"Ground Xero"

By Frank Lewis - June 12, 1997

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Published: Sep 28, 2006

Six months before Buzz Bissinger immortalized the Ed Rendell years with A Prayer for the City , Frank Lewis sat down at two of the evening haunts that were emblematic of Center City's transformation: Fluid and the much-praised Opus 251. The nightclub and high-end restaurant had little in common on the surface, but Lewis traced both of them back to South Street's Xero club, the brainchild of David Mantelmacher and Philippe Daouphars. The momentous partnership had set a new tone for Philly's nightlife at the outset of the 1990s, but was ultimately cracked apart by its own success.

 

 

Musically, they found a kindred spirit in Josh Wink. His girlfriend at the time, a waitress and bartender at Xero, introduced the then-18-year-old DJ to David and Philippe. They turned him loose in the booth, and "he just lit the place on fire," Daouphars recalls. "It was amazing."

"We just vibed," Wink recalls. "They were good people."

Wink then introduced the owners to fellow DJ Blake Tart and later, King Britt — who brought in Dozia Blakely — and word of the party at Xero started getting around. The club hosted the third traveling Vagabond party, and packed the house.

"It was really a word-of-mouth thing," says Daouphars. "[The buzz] just grew slowly until I guess at a certain point enough people had been coming on different occasions that all of a sudden word got out that it was the spot."

"Literally from one weekend, when it wasn't too busy, to the next weekend it was real busy, to the following weekend we had people in line because it was so crowded we just couldn't fit anybody else in the place. It happened that fast."

And so began Philippe and David's excellent adventure.

In July 1996, the former partners completed the division of their small empire. Mantelmacher, by then accustomed to running Circa alone, with former sous chef Eric Hall in command of the kitchen, says it was a day like any other — except that his wife had gone into labor.

"I received a loan to buy these guys out, and I had to have the check over to the accountant's office by 5 o'clock," he recalls. "So the bank issues the check at 4:30, my wife's in the hospital — my baby was actually two months premature, so my wife's in the hospital in bed. I had to rush the papers over to her so she could sign them, then I had to rush the check over to my accountant's office to get it there before 5, otherwise the deal would be off. And then at 11 o'clock that night my wife had a C-section, and we had a baby girl."

Frank Lewis lived in Philadelphia between 1990 and 2003, writing for City Paper for the latter half of that period. "It's easy to forget how dead Philly was in the early and mid '90s in terms of nightlife and the restaurant scene," he says. But for Mantelmacher and Daouphars, this town might not have reached the point of taking Stephen Starr and the BYO boom for granted. These days Lewis works as editor of the Cleveland Free Times , although he'd like for everyone to think that he only left Philly to finally break into the NHL.

Read the original story in its entirety.

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