Philadelphia

17 May 2024

The last ten miles into Philadelphia take as long as the previous eighty. I find my way into the university area of the city to meet Gary. He was in Florida at the beginning of this tour, and has come out to take a look at Philadelphia and Washington. Two cities neither of us have visited.

The critical subject of a dinner reservation was addressed weeks earlier by Richard. He recommended we go Lebanese at Suraya.  Not that he’s been, but on the basis that it is so popular, he’s never been able to get a table. It regularly features as #1 or #2 on informed lists (ie not TripAdvisor) of Best Restaurants in Philadelphia.

Finding the location in Fishtown requires a mile walk. The Human Robot craft ale bar is at about the half-way point. While I’m getting the beers, Gary has met Verna who’s having a cigarette outside.

Verna’s a local entrepreneur who built a successful business around the concept of food trucks. Her company provided a pop-up dinner option for bars, in and around the city, that wanted to offer food one or two days a week, but did not have a kitchen. In her spare time, Verna used to race Ducati’s until a major spill put paid to that. A redoubtable and authoritative character in every respect, Verna confirms Suraya as “a well oiled-machine and always a special treat”, but is alarmed by the route we plan to walk there by.

Philadelphia is a city that goes from charmingly-quaint to life-threatening, block-to-block. Again, the opioid crisis is the route of the problem according to our local expert. So we skirt the area ahead of us, and follow Verna’s route through neighbourhoods that East London estate agents would no doubt describe as “vibrant” or “colourful” but are still two we mince through briskly.

The entrance to Surayeh is modest but opens up inside, Tardis-like, to include laterally adjacent properties and has a huge open bar to the rear.

The weekend menu is a no-choice selection of six good-size mezze between us, ala-carte mains and a couple of shareable deserts to polish things off. At $90 a head, it provides a good foundation for a toppy bill that we build on with a  couple of cocktails, a ’proper’ bottle of Chateau Musar, a 1998, from the five vintages they have available. With the mezze, we have glasses of an elusive white Musar made from Viognier, Vermentino and Chardonnay grapes.

Even without letting the bill get completely out of hand, as we did, Suraya is expensive but simple perfection comes at a high price. Like all Levantine cuisine, it’s refreshingly unmessed with and just relies on the freshest ingredients combined with careful, loving preparation.

Tellingly, we scoff the lot. And easily too, leaving without feeling remotely Mr. Creosoteish, and looking forward to seeing the city tomorrow. The forecast is fine, so we plan to take a tourist bus to see as much of the city as possible in the day we have. As well as visiting Independence Hall and taking a look at the nearby Liberty Bell.

18 May 2024

The steady plop of heavy raindrops on Saturday morning is accompanied by a weather forecast only offering light relief in the late afternoon.

Overnight, Verna has emailed a recommended agenda for the day including one of the oldest and biggest festivals, the 9th Street Italian Festival, and a recommendation to check out the greased pole competition. The Bok Bar for a drink at sunset is also on the list as this has a spectacular view of the city from the roof of an old vocational school. All of this looks highly optimistic as, after a light, celestial waterboarding, we take the subway downtown to Independence Hall.

The subway stations reek of piss. In a valiant but misguided attempt to placate the travelling public, the transport authority are thoughtfully piping some ghastly, classical music that Shazam identifies as “Jeux, poème dansé” by Debussy, as interpreted by François-Xavier Roth and the London Symphony Orchestra.

I don’t normally bother to find out what classical music is as, to me, it’s all very “Meh” but this was so pointlessly meandering and offensive to the ear, I needed to know who was responsible. According to Shazam, only eleven other people have been sufficiently interested, which is probably the more damning indictment.

The Liberty Bell is of enormous symbolic importance to most Americans. Today, importantly to the rest of us tourists, it’s inside.

The place the bell takes in American history is well-chronicled in the Visitor Centre where the queue snakes through to where it now hangs. As a Brit, reading about the exhibits, it speaks volumes for the American people that there does not seem to be a shred of animosity towards Great Britain as a nation, despite having to kick us out with the help of the French, after some truly atrocious behaviour.

This is reasonable after two hundred and fifty years, given that all active participants are long since departed. But such a conciliatory tone is rarely the norm these days. Witness the current major conflicts where all combatants or, more pointedly, their supposed ‘leaders’ have an egotistical interest in prolonging the misery, refuse to draw a line under history, won’t allow solutions to emerge from dialogue or reconciliation to run its natural course.

We clamber aboard a tour bus. The guide battles with the elements valiantly, rattling through her commentary at break-neck speed, as if this will make the whole miserable experience end faster, so she can go home. It might also be because she has to keep telling the uncomprehending, sodden tourists on the upper deck to keep their umbrellas down as this contravenes some obscure city bylaw. She kept apologising for the weather, wailing that the last few years have all been like this.

You can argue about the causes until you’re blue in the face but the casual, empirical evidence is undeniable - both personal and recounted - the climate really has changed. At one of the many BMW dealerships I’ve visited, one person remarked that the riding season is now three months maximum across the US, albeit those three-month stretches are different, depending on the region. The weather is just too unpredictable and violent outside of this window to plan any extended trips.

Eventually, we give up on the bus tour as we can’t see anything and traffic noise on the rain-lashed streets means we can’t make sense of the narrative. Drenched like a couple of ageing sewer rats, we limp back to the hotel, grumbling like the pair of tragic, bitter old queens we must resemble.

I don’t think I’m being fair on Philadelphia as we saw it under lousy conditions but it all seemed a bit drab and provincial. Aside from the bell and the hall, it just looked like another 20th-century American city, complete with a clapped-out Macy’s, now routed that the internet has laid waste to the concept of a ‘Department Store”.

As a city, if it was en route to somewhere else, I would like to see it under different meteorological conditions but…

The conclusion I’m coming to is that American cities mix worse with motorcycles than European ones do, and they are bad enough. So US cities have got to be potentially magical to warrant a dedicated visit that is not part of a motorcycle tour, given the distances and costs involved. 

Thankfully, the rain abated by the evening and we struck out in search of National Mechanics,  a pub suggested by Verna in an incongruous neo-classical building. It’s on 3rd Street, so an easy walk through the fastidiously preserved Historic District between South Street and the Delaware River for dinner at an unpretentious local Italian restaurant.

The rain-washed streets now seem clean and refreshed, and the sheen from reflected street lamps on the cobbles is really rather lovely. It’s strange how much better the world looks after a couple of pints and a few glasses of wine.