Pig Head and Larder: Southwark Opens Tonight

Last weekend, husband and wife team Chris D'Ambro and Marina De Oliveira quietly re-opened Southwark, the Queen Village icon revamped for modern sensibilities. Starting tonight at 5 p.m., and henceforward, the restaurant is a full-go with the bar open till 2 a.m. and the kitchen open till 1 a.m., daily (after 10 p.m., 11 p.m. on weekends, the dinner menu shifts to an abbreviated version of itself). And since tonight is Wednesday, corkage fees won't be implemented.

The menu is focused, broken down into five categories: snack (D'Ambro's especially excited about his fried pig head slider slathered with n'duja mayo), appetizer, pasta, entrée, and larder — named after the larders of yore: rooms meant to preserve food items before the invention of refrigerators and freezers. The "larder" section of the menu is full of all things preserved, pickled, marinated, cultured, salted, etc. And in keeping with Southwark's original intentions, D'Ambro promises to keep locality and sustainability a priority.

Kip and Sherie Waide, Queen Village darlings and Southwark's previous owners, were a bit ahead of the pack when it came to the craft cocktail resurgence of recent years, and D'Ambro and De Oliveira plan to keep to it. They've brought on Jarrod Williams, a Philly native most recently behind the bar at Parts & Labor in Baltimore. Cocktails are categorized into Pre-Prohibition, Dark Ages, Modern Era (White Russians and Cosmos!), and House Libations — Southwark's signature cocktails. Peep the menus below: