Breakfast at Sulimay's

Inside a Fishtown institution

If you don’t live in Fishtown, you might never have been to Sulimay’s Restaurant. In fact, you’ve probably never even heard of it.

Though its location—the corner of Berks and Girard—is near the epicenter of Fishtown’s restaurant revolution, just a block away from high-end newcomers like Kraftwork, Lloyd, and Girard, this unassuming diner doesn’t draw too many customers from outside the neighborhood. Unless the vertical red letters that spell RESTAURANT down the side of a whitewashed corner row house happen to catch your eye, it’s easy to miss. But don’t let that fool you: In Fishtown, Sulimay’s is where business is done. The chefs at the neighborhood’s hot new restaurants might amaze discerning customers with craft charcuterie and gourmet pizza at night, but this is where they eat breakfast.

Inside, Sulimay’s is a classic Philadelphia diner. Not much has changed in its 35 years in business. There are mirrors on the wall traced with gold leaf, wood paneling, and banquettes with patterns straight out of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Customers can choose from the row of spinning stools at the Formica counter or a booth. There are plenty of Fishtown memorabilia: local cartoonist Jeffro Kilpatrick, known for his “Sketches of Fishtown” project, drew a loving tribute to owner Lucretia Sulimay that now hangs in a place of honor in the cramped vestibule. Children’s drawings decorate the doorway by the register, and on the wall there’s a photo of the street party that overtook Fishtown on D-Day at the end of World War II.

The decor may be out of style, but Sulimay’s—pronounced “Sellimee’s” by true locals—is still going strong. After all, crisp hash browns, homemade spicy-sweet breakfast sausage and servers who call you “hon” are always in demand.

The kid-friendly atmosphere also draws families, and young customers who clean their plates are invited to choose a lollipop from the bucket behind the register. More than a few children (including my 5-year-old daughter, Lucia) have grown up eating here. “I’ve had at least six very pregnant women go into labor after eating my pancakes,” says Lucretia. “And when their kids are ready for solid food, they have their first pancake here.” She bought this place 13 years ago. Fishtown has changed since then—and you can’t understand what’s so special about Sulimay’s unless you understand Fishtown.

To say that Sulimay’s is steeped in Fishtown history would perhaps be an injustice: Sulimay’s is Fishtown history. About three blocks away, in 1682, William Penn signed a treaty with the Turtle Clan of the Lenni Lenape people on a spot in what is now Penn Treaty Park. The new European inhabitants of the area were shipbuilders and the fishermen for whom Fishtown is named, harvesting the bounty of shad that then swam the Delaware River. In the 19th century, glassworks, breweries and distilleries employed immigrant laborers. The cultural legacy of the Irish, Polish and German workers who settled in the neighborhood is still strongly felt today. Heavy industry kept Fishtown bustling through the mid-20th century.

But the good times—or, at any rate, the times when you could just walk into a factory and ask the foreman for a job—eventually stopped rolling. In the 1970s and 1980s, the economy contracted and good union jobs that had supported families moved overseas or dried up. Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Detroit: Those who could afford to leave the city did. Those who couldn’t, or were prevented from doing so by redlining and racism, stayed and dealt with the aftermath. Industry fled and left in its place emptiness and poverty. Working-class Fishtown struggled, and black-market industries filled the void—especially heroin. In the ‘80s and ‘90s the neighborhood gained a new reputation as a place to score dope.

In the 21st century, though, the neighborhood’s changes can be ascribed to a new force: gentrification. Things shifted shortly after the turn of the millennium, when outsiders went from thinking of Fishtown as a “bad” neighborhood to thinking of it as cheap real estate, full of cute little houses ripe for refurbishment by anyone with the cash to get started. Over the past decade, developers have swarmed the Frankford-Girard corridor, turning dive bars into gastropubs and run-down row homes into sleek, eco-friendly dream homes with roof decks—and pushing the pushers and their customers north and west.

Those homes, with six-digit price tags unknown in the neighborhood a decade before, aren’t for the locals. They bring in a new crowd, one full of artists, architects, pizzaiolos and pickle makers, a Rust Belt answer to Portlandia that mixes somewhat uneasily with the proud, tight-knit natives of the neighborhood. Fishtown also is a lot less segregated than it used to be, but in the process gentrification has displaced quite a few working-class white people in favor of an economically and racially mixed set of newcomers. The resulting balance has been uneasy, with hostility occasionally breaking out on both sides. Sulimay’s has occupied a front-row seat for it all.

For the last 13 years, so has Lucretia Sulimay. She is the heart of this place, not to mention its brains and its palate. Small and fineboned, with dark hair and a quick, warm smile, she is constantly in motion: greeting customers, making coffee, running plates out from the kitchen, chatting with regulars. She is the third of seven children raised in Pennsauken, New Jersey, most of whom now work in the hair-care industry (you’ll find Sulimay’s Barbershop just down Girard and the slick new Sulimay’s Urban Salon over on Frankford).