"If only this space ever became available." As reported by The Inquirer, that's what Hank Allingham told his wife Kat, years before he ever got the keys to 623 South 6th Street. He said it out loud one night while the two of them were finishing dinner at Bistrot La Minette, the French bistro that had run the room since 2008. Then, eventually, the space did become available. Allingham opened Side Eye there in February 2026.
If you live within a few blocks of that stretch of 6th Street, near Bainbridge, you've probably already clocked the changes without connecting them. A familiar sign came down. A new one went up. Another storefront a couple doors south has plywood in the window right now with a name on it you haven't tried yet. Taken one at a time, none of this looks unusual. A restaurant closes, another one opens in its place, that's just how a commercial block works. But look at what's actually happened on this specific three-door stretch over the past two years, and a different pattern shows up: two restaurants gave way to places in much the same broad category, while a third storefront is preparing to open as a cafe.
What actually happened to Bistrot La Minette
Chef Peter Woolsey ran Bistrot La Minette for almost 16 years before he closed it on July 31, 2024. During that run, the restaurant outlasted a pandemic, and Woolsey also spent stretches covering line stations himself. The menu he built there, snails in garlic butter, mustard-braised rabbit, trout meunière, cassoulet that regulars ordered on repeat, doesn't have an obvious successor anywhere else in the city. When he announced the closing, he said as much himself: there wasn't anyone else in Philadelphia doing quite what he'd been doing.
The building sat empty for a year and a half. That's a long vacancy for a corner this visible, long enough that a neighbor walking past every week could reasonably start assuming the space was headed toward something other than a restaurant. It wasn't. Side Eye opened there in February 2026, run by Allingham, whose background is in restaurant finance and operations rather than the kitchen, alongside chef Finn Connors. They call the food "French-ish," a deliberate step back from Woolsey's tighter bistro style toward something looser: chicken liver mousse, deviled eggs with Spanish olives and anchovy, a peppercorn burger finished in beef jus and Fromager d'Affinois, moules marinières built on a witbier broth with crab fat and pork belly. The room still seats close to 90 across the bar, the main dining area, and a rear room, plus a seasonal patio.
Early reviews have been mixed. An August 2026 write-up in the Inquirer described service that ranged from chaotic to outright hostile on Allingham's early nights, along with a burger the kitchen couldn't quite land in either direction, overcooked once and underdone the next time. The same review noted things had started turning around once a calmer front-of-house staff took over, and singled out a server, Tessa Draper, for steadying the room. That's a restaurant still finding its footing seven months in, which is normal. What's not normal is how long the Allinghams had been waiting for this exact address before they ever got the chance to try.
Two doors down, the same shape came back
Walk two storefronts north and the same pattern repeats, though with less fanfare. Isot Turkish Cuisine had been serving mezze, kebabs, and manti at 622 South 6th Street since 2015, the kind of BYOB regulars ordered from by name, Adana kebab, pistachio baklava, a second-floor room for private events. At some point over the past year, Isot closed. KOR Mediterranean Table opened in the identical footprint, still BYOB, still built around a build-your-own tasting board of hummus, muhammara, tzatziki, and baba ganoush, alongside grilled classics like kofte and Adana kebabs. KOR even kept a vegan option on the menu, a falafel and stuffed-vine-leaf bowl over rice pilaf.
Nobody converted this space into a coffee shop or a boutique. The category held. A Turkish-Mediterranean BYOB was replaced by another Turkish-Mediterranean BYOB, run by different owners with a different name, in the same rooms with the same brunch and lunch hours, weekdays from 11:30 to 5, weekends opening a half hour earlier. If you'd only glanced at the sign changing, you might have assumed something bigger shifted here. What actually shifted was much smaller: who's running the kitchen, not what the kitchen is for.
The third storefront hasn't opened yet, and that's the point
A few doors south, at 625 South 6th Street, a husband-and-wife team named Rey Tamaka and Vina Kencana are getting ready to open Eggcetera Haus. As of mid-August 2026, there wasn't yet an official opening date, just a build-out in progress and an Instagram account posting sneak peeks of the interior. The concept, once it opens, is meant to run all day: morning coffee and brunch through the early afternoon, then a shift into dinner and evening cocktails, with hours planned for roughly 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., a break, then 4 p.m. until 10 or 11 depending on the night.
That's three storefronts on one short stretch, with two restaurant changes and a cafe preparing to open over roughly a two-year span. At Bistrot La Minette's former space, the wait was long enough to notice, roughly a year and a half, before Allingham opened Side Eye.
What this actually tells you if you live nearby
None of this means the block got "discovered" or that some outside wave of investment rebuilt it from scratch. If anything, it's the opposite. The two completed restaurant changes kept a similar use in place. A French bistro building is now a French-adjacent bar. A Turkish-Mediterranean BYOB is now a different Turkish-Mediterranean BYOB. A third storefront that was apparently sitting available has been claimed by an all-day cafe concept before it even opened its doors, plywood windows and all. Together, the changes suggest this stretch continues to draw food businesses, even as the cafe is still preparing to open.
For a resident who's watched the window signs change without really tracking why, that's the useful part. Two restaurant changes and a planned cafe give a better read on the corner than any single opening or closing on its own.
If you're the kind of person who notices these things before they show up in a headline, that instinct is worth more than it feels like day to day. Love City Group, led by Frank Genzano, spends a lot of time walking these same blocks. If you ever want to talk through what a corner like this one actually signals, we're an easy conversation to start.
