A new grocery store and West African restaurant will open on the ground floor of the new apartment building on 43rd and Chestnut Streets.
Alterra Property Group, the developer of the new building, has announced that the commercial space on the first floor of the building will be leased to Grocery Outlet and Kilimandjaro, a Senegalese restaurant. Construction on the building began in 2020 and was expected to be completed in 2023, but the project faced delays due to the pandemic.
Grocery Outlet is a supermarket that offers discounted, overstocked, and closed-out products from name-brand food suppliers. Currently, there are over 400 locations across the United States, with five of them in Philadelphia.
The West African restaurant Kilimandjaro is a Senegalese restaurant owned by Youma Ba and is one of the first African-owned restaurants to be approved by the Mayor’s Commission on African and Caribbean Affairs. As a family-owned restaurant, Kilimandjaro offers a casual dining experience with authentic West African cuisine.
As a former occupant of the shopping center that once stood in the place of the new apartment building, Kilimanjaro had to move its business due to the construction process, and the restaurant currently operates at 4519 Baltimore Avenue. On Wednesday, an employee told the PhillyVoice that the business hopes to return to its original location as early as this spring or summer.
The proposed building is a 275-unit mixed-use development building with seven stories and 11,000 square feet of commercial space on the first floor. The residential space is expected to cover nearly 150,000 square feet with amenity spaces, a common space, a rooftop deck, and an underground garage.
The site was previously occupied by a one-story strip mall, which was one of the few buildings demolished in order to continue the city’s Real Estate Development plan. The plan entailed renovating and constructing academic, commercial, residential, medical, and mixed-use buildings.
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