Le Bec-Fin Closing on Saturday, March 3rd

This is truly The Shutter of all Shutters: Le Bec-Fin, as we know it, is closing after service on Saturday, March 3rd. This afternoon, Foobooz did some solid sleuthing and figured out that Georges Perrier's legendary French eatery was closing this weekend (as opposed to the originally reported timeline in April) after a few attempts at scoring reservations post March 3rd came up empty.

Eater Philly called on a few people very close to the action that all confirmed the rumor to be 100% true, that this era of LBF is over as of Saturday night. Apparently, new owner Nic Fanucci was supposed to be in town the last few days to make the new shutter date official, but didn't show until today. The new regime will launch LBF 2.0 sometime in the next 3-6 months (but not before mid-April), and we've got it on good authority that Per Se executive sous chef David Breeden will be the new cooking honcho at Le Bec-Fin.

The restaurant is losing money at an epic clip, and this was a much more realistic timeline than the one Perrier originally established. Who we really feel for are the more than 80 people on staff at LBF who were expecting another months worth of work in a shitty economy, and now need to rustle something else up in short order. And while Le Bec hasn't really been Le Bec for some time, this is still a dark day for the Philly food landscape.

· Le Bec-Fin's Last Night [Foobooz]
· Meet David Breeden, Le Bec-Fin's Next Executive Chef [~EPHI~]