Penn Restaurateurs
Before Ellen Yin …

Roger Harman Gr’77 and the late Duane Ball Gr’73 were both teaching college economics when they got bitten by the restaurant bug in 1979. “We became kind of disillusioned with the academic life,” Harman recently recalled. While inflation and unemployment hovered at double-digit levels—a scenario that textbooks of the time maintained was impossible—the two friends soured on the tenure chase.

“We felt that it would be more interesting to become part of the economy rather than to talk about the economy,” Harman says. Discovering an abandoned laundry for sale at 47th Street and Chester Avenue in West Philly, they pounced. “We had enough money on a credit card to get the building. It was like $7,000.”

After sprucing it up and christening it the Gold Standard, they opened their doors to the eating public in 1979. A few years later, Philadelphia magazine bestowed one of its annual Best of Philly awards on the place—cheekily naming it the “Best Restaurant in an Unlikely Location.” 

By that time, the offbeat location had attracted a regular who would go on to play a key part in the restaurateurs’ future: Penn President Sheldon Hackney Hon’93. “He liked going there I think in part because people didn’t really recognize him or bother him,” Harman says. “And Sheldon, or one of his aides, came to us one day and said, ‘You know, the Christian Association is looking for a new tenant.’”

The Christian Association occupied the building now known as The Arch on Locust Walk. In 1983, Ball and Harman shifted their operation there, opening the Palladium, which served the Penn community for the next 20 years.

“It was ironic. Here we were trying to get away from academia, and we landed smack in the middle of it,” Harman laughs. “All these professors would come in and want to discuss recent things they’d read in economics. I didn’t read that stuff anymore. I read home economics!”

In 2003, as the administration of President Judith Rodin CW’66 Hon’04 felt pressure to remove alcohol from campus, the Palladium shut its doors. “As near as I can tell, ours was the last restaurant and bar in the middle of an Ivy League campus,” Harman says. “I don’t think there are any left.”

These days Harman spends his days a little closer to the old Gold Standard location, where his third restaurant, Abbraccio, has been serving Italian food since 2003. Perched between University City and southwest Philadelphia, Harman reckons he attracts “the most diverse clientele of just about any restaurant” in town.

“We have people with very modest means, and then people who want the latest specials,” he says. “It’s been a struggle. We’re still not out of the woods by any means. But it’s been a lot of fun. It’s a neighborhood restaurant.”

 … And Since

“People look at me like I’m crazy for leaving,” Cook says. “And sometimes I agree with them.”

Nevertheless, night classes at the French Culinary Institute in New York beckoned him away from the balance sheets just long enough to get him hooked on food. Soon thereafter, he realized he needed a change of scenery as well. “I realized I wasn’t going to be able to support myself on a cook’s salary, in the life that I’d grown accustomed to as a banker. And I really loved Philly.”

So he returned to his old stomping ground, where fine dining was undergoing a sort of revolution. Small restaurants without liquor licenses were starting to change the gastronomic landscape, and Cook plunged right in. First he spent a couple years polishing his kitchen skills under the chefs of two well-regarded restaurants near Rittenhouse Square. Then he came back to the University’s side of the Schuylkill to open Marigold Kitchen in October of 2004.

He couldn’t have picked a better moment. The bring-your-own-booze scene was now really beginning to blossom, and Marigold went from a cozy neighborhood eatery to an inspired destination restaurant virtually overnight. Philadelphia magazine called it the Best New BYOB of 2005. Food & Wine plugged Cook’s “gutsy, refined dishes,” and Gourmet jumped on the bandwagon with praise in two separate issues.

Cook wasn’t content to rest on those laurels. “There are some limitations to what you can do in a 40-seat BYOB restaurant at the corner of 45th and Larchwood,” he laughs. Besides, he had discovered that he had another skill: talent scouting.

After tapping a rising chef named Michael Solomonov to take his place at Marigold’s burners, Cook set about opening Xochitl, a haute Mexican restaurant in Old City. To run the kitchen, he found a chef named Dionicio Jimenez, who’d landed in Philadelphia from Mexico nine years before and started out as a near-broke dishwasher. Evidently the Blackstone alum knew an undervalued asset when he saw one. Within months of Xochitl’s 2007 opening, Gourmet and Food & Wine were back in Philadelphia to sing Jimenez’s praises.

At the moment Cook is hard at work on his next venture, an upscale Israeli and Middle Eastern restaurant called Zahav, which he hopes to open by the middle of this year. The banker became a chef, and the chef is maturing into a full-fledged entrepreneur. “I like projects,” he explains. “It’s fun to be in a restaurant every day, and try to improve it and get it to run better. But what really gets me excited to jump out of bed in the morning is to build things.”—T.P.