So what's up with this Carrot Cake company? My boyfriend and I went walking around the neighborhood last week to find a laundromat (the one in my apartment building truly sucks) and found a little tiny place I've probably walked by a dozen times and overlooked. The Carrot Cake company did not look very...um....er... appetizing from the outside, but I did a search on the web and apparently it's been written up on quite a few websites. Has anyone been there?

And what's up with La Naz? People keep telling me what a great place this is but every time I walk by, the gates are up but the door is locked and it looks abandoned.

__________________
- We must be the change we wish to see in the world -
Mahatma Gandhi

After 5+ years, I went there for the first time back in February. It was very good. I advice if you're going to buy a slice, order extra icing.

Carot Cake Man is good and mostly concentrates on selling to other businesses. Sometimes the main guy goes out making deliveries walking and you can buy a piece from him directly, which is kind of fun. La Naz is mostly a water ice shop so business is obviously slow to non-existant in the winter. It functions as kind of a bakery/cafe in the winter but I don't think business is steady enough to pay for her to keep it open regularly in the cold weather months. Hopefully as the warm weather comes we will see la Naz open more regularly.

I don't mean to sound cranky but... I don't know how anybody gets anything done in this town. Could be I'm suffering from "The City that Never Sleeps" syndrome. It just bugs me when I want to go somewhere and find that the place either opens sporadically or has hours that are unfriendly to those who work a regular schedule. I need to make keys for my new lock and I pass two locksmiths on the way home. But no luck -- one is open from 8:30 - 5 (the exact hours I work so I'm gonna have to hightail it over there at lunchtime - grrrrr....) and the other one wasn't open at all; I don't know why.

So I walk by La Naz on three different occasions on the weekend and they don't bother to open because there is no business in the winter...? Seems like that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't open, how do you know there's no business? The Object of My Affection and I went to Lee's for breakfast this past Saturday instead of going to Little Pete's (where everybody knows our name. Seriously. We eat breakfast there nearly every weekend). Breakfast was good -- not speedy, but good. Thought we might go again on Sunday. But no. Lee's is not open on Sunday.

Sigh. Go ahead. Say it. I'm a spoiled New Yorker.

__________________
- We must be the change we wish to see in the world -
Mahatma Gandhi

Don't worry Lee, when I moved here (and even now), this and the lack of parking are two of the biggest things I complain about this city.

I agree, I don't know how much gets done in this city since almost everyone is at work the same time as almost everyone else.

Thanks, O. I was beginning to think it was me. Sigh.

__________________
- We must be the change we wish to see in the world -
Mahatma Gandhi

Well as a business owner in the neighborhood with a business that can only afford to be open 2.5 days, I hear you and I also sympathise with La Naz. UCity may be approaching "full occupancy" but until further West Philly starts to approach the residential density of yore you really have to specialize or have a side business to make a go of it on Baltimore Ave, IMO. Even for us, the fact we own the building and that Christine can be working on making jewelry in the down time sections of our retail day are key to making the business work. There is no way we could do it otherwise. Us, the woman who owns La Naz, the woman who owns UC Pets - most the new retail on Baltimore Ave. work other jobs to keep afloat while we build our businesses. Even at Kulture, they have a second business - their musical carreer as Kindred which is sporadic but I believe helps rather than hurts their ability to build a business. I hear you but in the big picture, Baltimore Ave. is still in the early days of its renaisance as a commercial strip.

Have you ever tried Abraccio for a Sunday brunch? I hear its pretty good. For keys, hav eyou ever gone to the little keys and shoe-repair place across from the ticket window in Market East station before you hop the trolley home from Center City?

Sean, while I understand what you're speaking of and your examples make it more understandable, I'm not talking about JUST West Philly but the city in general. I had a dentist open on weekends (mine laughed at me when I asked about this). When I tried to get electricity, PECO had a 2 hour block open from like 7-9 am on a Sat as the only time I could come in and set it up (I believe it's more now but not much, 4 hours maybe). Have you seen a bank open on a weekend in the area? I haven't (but I gave up on trying 2 years ago). It's not that hard to have one night a week where you're open late and then open late the next day.

