WIM Cafe Transforms: Forîn to Take Over with Indonesian-Inspired Menu

A latte from Forîn / Photograph by Mike Prince

Howdy, buckaroos! And welcome back to the weekly Foobooz food news round-up. With the holidays behind us and Valentine’s Day looming large on the industry calendar, we’ve just got lots of news to get through this week, including (but not limited to) a long-awaited opening announcement from Baby’s Kusina, more details on the reopening of Sonny’s, the 2025 Bark Bowl, a spicy collab for FedNuts, dim sum news from Chinatown, and an absolutely bonkers week for one Manayunk restaurant. So saddle up, and let’s kick things off this week with…

Forîn Gets a Third Location

Word just came down last week that the WIM Cafe space inside the Yowie Hotel on South Street will shortly be transformed into a new Forîn location. Partners Seth Kligerman, Kyle Horne, and Will Landicho acquired the space a few months back, but as of Friday, February 7th, it will officially become the first Forîn cafe outside of Fishtown/Kenzo.

Couple interesting things about this:

First, Klingerman, Horne and Landicho actually took over operations at WIM last year, but have been waiting until they and their team were settled before making the change official. The new Forîn will continue to be open seven days a week, starting at 7 a.m. (8 a.m. on the weekends), but it will now wear the green-and-white Forîn colors and vintage aesthetic going forward.

Second, once the place starts operating as a Forîn cafe, Indonesian-American chef Ariel Tobing (who took over as exec of the Forîn brand last March) will come in and lend his Southeast Asian flavors to the new menu. Tobing used to work for Musi and Kiki Aranita’s Poi Dog back in the day, and he’ll be doing a new menu of Indonesian-inspired quick breakfast options and beverages.

Also, the team looks like they’re really leaning into the whole community aspect of the Yowie/South Street vibe. Though there’s nothing on the books yet, they’re looking at “vendor pop-ups, chef takeovers, community runs, and more in the coming months.” All of which are good things, and all of which seem pretty much in line with the retail/experiential programming focus at Yowie.

And that all starts with the “release party” they’ve got planned for the grand opening on the 7th. Starting at 6 p.m., there’ll be music, food, and drinks done in collaboration with Aranita’s Poi Dog. Plus, vinyls for sale from Impressions Philadelphia, extended hours from the Yowie retail shop and more. Need more info? Get it right here. Or just show up. If nothing else, you know the coffee will be good.

Hey, Speaking of Poi Dog …

Farin di Vita’s Guava Cutlet Royale / Photograph by K.C. Tinari

A former cook and an opening-night party aren’t the only things that Kiki Aranita and the never-really-gone Poi Dog have cooking. She, along with her husband, chef Ari Miller, and Jason Okdeh, chef-owner of Farina di Vita in Queen Village, met at a party over the holidays and got to talking. Okdeh was there, dressed as South Philly Santa. Aranita was (as always) pushing her Poi Dog sauces (which are very good), which Okdeh ended up chugging right out of the bottle. Things got weird. But the result was a decision that they needed to get together and make some kind of huge, monster sandwich, using Okdeh’s Italian expertise and Aranita’s killer BBQ sauce.

The result? The “Guava Cutlet Royale” — a foot-long sandwich mounted on a Cacia’s bakery seeded roll, stuffed with Karina di Vita’s breaded chicken cutlet, a generous shot of Poi Dog’s guava katsu sauce, onions sautéed in Japanese A5 wagyu fat, and a load of Okdeh’s mac salad. As you can see from the photo, this is a fully over-the-top sandwich — all fusioned up, thoroughly non-traditional, and messy with competing influences. I love the very idea of it.

The Guava Cutlet Royale will be available at Farina di Vita (250 Catherine Street) starting February 4th. The 12-inch version will run you $18, and a slightly less insane six-inch is just $9. Farina di Vita’s hours are Tuesday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and weekends from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., which gives you plenty of time to check this sandwich out before it vanishes like a dream a month later (on March 2nd).

Now what’s next?

Baby’s Kusina FINALLY Has an Opening Date

Inside Baby’s in Brewerytown. / Photograph by Mike Prince

Want to know how long we’ve been waiting for this? It’s been more than a year since rumors about Raquel and Tam Dang’s Filipino concept started making their way through the industry. I first wrote about Baby’s back before Little Walter’s had even opened. Before Cheu and Bing Bing and Volver all closed. First mention of it in one of these columns? April 2nd of 2024 — six days before last year’s solar eclipse — and when I talked about it then, I said that it was “scheduled to open soon” because they’d already had a friends-and-family dinner that’d gone swimmingly and the space looked totally ready to go.

That was nearly eight months ago.

And while Baby’s STILL isn’t open, after five years of pop-ups and supper club dinners and a year of delays, the Dang’s have finally decided on Saturday, February 8th as the official opening date for their space at 2816 West Girard Avenue in Brewerytown. Originally scheduled to open late in 2023, “ongoing challenges with contractors and unclear city processes” were what turned opening soon to opening eight months after an eclipse that people barely even remember anymore, but none of that matters now because now Raquel and Tam have a completely re-done 2,500-square-foot storefront full of cane chairs and exposed brick. Set up primarily as a counter-service operation, there’ll be a handful of seats both on the main floor and on an upstairs mezzanine, offering all-day pastries and a coffee service featuring beans sourced from the Philippines and roasted by Càphê Roasters, locally-sourced retail produce in the market, and an all-day menu of traditional and modern Filipino dishes with Raquel standing as exec, Alvin Panicker as chef de cuisine and pastry chef McBryan Lesperance in charge of the calamansi donuts, bibingka, and ube hand pies.

