"It's one of those places at which you can get that particularly blithe combination of the elegant and the mundane: a glass of champagne and a cheeseburger.
"It's Sassafras, an intimate, dimly lit little place on Second Street with an attraction for the city's Beautiful People and an atmosphere more evocative of Paris than of Old City Philadelphia. And though most people who know it seem to think of it as primarily a bar, albeit a chic one, it has a limited but nicely handled menu as well."
The preceding is the intro of an Inquirer review of Sassafras from May 15, 1981. I'm presenting it here because Sassafras reopened two weeks ago after being shut down for about six months and because new owners Donal McCoy and Neill Laughlin deserve a lot of credit for not messing it up.
McCoy, who owns Tin Angel/Serrano up the block, and Laughlin, simply refurbished what needed to be refurbished.
The old deer head that hung over the kitchen door was tossed at some point, so they found a new old dear head and positioned it over the bar. The tin ceiling was repaired and painted a dull gold. New white flocked wallpaper and heavy antique mirrors dress up the walls. The old-fashioned tiled walls, which probably date from the 1880s or 1890s, remain, as does the charmingly cracked floor tiles. Upstairs, the spacious women's restroom has a fancy, new mural. In more recent years, the women's room contained a bathtub. It's out now being resurfaced.
Menu, tight as it was when my colleague Sue Chastain reviewed it 27 years ago, includes grilled vegetable spring roll ($6.95), shrimp cocktail ($9.95), basil hummus ($5.95) and verenike ($7.95). Verenike? As in Mongolian dumplings. McCoy and Laughlin wisely brought back Sassafras' long-ago Mongolian-born chef, known to all by one name, Batsuh. There are burgers ($9.95 for veggie, $10.95 for a sirloin, lamb burger or pork-and-ginger, $12.95 for buffalo and $13.95 for ostrich), salads, a few sandwiches (croque monsieur with tomato soup for $8.95, a steak for $10.95 and a chicken for $10.95), and seven entrees ($12.95 for Hungarian goulash to fettucine carbonara, salmon or lambchop lollipops for $14.95.)
The 1981 menu price of a spinach salad was $4. Now it's $6.95. Burgers used to be $4.25.
International beer list has six on draft including Guinness on draft, plus Arrogant Bastard, Fullers ESB, Sam Smith Oatmeal Stout, Ayinger Altbainsch Dunkel, Coopers Sparkling Ale, Pilsner Urquell and Asahi.
Red wines include MacMurray pinot, Wishing Tree shiraz, Daniel Gehrs cabernet sauvignon and Mont Gras carmenere. Whites include King Estate pinot gris, Zaca Mesa chardonnay and First Love.
Sassafras, 48 S. Second St. Same phone number, too: 215-925-2317. Kitchen is open from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. (bar till 2 a.m.) nightly.