Rooster Soup Co. Transforms Into The Rooster, a Jewish Deli

Eighteen months in, Michael Solomonov and Steve Cook’s community-minded Rooster Soup Co. is getting a second life as a Jewish deli, complete with a shortened name. The Rooster will serve corned beef, smoked whitefish, and patty melts, and continue to give all its profits to charity through the Broad Street Hospitality Collaborative.

The CookNSolo team announced the change Monday morning to its Kickstarter backers, who first got excited about the notion of a charitable chicken soup restaurant back in 2014. Complementing the philanthropic mission, the idea was to make use of the leftover chicken carcasses from fried chicken-and-doughnut chain Federal Donuts, co-owned by Solomonov and Cook along with Felicia D’Ambrosio, Tom Henneman, and Bob Logue.

The rebranded Rooster (1526 Sansom Street) will still sell chicken soup — it is a Jewish deli, after all — but the menu now puts aside the beer-braised pork and cheeseburgers for bagels and pastrami. Yehuda Sichel of Abe Fisher, which serves CookNSolo’s upscale take on Jewish fare (not Israeli; find that at their Zahav), consulted on The Rooster’s menu and it includes a version of Abe Fisher’s famed Montreal-style smoked meat. (Note that both restaurants cook Jewish-style, not kosher, food.)

Alexandra Hawkins

One reason for the change was to get “soup” out of the name to make it sound like more of an all-weather eatery. The owners also say they had been throwing around the idea of a Jewish deli for years, often with Sichel, who was raised in an orthodox Jewish community in Baltimore. His first restaurant job was making matzo balls in a kosher deli.

The matzo ball soup at The Rooster is a Yemenite recipe made with hawaij, a spice blend donated from Lior Lev Sercarz of La Boite spice shop in New York. The wedge salad — “the king of lettuces,” as Solomonov and Cook describe it — uses the sesame paste tahini instead of cream. It’s the same ingredient used in their tehina (another word for tahini) shakes at Goldie.

The sandwich section of the new menu starts with hot corned beef on house-made rye. It’s “pastrami’s red-headed stepchild,” Solomonov and Cook write. “It doesn’t have the same smoky flavor, it’s the simplest sandwich on the menu, but it’s the purest example of all the techniques that come together in the deli.”

Alexandra Hawkins

Pastrami is found in the Montreal smoked meat sandwich, created with a Baltimore pit beef sandwich in mind. Like the Montreal-style short ribs at Abe Fisher, the meat is cured for five days, crusted in black pepper, allspice, and coriander, smoked, and then confit. Abe Fisher serves it bone-in, but here it’s on a Martin’s potato roll, with horseradish sauce and onion.

The patty melt on the menu is similar to a reuben — “especially because of the ‘everything’ sauce with everything nice,” the owners say — and the smoked whitefish comes on a bagel with tomato, red onion, and capers. There’s also a vegetarian take on a reuben made with beets.

For dessert, look for a rotating choice of fruit pie (it’s blueberry crumb right now). The milkshake, available in four flavors plus one spiked version, is another sweet option.

Rooster’s revamped drinks list includes classic cocktails, like a dirty martini and a Manhattan, here made with pastrami-washed rye; a short selection of wines; and local beers on draft.

Alexandra Hawkins

Rooster already went through smaller revisions since it debuted in January 2017. Opening chef Erin O’Shea left last summer after 12 years with the restaurant group. George Sabatino signed on about six months ago and tweaked the menu. He just left, because of the concept change.

Jarrett O’Hara, who was sous chef for both O’Shea and Sabatino and previously worked under Sichel at Abe Fisher, has now moved up to chef at The Rooster.

The restaurant is open for lunch and dinner from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. A brunch menu will be added later.

The Broad Street Ministry’s Hospitality Collaborative provides food to Philadelphians in need, in the form of a restaurant-style sit-down meal, along with a slew of other services. According to The Rooster, the Hospitality Collaborative served more than 72,000 meals last year.

In Solomonov and Cook’s words:

Alexandra Hawkins

Alexandra Hawkins

Alexandra Hawkins

• Behold Rooster Soup Co., the Restaurant That Gives Away 100% of Its Profits
• Rooster Soup Co., A Unique Partnership Between Federal Donuts and Broad Street Ministry
• The Philly Restaurants That Give Back to the Community
• Philly’s Must-Try Jewish Delis