Fairmount’s most charming all-day café levels up at its new Rittenhouse location

Philadelphia’s food scene has a lot going for it, but one major shortcoming is hard to ignore: Many coffee shops start closing up at 5 p.m. (or earlier), and other third spaces have dried up post-pandemic.

That makes Rittenhouse’s newest cafe, Musette — serving a full coffee menu, small plates, and non-alcoholic drinks all day — a welcome addition to the scene. True, it closes at 5 p.m. Sunday through Tuesday, but the sunny corner spot at 20th and Locust covers a wider spread the rest of the week: open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday. It’s a perfect low-key option to either start the night or wind down the day in Center City.

This is Musette’s second location — its first is at 25th and Aspen in Fairmount — and its ambitions are slightly higher here. Aside from the more expansive hours and the NA offerings, Musette Rittenhouse switches over from counter to table service in midafternoon and has an evening-appropriate array of snacks, including baked halloumi and patatas bravas, sliced-to-order charcuterie and cheese, and boquerones and gildas (the Basque pintxo composed of anchovy, olives, and pickled peppers).

That’s rounded out by café fare that you can also find at the Fairmount location: overnight oats, various sandwiches (egg with confit tomato, smoked salmon tartine, prosciutto and scamorza panino, fig and brie baguette, etc.), seasonal items like caprese salad and house-made gazpacho, and a selection of tinned fish. With the exception of Metropolitan Bakery pastries, which are gone upon sellout, everything on the menu is available all day.

To drink, there’s a coffee program featuring Rival Bros. beans and “haute teas” from Steven Smith Teamakers. Among the NA beverages are canned beers and cocktails ($5-$8), a glass of sparkling chardonnay ($13), and several house-made zero-proof cocktails, including a Manhattan riff (Uptown, $12), a daiquiri ($9), and an espresso martini ($12). If you want to have a real chardonnay or pale ale over your smoked trout and marinated olives, you can bring your own booze. You can pick up an excellent, reasonably priced bottle of wine at Cork, a block south; for beer, head down one more block to Food & Friends at 20th and Spruce.

One thing you can’t get at Musette, in either location: free Wi-Fi. (They won’t admonish you for using your laptop, though.) Owner Michael Harding said he made that decision when he first opened in Fairmount in 2021 to indicate that Musette was intended as a café, as opposed to a typical coffee shop. It’s a choice that’s meant to buck some negative connotations.

“It’s not always the case, but a lot of people I talk to, when I ask what are a couple of things they think of when they think of a modern American coffee shop, they’re like, ‘[Bad] service and a bunch of computers,’” he said. “Being positive, being welcoming, having good service, those are the things that I hang my hat on, and what I think differentiate us from other places that serve coffee in the city.”

Harding took over the space at 238 S. 20th St. in late February, not long after Ultimo Rittenhouse cleared out. Aside from heavily caulking and whitewashing the brick walls, he installed built-in benches, a wavy green-and-white tile floor, and marble-topped tables, creating a similar aesthetic to the Fairmount original. It soft-opened in early June. When the Rittenhouse cafe transitions to table service around 3 p.m., stools are put out at floating tables that front 20th Street, allowing room for around 15 inside. Sidewalk seating on 20th and Locust extends that number in good weather.

Harding, an alum of the erstwhile Plenty Cafe group and a trained sommelier, said that he’d love to eventually secure a winery or liquor license one day, but that’s not in the cards anytime soon. In the meantime, he’s delving into the world of actually good non-alcoholic spirits, a rapidly expanding category that’s giving bartenders more to work with. “Five, six years ago, if somebody came up to my bar and said they wanted a non-alcoholic drink, I’d just shake you up some juice and give you a float and a pretty garnish,” he said. Now, with zero-proof amaros, whiskeys, and aperitivos, spirit-forward NA drinks can stand on their own.

Musette takes its name from a cyclist’s term for a sling filled with provisions used during long-distance bicycle races. Harding is a hard-core cyclist — he’s heading to Iceland this month for a race — and opened the Fairmount location partly as a spot for the Musette cycling club to convene. (In future, he plans to broadcast professional cycling races onto the wall at the Rittenhouse location.)

“My original thought was that I just gonna be in there watching cycling and making coffee and chatting with people,” Harding said. The neighborhood had other plans for the corner shop, which replaced a salon and a dry cleaner. “Day one, there was a line down the block, and from that point on it was super, super busy.”

Harding is hoping to replicate that success in Rittenhouse, creating a third space in the city’s dining epicenter. “I’m not trying to be a destination restaurant,” he said. “It’s essentially more a place to hang.”

Musette Rittenhouse at 238 S. 20th St. is open 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 8.p.m. Saturday, and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. See musettephiladelphia.com for more info.