COMMISSION ROW Pacers Sports & Entertainment and Cunningham Restaurant Group have a slam dunk with their latest venture. Written by Neil Charles Interiors photographed by The Addison Group, food photographed by Kelly Schuyler A few days before the NBA All-Star weekend in February, our publisher and I decided to run the gauntlet of the downtown crowds to pay a visit to the highly anticipated and recently opened dining and entertainment venue, Commission Row, while seats in the dining room were still available. An overnight hit with reviewers and social media types alike, this upscale multicomplex was already generating the kind of fanfare usually reserved for spots helmed by celebrity chefs in Chicago or New York. A partnership between Pacers Sports & Entertainment and Cunningham Restaurant Group, Commission Row, situated on Bicentennial Unity Plaza just steps from Gainbridge Fieldhouse, offers 30,000 square feet of dining and entertainment space in a premium downtown location. Featuring a lower-level speakeasy, Mel’s, as well as a street-level chophouse and seafood restaurant, this luxurious hospitality site also boasts an upper-level event space catering to private parties. Above, which offers heated outdoor terraces overlooking Bicentennial Plaza, with its basketball court that converts into an ice skating rink over the winter months, is equipped to comfortably host over 200 guests. Consisting of several distinct spaces, including a smaller private dining room overlooking Delaware Street, this is not your run-of-the-mill event venue. Furnishings and finishes are refined, verging on opulent, and the overall impression is that this is an extension of the restaurant below, only on a larger scale. We were fortunate to receive a private tour before Above had hosted its first event; we were impressed by the scale and silence of the yet-to-be-used kitchen, its pans and dishes still shrink-wrapped in anticipation of the deluge of meals it would produce over the following week.
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