Chef Tyler Akin is finally opening his much-anticipated new restaurant, Bastia. The acclaimed Philadelphia chef-restaurateur, who has worked under luminaries including José Andrés and Michael Solomonov, and whose Sicilian-inspired Res Ipsa Cafe and Southeast Asian concept Stock were both pre-pandemic hits, seems poised for another splashy debut.
The new all-day Mediterranean café and evening restaurant has long been in the works as the culinary component of the trendy Fishtown neighborhood’s largest boutique property, Hotel Anna & Bel, which opened just last week. In an interview with Appetito, Akin detailed his approach to creating the restaurant, which involved traveling to Corsica and Sardinia to study their cuisine.
“These places have the historical and cultural connection to these major scenes and traditions, but they have their own thing going on,” Akin says of Corsica, an island that is part of France, and Italy’s Sardinia. “I thought the heartiness of Corsican cuisine and the brightness of Sardinian cuisine seemed like they would be complementary.”
Akin certainly sounds like a thinking man’s chef, and the just-released menu for Bastia reflects his intentional approach to creating dishes while honoring culinary traditions—with some innovation as well. It’s a tricky dance that not many chefs even attempt, but Akin has proven adept at mastering the art of many different cuisines. His other current operation, Le Cavalier at the Green Room, is a French brasserie at the Hotel Du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware.
At Bastia, he is working with Pennsylvania farmers and purveyors to access ingredients similar to those found on the Mediterranean islands that are his focus. This has allowed him to open with a menu that includes baked strozzapreti with brocciu and arrabbiata (that’s Corsican dumplings and cheese with a spicy sauce) and gnocchetti with veal broth and pecorino sardo, which employs a Sardinian sheep’s milk cheese.
Akin speaks highly of the citrus flavors found throughout both cuisines, and his summer menu features grapefruit and sour cherries with burrata and dark chocolate, and scallop with preserved citrus curd and Calabrian chili.
One of the menu’s showstoppers will surely be a main course of porceddu with pane carasau, a Sardinian-inspired preparation of suckling pig and paper-thin flatbread.
The attention to detail extends to the wines. Akin speaks passionately about the small production and native varietals he discovered during his trips. He sounds enthused about featuring wines such as reds and whites from the Patrimonio appellation in Corsica, which was granted AOC status in 1968, and which importer Kermit Lynch describes as “a dynamic wine region featuring a mix of exciting young producers and established legends who paved the way.” Akin says his team is sourcing other natural and low-intervention wines from Sardinia and other Mediterranean producers.
Akin says of Bastia’s concept, “We're not building a tall box around those two islands,” of Corsica and Sardinia, noting that he intends to draw from Mediterranean coastal cuisine, as he did at Res Ipsa Cafe with Sicily; Greek islands are also an inspiration.
At the Hotel Du Pont, a grand European style building founded and run for a century by the family behind the Delaware-based chemical company, Akin took cues from the architecture to create a showcase of French dishes and flavors at Le Cavalier. (As a young man, he attended the influential and now-defunct French culinary school L’Academie de Cuisine in Washington, DC.)
Working with the developers of Hotel Anna & Bel, Foyer Project, Akin says he noticed, “They were evoking this golden age of Mediterranean resort lifestyle,” in creating a 50-room boutique property with a pool, gym, and an F&B program that features Bastia as an all-day café and nighttime restaurant. There is also a cocktail lounge, Caletta, that is opening under Akin’s direction. The hotel concept helped guide him toward the shoulder regions of France and Italy—“places that have a chip on their shoulder and a little bit of separation from the core identity” of the powerhouse cuisines.
It’s an apt metaphor for his own career and for Bastia, which is located in a now-burgeoning but once-forlorn Philly neighborhood that marks a return to where his career began to take off—when he opened Stock in Fishtown a decade ago.
As coastal Italian and French-Italian crossover restaurants continue to blossom in major U.S. urban centers, Akin’s creativity and approach represent a different and more novel approach. It’s one that will surely be worth watching.
1401 E. Susquehanna Ave., @bastia_fishtown, bastiafishtown.com
