Garces Trading Co. closes at the Kimmel Center

Garces Trading Co., the cafe and mini-market in the lobby of the Kimmel Center, has closed after only a year in operation. Further, the long-term future of Volvér, the posh Jose Garces restaurant on the Kimmel’s Spruce Street side, seems murky.

In a joint statement to The Inquirer, the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center Inc. (POKC) and restaurant operator Ideation Hospitality described Garces Trading’s closing as a mutual decision, effective Monday. Scott Campanella, Ideation’s chief executive officer, said in an interview that Garces Trading had become “a financial burden.”

A POKC spokesperson said it hoped that another operator would open a new cafe, also accessible from the Broad Street entrance, by summer.

In the meantime, the bar in the lobby near Verizon Hall that serves snacks and refreshments will stay open.

Ideation operates Garces’ restaurants, such as Amada, Buena Onda, and the Olde Bar, as well as Garces Events, which has operated out of the Kimmel Center for most of the last 12 years.

Garces, who is Ideation’s chief culinary officer, said Tuesday that he expected Volvér, the posh restaurant on the Kimmel Center’s Spruce Street side, to close in June, the end of the Kimmel’s 2023-24 season.

Campanella said he was not aware of any final decision on the part of POKC regarding the Volvér space or its relationship with Ideation and Garces Events.

The 34-seat Volvér, and its bar next door, opened in 2014 with dinner seatings for which tickets were required. More recently, Garces oversaw a guest-chef series at Volvér that provided visibility to chefs from underrepresented communities.

Garces Trading Co. was launched in 2010 at 1111 Locust St. in Washington Square West. It combined Garces-branded groceries, a restaurant, and, for a time, a small Fine Wines and Good Spirits shop that enabled the restaurant to operate as a BYOB. It closed amid Garces Restaurant Group’s 2018 bankruptcy. Ideation revived it, first as a pandemic-era ghost kitchen.

The other Garces Trading location, in the lobby of the Cira Centre across from 30th Street Station, is unaffected by the closing at the Kimmel.

Garces Trading’s opening added a quotidian use to the Kimmel lobby at Broad and Spruce Streets. Inquirer culture reporter Peter Dobrin wrote that “with the opening of a cafe in its lobby, Philadelphia’s major arts center is taking another run at inviting the city in.”

“Yes, I know: In one sense, a few dozen seats and a place to have a macchiato and a country-ham-on-baguette is a modest gesture,” he wrote. “But quietly and convincingly, the cafe is already easing one of the arts center’s long-standing deficits. It has made the institution less opaque — metaphorically and physically.”

Dobrin observed that “when you pass by on Spruce, you look through glass to see a warm social tableau inside — people eating, drinking, and talking. This legibility of activity within has never been possible in this prime spot. Cafe crowds, though modest so far, are bringing a level of steady activity not seen at the Kimmel in many years.”