PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The Divine Lorraine Hotel on North Broad Street has been buzzing with business recently: A cafe just opened, and three more establishments are underway.
Aside from Cicala restaurant already stationed in the hotel, there’s The Daily, Broad Hall, Foundation, and Annex.
The first to open was The Daily, a coffee shop.
“Natalie Maronski, she was on ‘Top Chef.’ Natalie’s the executive chef (of The Daily),” said Robert Del Femine, one of three managing partners. “The third wheel is our director of operations who’s doing the day-to-day running of everything, and that’s Brian Kane, who has worked with CookNSolo at great restaurants like Zahav, Abe Fisher, Dizengoff.
“We really try to do traditional coffee drinks and some specialty items (at The Daily).”
Broad Hall will debut next, which will be an ever-changing pop-up event space, according to Del Femine.
Then there’s Foundation, which will be a bar with a recording studio inside.
“In the ’20s during Prohibition, it was a speakeasy with a hatch from Broad Street,” he said. “It’s been closed for 70-plus years, and we were able to get approval from the city and the Historical Commission to open it. So we made it look like another Broad Street subway exit.”
The fourth establishment in the Divine Lorraine will be Annex.
“What we’re going to do with that one is really have an all-day restaurant,” he said.
While they plan to open Annex a couple of months from now, Del Femine said they could be using the hotel courtyard for service as early as November.
For more details, listen to the KYW Newsradio original podcast What’s Cooking on the RADIO.COM app.