I'm not at all saying that everything should be open 24/7, just saying that maybe making things a little easier for those wanting the service would be great.

As a side note to La Naz and other stores with odd hours, at least put a note in the window so people who do want to try have the ability to know when it's open.

Abbraccio's Bruch Menu

I've been there at least twice for brunch. It's not expensive at all and the food is decent. I'm sensing this will be sean's next place for a UCity get together!

Must agree with O, Sean. I sympathize, I really do. But a business only remains a business if it first and foremost, serves the customer, no? I don't expect a 24-hour city like New York either; before I moved here, I lived in Jersey City for a year and it certainly wasn't 'open all night'. But most of the stores stayed open until at least 7 or 8 in the business areas and later than that in the residential areas. Banks, dentists, etc., had Saturday hours, even if it was only a half day.

People on the blog and elsewhere get their noses out of joint when anyone makes a comment about Philadelphia being an 'also-ran' but really.... it's either gonna be a big city or a small town -- it can't want to be perceived as one but operate like the other. And as O said, even a tiny sign in the window would help. Another example is that restaurant on 52nd street (George's, I think??) that so many people told me about when I was living in Center City. Once I moved to UC, I couldn't wait to go to the legendary George's. Well, the legendary George's closed up shop one day, lock, stock and barrel with NO sign out front saying that it was closed, under new management, nothing. It just looked as if it had been abandoned.

I just don't get it.

IMHO, if business owners cannot devote full time to their businesses for financial reasons, then don't open it until you can. Don't put up a shingle and pull up the gates and have people walk by, week after week only to find that you're not there. Because speaking as a consumer, I'm not likely to wait for you... I'm likely to go somewhere else and give up trying. It's like bad websites that post, "coming soon". Most webmasters stopped doing that because studies have shown that you have about 8 seconds before users get disgusted and move on... and if they find what they're looking for elsewhere, they're not likely to come back to find out whether the site has been populated or not.

__________________
- We must be the change we wish to see in the world -
Mahatma Gandhi

Well then, more likely than not you will simply get never get any new businesses and no services at all in the neighborhoods, period, if thats what you prefer. Curruption in City Hall, overly complex and onerous licensing processes that stretch on for years at L&I, the Business Priveledge Tax - all that boring, more politically oriented stuff a lot of people argue about here on the blog has a direct effect on the ability of small businesses to make a go of it in Philadelphia and it directly effects the options available to you as a consumer. If I didn't post from my day job, you would never hear from me at all on this forum. Sure "the customer comes first" sounds nice, but in reality putting food on the table and paying your ownpersonal rent or mortgage comes well before "customer service", sorry if you have a problem with that.

RE: Big George's
Big George ran that restaurant with his wife for years. His wife passed and looked for someone to run the business. He recruited the old owner of Sassy's which used to be at 49th and Catherine. the reason she feailed didn't have anything to do with her ability to make good soul food, or even make a profit selling it - it was because she totaly neglected her local city taxes including the BPT and because L&I cited her for not changing her signage from "Big George's" to the new name "The Garden Vine". The fines and added up and she just bailed. One of our consigners at MiaLou has a relative that worked in the kitchen at "the Garden Vine" and she lost a full-time job as a result of it. Big George never complained about the signage issue - someone at L&I just took on themselves to enforce it - even though the failure of the business that still had his name on the sign obviously reflected badly on him. I assume he is still looking for someon else to operate the restaurant or straight up buy the whole building currently - obviously these things sometime take time. Remember my and lawmummy's posts about the 6 month process it takes to just legally hang a sign in this town.

I hear your complaints and I agree that except for imigrants a lot of potential entrepeneurs are often a little too timid to make the jump in areas on the bounce back but if you think you can do a better job, I challenge you to start a business yourself. Nothing would make me happier to wee you succeed, particularly in UCity.