We’re going to have more details on Baby’s long road to opening later (so keep an eye out), but in the meantime, a couple things to keep in mind: Yes, they’re going to be serving Filipino breakfast sandwiches every day. Yes, they’re coming right out of the gate with Saturday and Sunday brunch services. No, there’s no supper club element right now, but seeing as the Dang’s made their name doing dinner parties starting back in 2018, it’s definitely something that’s in the works for the future. According to Raquel: “The supper clubs are something we will be implementing once we can execute day-to-day operations, but we definitely are thinking of ways to make it more special. Those were such a huge part of what got us to where we are now. We started the concept because there was a lack of Filipino food in Philadelphia in 2018. When Tam and I started dating, we’d always be the ones hosting friends and family for dinners, and I loved that because growing up Filipino, love was always shown through sharing food.”

Baby’s will be open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week (closed Tuesdays) starting February 8th. More details to come.

Moving on …

What the Hell Just Happened in Manayunk?

Long story short: Winnie’s Manayunk has closed. Permanently. After 20-odd years, the sign has come down, the lights are off, and the doors are locked at the 4266 Main Street space owned by Winnie Clowry.

Last week, employees delivered a letter to Clowry asking her to address problems with payroll. Staff wasn’t being paid, and, unsurprisingly, they wanted some assurances that their paychecks were going to continue to arrive (and not bounce). The letter was empathetic, respectful, and entirely reasonable. You can read it right here, because after what came next, one of those employees posted it publicly.

After the letter was delivered, Clowry fired the entire bar and waitstaff. She tried to reopen with just her on the floor and her managers in the kitchen, but then she fired the managers, too, and had them escorted out by the cops. When employees showed up on Friday looking for their checks, she called the cops again, then said, Fuck it, I’m out, and closed the place for good.

The entire story is somehow even more bonkers, and the Inky has a very good explanation of how everything went from bad to worse super fast. The restaurant industry is never easy. Nearly every operation out there is just a couple bad weeks away from completely self-destructing. It’s frankly miraculous that these kinds of stories don’t happen every single week, but the Winnie’s saga? It is kinda in a league of its own.

Now who has room for some leftovers?

The Leftovers

Photograph courtesy of Campbell Soup Company

Here’s a strange collaboration that’s probably worth paying attention to. Pace — you know, the big national salsa brand owned by Campbell’s — is teaming up with our very own Federal Donuts & Chicken for a limited-time collaboration two-fer.

Starting January 30th at all brick-and-mortar FedNuts locations, you can get a Mexican hot chocolate doughnut or a Hot Honey Chipotle chicken sandwich (or both), kicked up with Pace’s “Hot Honey Chipotle Signature Sauce.” We’re talking a spiced cake donut glazed with Hot Honey Chipotle and spiced dark chocolate, then topped with hot cocoa powder on the one hand, and on the other, a fried chicken sandwich, doused in the same Pace sauce, with creamy cheddar cheese, bacon, and pickles on a potato roll.

Honestly, both of them sound kinda awesome. And yeah, it’s a little weird seeing one of these enormous national brands collaborating with the little place where I used to stand in line to get hangover doughnuts on Friday mornings, but FedNuts is no longer the little coffee-and-doughnut shop it was back in the day, either. They’re all grown up now. It’s just surprising that it happened so fast …

The Pace collab starts in a couple days. The doughnut will be on the board until February 2nd, and the chicken sandwich will remain available through March. Get ’em while they’re hot.

Dim Sum Garden has now officially moved into its new home at 1024 Race Street. It’s been a long wait, but the new space is massive, with 200 seats, a full bar, private event space, and more soup dumplings than anyone can reasonably eat (no matter how hard I try). Maddy Sweitzer-Lammé has a full wrap-up on the new joint and just what it took for mother-daughter team Shizhou Da and Sally Song to get here. You should absolutely read it. And then go get some dumplings.

A look at Sonny’s menu / Photograph by Eddy Marenco

Last week, I told you all about the return of Sonny’s Cocktail Joint. And now that the place is officially re-opened (after a three-year wait), I’ve got a few more details — most notable of which is Steven Seibel, ex of Hawthorne’s, being the man in the kitchen at the new-and-improved Sonny’s. This is the guy slinging those bar pies from the new menu, the one doing the crab rangoon dip, double-smash-burgers with pepperoncini pickles, and blue cheese chicken fried shrimp. Honestly, this looks like one of the greatest comfort (read: junk) food menus I’ve seen since Gass & Main, and I am super-psyched to see how well they can execute.

Also, the drink program looks wild — everything from custom, hand-crafted cocktails to a Jim Beam highball machine, on-demand frozen cocktail glasses at the bar, and a back bar stuffed with rare and limited-edition brown whiskies. They’re calling the place “a metamodern retro bar,” and I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but I am there for it. Champagne splits and robot bourbon? Bring it on. Plus, they’ve got a bunch of Eagles specials to celebrate the Super Bowl run, and that’s nice, too.

Speaking of the Super Bowl, on Saturday, February 8th — the day before the big game — Craft Hall is running their own fourth annual Puppy Bowl event called “Bark Bowl.” There’ll be indoor turf for your dogs to play on, toys to keep it interesting, a special menu for the humans in attendance, and $1 from every drink sold will go to the PSPCA. Plus, if you don’t already have a dog of your own, the PSPCA will be bringing along some adoptable pups to act as cheerleaders. Make your reservations here.