sweet wheat flour crepe gilded with nothing more than lemon and sugar

The new restaurateurs were a bit nervous about the reaction of what Caiola calls the "post-Magic-Pan generation." judging by the positive response they have received, they need not have worried.

GETTING THERE
BEAU MONDE
624 S. Sixth St.
215-592-0656