Ajia Beauty

by Alex Koppelman

Philadelphia, despite its Champs Elysees-inspired Parkway, is not Paris. But with the addition of Ajia as the fourth restaurant in University City apartment building The Left Bank, named for the famed section of Paris, the City of Lights is moving just a little closer.

When the restaurant opened in April, it meant that all the commercial space in the 271-unit apartment building at 3131 Walnut St., owned by Center City developer Dranoff Properties, had been filled. In addition to Ajia (the name is pronounced Asia and is the transliteration of the Japanese word for that continent), coffee shop Intermezzo Café, Italian restaurant Ecco Qui, gourmet-to-go store Picnic and Trophy Bikes' new location, the University of Pennsylvania leases 100,000 square feet there for its real estate division and post office, and for a daycare center with enough room for 125 children.

"We felt that we wanted local businesses, and we got those," Midge McCauley, director of Downtown Works, the retail property division of Dranoff Properties, says. "We're delighted. We have our coffee shop, we have our little market. And Ajia has only been open about a month, but already it's busy."

The four small food vendors have all successfully melded in with The Left Bank, according to McCauley. "The type of businesses we have lend themselves to the spaces we have," she says, "because we didn't have big spaces." Intermezzo Café is only 1,000 square feet, Ajia and Picnic both take up a scant 1,800 square feet and the largest, Ecco Qui, has 3,200.

"We haven't been doing advertisements," says Vincent Lan, one of the co-owners of Ajia, "we're just getting people to notice us." Still, despite the soft opening, the restaurant has been busy with residents and some students from Penn and Drexel. "There's a lot of potential in The Left Bank," Lan says, noting the impending opening of the new WXPN building next door.

Lan and his partners also own Tokyo Café Incorporated, a sushi café in Brooklyn. "Because we're doing so well in New York, we hoped to bring something new to Philly, new food fusion-wise, Lan says. "Too many of these restaurants are traditional, we want to bring something new."

Ajia's reasonably priced menu brings together many Asian influences, from Korean to Chinese, though the Japanese standards are there, too. There is, as might be expected, a sushi bar, which currently offers a half-price sushi special after 5 p.m.

Ajia, 3131 Walnut St., 215-222-2542.

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