A little over two years ago, the West Philadelphia-based
Enterprise Center celebrated the opening of its 13,000-square-foot
Center for Culinary Enterprises (CCE), a shared incubator space where retail food entrepreneurs without a commercial kitchen facility of their own could set up shop.
The CCE has since become a powerful resource among the city's start-up retail food community; click
here and
here to read previous Flying Kite reports on the venture.
Around the time of the CCE's launch, Bryan Fenstermaker of the
Enterprise Center Community Development Corporation (TEC-CDC) began receiving feedback that a different community of culinary entrepreneurs -- would-be restaurant owners -- was also interested in acquiring start-up assistance. So a plan was hatched to create
Common Table, a restaurant incubator that will offer technical, financial and managerial assistance.
Common Table is currently being constructed inside one of the CCE's three retail spaces at South 48th and Spruce Streets. It will feature a rentable 40-seat pop-up restaurant for amateur or experienced chefs who would like to take their culinary creations public. The restaurant space is scheduled to open this fall.
In the meantime, an application process opened two weeks ago for a 6 to 12 month
fellowship that will test the brick-and-mortar restaurant concepts of six to nine participants. The selection process will involve a business plan submission and a tasting competition judged by local culinary heavyweights.
Applications for the Common Table Fellowship can be accessed at commontablephilly.com.
Writer: Dan Eldridge
Source: Allina Yang, TEC-CDC