On the Side: Things are looking up downstairs

Commuters who ventured westerly beyond the old, 17th Street boundary of Suburban Station last week found themselves encountering, after a set of frosted doors, a secret garden of underground eating.

The terra was still a bit incognito. It wasn't immediately clear exactly where to line up for the gravied hot roast pork sandwiches being dispensed at the DiBruno Bros. stand. Or whether the milk-chocolate-dipped cherries at Sook Hee's Produce were for sale or being offered gratis as samples.

The ropes, so to speak, were that new at the Market at Comcast Center (more precisely, below Comcast Center). It was open to the public: In fact, 300 fresh-faced office workers were noshing by lunch time. But if you didn't know it was there, well, it was hard to know it was there.

The market/food court - it has seating for 400 - was all the more remarkable for what it was not. Which was more of the same. As any denizen of the city's concourses can testify, those sunless precincts - freshened up though they've been - have remained resolutely inhospitable to even the most modest upgrades in food choices.

Trudge through Suburban Station, as nearly 100,000 commuters do each day, and behold the absolute lowest common fast-food denominators - McDonald's, pizza, burritos, Juan Valdez coffee. The crown jewel, pathetically? A Dunkin' Donuts.

With that much traffic, not to mention the thousands of office workers stacked up above, it has been a supremely neglected space - and a grandly wasted opportunity.

That all changes behind the frosted doors, between and below 17th and 18th, JFK Boulevard and Arch Street. (The new Table 31's elegant outdoor plaza cafe is upstairs at street level, its fountains spouting like a pod of whales.)

Three things come quickly into focus. First, these aren't the usual generic franchises. They're enterprises with venerable Philadelphia pedigrees, chief among them DiBruno's of Italian Market fame; Termini Bros. bakery, the South Philly staple since 1921; and Under the C Seafood, Suzi Kim's latest iteration of her Johnny Yi's fish stand at the Reading Terminal Market.

Secondly, the air is clean, the lighting refreshingly fresh, and the hallways of amped guitars silent (though the brushed aluminum chairs here make some of the most annoying scraping sounds in the station).

But there isn't the bland sterility of your typical food court: Columns are wrapped with quilted aluminum, resonant of the city's lunch trucks. Brick ovens yawn. Live lobsters loll, the size of boxing gloves; I had one weighed: It was 6.2 pounds, $74 total.

Finally, clamshells of prepared foods - and hits of Illy coffee and slices of whole-wheat vegetarian pizza and an overabundance of bottled water - are the main attraction. But there's a sprawling produce section (maybe too sprawling for an office-commuter crowd), warm rotisserie chickens (half or whole), cheese plates, boxed Italian cookies, cannoli shells filled to order from dangling pastry bags, and a sparkling seafood counter that, if you call ahead, will broil your hunk of salmon to go.

It will never be mistaken for the grand sweep of the oyster bar beneath Manhattan's Grand Central Station.

But it is welcome proof that the city's underground concourses are not eternally beyond redemption.

In a few months, Susanna Foo, the Asian fusion queen, promises to add a Chinese dumpling kitchen to the lineup.

If the secret isn't already out of the bag by then, that ought to blow it for good.