Ellen Yin’s newest Philly restaurant doesn’t have a grand opening date yet, but it does have a vintage-looking light blue Lambretta scooter parked out front.
Why? To set the mood.
The acclaimed restaurateur’s latest project is Bar Cicci, an all-day aperitivo bar soft-opening Aug. 18 at 1620 Sansom St., just next door to Uchi. Inspired by Yin’s longstanding, almost obsessive love of northern Italy, the bar is an ode to the country’s casual drinking culture, with classic pastries in the morning followed by sandwiches in the afternoon and snacks and spritzes in the evening.
Yin has traveled to Italy more than any other country. There, “a bar is a place where you go in the morning to have an espresso and meet up with your neighbors, chit-chatting away,” she said. “And that morning ritual turns into sandwiches and gelato at lunch time, and then [drinks] at dinner.”
Pronounced “Bar CHEE-CHEE,” the name is a play on the Italian word ciccio, a term of endearment for something small and plump. The menu — curated by Yin and Christina McKeough, the culinary director for High Street and the Bread Room — will be a smorgasbord of little things. The dayside, counter service-only lineup will feature traditional Italian pastries and sandwiches. Starting at 4 p.m., the menu will switch to showcase 20 small plates and a rotating array of cicchetti (or snacks), with prices falling between $5 and $20 each.
Yin envisions Bar Cicci as a catchall space for those who live and work around Rittenhouse Square. In theory, a customer could stop in three times in one day: first for coffee and a pastry on the way to work, then again for a business lunch, and once more for pre-dinner drinks.
Cicci will be Yin’s sixth Philly restaurant as part of High Street Hospitality, the restaurant group Yin cofounded with chef Eli Kulp. Fork, her first, opened in 1997 and went on to become one of Old City’s most enduring fine dining restaurants. She would follow it up with High Street — one of the city’s first all-day cafes, now located in Center City’s Franklin Residences — and a.kitchen, the Rittenhouse Square hotel restaurant. The Bread Room, known for its grown-up pop-tarts and morning buns, is the group’s bakery.
Yin and McKeough had been working on Bar Cicci since April 2025. It’s their first themed project. “We don’t just get to do what we want here,” Yin said. Everything in the space has some tie to northern Italy, down to its groovy accent pillows.
Bar Cicci’s 30-seat dining room channels 1970s Milan. Plush burnt-orange banquettes decorated with Missoni-style striped pillows wrap around black marble tables that interior designer Marguerite Rodgers repurposed from the lobby bar inside the Franklin Residences.
The counter is outfitted with a modernized Faema E-61, at one point Italy’s best-selling and only semiautomatic espresso machine. Even the dome-shaped mid-century modern light fixtures — a holdover from when Sandler’s on 9th occupied High Street’s space at 101 S. Ninth St. — cast a slightly hazy glow, as if you’re sitting in a scene from a film.
The vibe is inspired by Yin and McKeough’s favorite bars from research trips to Venice and Milan, such as Milan’s Bar Basso, where Yin recalled being offered seemingly endless pours of Campari. The duo intend for Bar Cicci to be an introduction to Italy’s slower-paced aperitivo hour, a time in the early evening when lower-ABV cocktails are paired with bite-sized snacks designed to get people socializing without pretense.
Aperitivo is “supersocial,” McKeough said. “A lot of bars in Italy, people aren’t even sitting down. They’re standing up.”
Sandwiches, spritzes, and snacks
The centerpiece of Bar Cicci’s evening menu will be a rotating array of cicchetti, crostini-esque bites that you typically eat with a glass of wine while standing. The restaurant will offer about a dozen at a time, in sets of three or five, all prepared on McKeough’s version of an Italian baguette, which is chewier than its French counterpart.
The bread was the hardest to perfect, according to McKeough, and the most crucial to get right: “No matter where we went, [the cicchetti] were always so easy to eat … you could take a bite without it falling apart.” She anticipates Bar Cicci’s opening lineup will include Venetian standards such as salted cod and tuna with eggs.
The Bread Room will bake all the bread for Bar Cicci’s lunchtime sandwiches, will which include a long olive oil sfilatino loaf filled with mortadella; tuna and jammy egg on slider-sized rolls; and Roman-style pizza biancas layered with eggplant, bomba, and radicchio or anchovies, watercress, and tomato tonnato.
As for the grab-and-go case, it will contain tried-and-true pastries that range from trendy cream-stuffed maritozzi to Italian-style chocolate chip pound cake and five versions of cornetti, which McKeough likened to a “reverse-engineered croissant.”
Bar Cicci will serve dark-roast espresso and coffee from Arkansas-based roaster Onyx and Italian-style wines from Mural City Cellars, the popular Fishtown winery. The restaurant is going all in on aperitivi with its cocktail lineup, which will include a spaghett-style Aperol spritz, foamy espresso martinis al freddo, and the Garibaldi, a Campari cocktail made with the juice of a whole orange.
For McKeough and Yin, the hope is that the food, if not cocktails, will make people linger.
“There’s just something about a little bite that makes you want to have another drink,” McKeough said.
Bar Cicci, 1620 Sansom St. Suite C3, 215-515-3793, barcicciphl.com. Hours: 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday (to start). Soft-opening Aug. 18.
