We’re in Philadelphia, several blocks north of Center City/Chinatown, north of the terrible Vine Street Expressway.

It’s a Mexican-Chinese fusion restaurant in…what do you think that building used to be? There’s an obvious hint, but also something that looks like a hint but isn’t.

Here you go:

That round front rotunda to the right of the garage doors is not original, even though it resembles some old auto-garage architecture!

Here’s the building after the Jiffy Lube closed; it sat like this for about a decade, vacant.

It’s always fun to see a building creatively reused, and to see the return of street life in a vacant property.

A little bit about the restaurant:

The kitchen at La Chinesca serves the egg roll in a puddle of green aguachile — which sounds stupid, yes (serving anything fried and crispy on anything wet is never a good idea), but it isn’t stupid, because the bottom of the egg roll gets squishy and the top stays crisp. Because the bottom soaks up all the sharp heat of that chili juice and carries it throughout. Because once you’ve taken the first bite and tasted how well the two flavors work together, you get it. You get La Chinesca.

It shouldn’t work, but it does, this fusion of Chinese-American and Mexican cuisines with a little Southern California swagger….

This is a dream cuisine, an ever-changing menu full of Sichuan chilies, Chinese long beans, flinty mezcal and fatty tacos, all served in the shell of an old gas station in a neighborhood that has never seen anything quite like it. It’s fiction. It’s a figment. It’s fantasy La Chinesca is selling.

These types of restaurants are very difficult to execute, I think, because the unique fusion dishes have to shine on their own. Not being able to compare them to the version from the joint down the street puts more pressure on the chef. D.C. is full of trendy restaurants that sound really cool on paper but just (in my opinion) end up feeling overpriced and overhyped. Unfortunately, this one is three hours away, because otherwise, I’d definitely give it a try!

Related Reading:

The Yugo in Yugoslavia

Doomed Restaurants

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