Pennsylvania’s restaurant scene was already absorbing another painful round of local closures when two more distinctive gathering places reached the end this month—joining a South Philadelphia landmark that closed late last year.
The losses include a 15-year Philadelphia cantina, the restaurant inside Lancaster’s most unusual independent cinema and a pizzeria that survived for nearly a century.
La Calaca Feliz in Philadelphia
La Calaca Feliz served its last meals Saturday, August 1, after 15 years in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood.
Brian Sirhal and Tim Spinner, both veterans of chef José Garces’ restaurant organization, opened the contemporary Mexican restaurant at 2321 Fairmount Ave., near the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The restaurant later became known as Cantina “Calaca” Feliz, but the colorful dining room, lively patio and neighborhood personality remained familiar.
Customers visited for tacos, enchiladas, nachos, guacamole and handcrafted margaritas. Its brunches and happy hours made it an especially versatile gathering place. It could host a first date one evening, a family meal the next afternoon and drinks with coworkers later in the week.
The restaurant also helped advance Philadelphia’s approach to contemporary Mexican cooking. Philadelphia Inquirer critic Craig LaBan awarded it three bells and credited it with pushing the evolution of contemporary Mexican cooking in the city forward.
Sirhal said the closure came when the restaurant’s lease expired. Ownership has expressed hope that the Cantina spirit could reappear in another location, and neither owner is leaving the business: Sirhal still runs the original Cantina Feliz in Ambler, while Spinner operates Taqueria Amor and Riptide Tavern in Manayunk. But no new Fairmount home has been announced.
The restaurant at Zoetropolis Cinema Stillhouse in Lancaster
Zoetropolis Cinema Stillhouse served its final restaurant meals August 2, after eight years of dining at 112 N. Water St.
Zoetropolis was never a conventional restaurant. It combined food with an independent movie theater, Lancaster-made spirits, live music, special events and an intensely creative downtown atmosphere. The theater itself is older than the restaurant: Zoetropolis debuted in 2013 at Mulberry Centre on West James Street before moving to Water Street in 2018, where it expanded with the 60-seat restaurant and a distillery.
Customers could order dinner and drinks before watching a foreign film, cult classic, documentary or locally produced movie. The restaurant also provided a gathering place for musicians, filmmakers, artists and customers who wanted an alternative to the typical multiplex experience.
The restaurant portion has now closed, but Zoetropolis itself has not disappeared. In announcing the change, the business said it would renew its focus on the theater and its Lancaster Distilleries brand, which has a stand at Lancaster Central Market and a tasting room in Columbia. The partners eventually plan to move the stills—currently housed in the restaurant space—to that Columbia tasting room. Lancaster native and “Chicago Fire” star Taylor Kinney is among the investors.
That distinction provides some relief, although it also changes what made Zoetropolis special. Dinner, cocktails and an independent film once fit together under the same roof without requiring customers to travel elsewhere between activities.
The remaining business will continue supporting Lancaster’s arts community, but the full dinner-and-a-movie version of Zoetropolis is now gone.
Marra’s in Philadelphia
Marra’s, widely considered Philadelphia’s oldest pizzeria, closed Sunday, November 30, after 98 years on East Passyunk Avenue—one day before the sale of its black-and-white-tiled building closed.
Salvatore Marra arrived at Ellis Island in 1921, and his wife, Chiarina, followed shortly after. The couple, who had grown up baking pizza in Naples, opened their first shop in 1924 at Eighth and Christian streets, then bought a former butcher shop at 1734 E. Passyunk Ave. in 1927 and moved, dismantling the oven brick by brick and rebuilding it there with bricks ordered from Naples. Generations of the Marra and D’Adamo families kept it operating.
That oil-fired brick oven became the heart of the business. Customers returned for thin-crust pizza, pasta, red-sauce classics and the feeling of stepping into a restaurant that belonged to an earlier version of the neighborhood. Over the decades the guest list ran from Frank Sinatra and John Wayne to John Travolta and Conan O’Brien.
Marra’s survived the Great Depression, changing dining trends, suburbanization, recessions and the pandemic. What it could not survive was parking. Grandson Mario D’Adamo Jr. told the Inquirer that parking was the biggest killer—the restaurant had 160 seats and no lot of its own, and small restaurants can absorb that where large ones cannot. The oven was also nearing the end of its roughly century-long life, with the interior collapsing and the bricks pulverizing under the flame.
The building, which the Marras bought in 1927 and had listed for several years, sold to Dan Tsao, owner of the Chinatown Szechuan restaurant EMei, who plans a second location in the space.
The family has said it is exploring a new home for Marra’s, ideally one with better parking. For now, though, East Passyunk has lost one of its last direct links to the Italian American immigrant era that built the Avenue.
La Calaca Feliz, Zoetropolis and Marra’s could hardly have been more different.
One was a colorful Mexican cantina. One combined a restaurant with independent film and live music. One served brick-oven pizza and Italian food for almost a century.
What they shared was the ability to become part of their neighborhoods’ identities. Pennsylvania can fill their empty spaces, but replacing those identities will be considerably harder.
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