The new Honeysuckle is thought-provoking, original — and totally delicious

If you have yet to wrap your hands — or mind — around the $65 “McDonald’s Money” burger at Honeysuckle, let me give you a preview of Philly’s most audacious new splurge.

Chefs Omar Tate and Cybille St.Aude-Tate shower the burger with summer truffles and gild the Jersey beef patties with shiny swatches of edible 24-karat gold sheets. There’s caviar, too, the briny beads cascading in flows of special sauce over the double burger stack, which is layered with molten Cooper Sharp. And it’s all between two plush cushions of house-baked Japanese shokupan milk bread. The caviar gives it an extra pop of oceanic umami, while some holy trinity (minced peppers, celery, and onions) and mushroom garum mixed into the meat lends an earthy Creole through line and vegetal boost to each juicy bite.

Is it an indulgence? Absolutely. Is it also delicious? Oh yeah. Especially alongside the crispy, tallow-cooked fries dusted with ”new bay” spice, whose paprika blush is piqued with mustard and ginger.

The married chef-partners here know exactly how to take a joke and wry cultural reference — this one rooted in Eddie Murphy’s stand-up complaint about his mother’s ugly DIY McDonald’s replacement burger — and lift it to where it’s so good it’s not (quite) a joke anymore.

The McDonald’s Money burger — of which there are 20 available per night — is an essential add-on to the $95 four-course prix fixe dinner experience here because it exemplifies the joyful, irreverent, no-limits spirit of the expansive new Honeysuckle, whose goal, Tate says, “is to make delicious food that feels contemporary and recenters you to Blackness.”

Honeysuckle’s move this spring, from a tiny West Philly market-cafe into a spacious new address on North Broad Street, complete with a full-service bar, has given it the room to fully blossom into a dynamic destination celebrating the culture of the Black American diaspora. It isn’t just thrilling for Philadelphians: Honeysuckle is worthy of national note alongside projects from other top chefs propelling the Black culinary narrative across the country, in restaurants like Gregory Gourdet’s Kann in Portland, Ore., Serigne Mbaye’s Dakar NOLA in New Orleans, and Kwame Onwuachi’s Tatiana in New York.

From the daily cornucopia of gorgeous vegetables harvested from their farm plot in Chester County ringing a silky black-eyed pea dip to dishes that draw on flavors from Haiti to West Philly to the American South, the range of the culinary repertoire and inspirations — frequently historical, always personal — never fails to delight, illuminate, and surprise.

One moment I’m eating raw oysters splashed with the same passionfruit mignonette the couple made one evening when they were still courting in 2020. (“It’s part of our love story,” says Tate.) The next moment, we’re diving into a fragrant bowl of hot tamales inspired by the century-old Black food tradition of the Mississippi Delta. Tate subs grits for Mexican-style masa inside the corn husks, which are stuffed with braised oxtail and Wagyu beef cheeks, then simmers the tamales in a cuminy beef broth spiked with the house hot sauce. They’re served alongside chile-stewed limas, green tomato salsa verde, saltine crackers made of blue masa, and a cloudy shot of smoky corn milk and liquor.

I’ve come to expect such extraordinary feasts over the past five years of watching Honeysuckle build momentum through various stages as a pop-up; chef residency; various farm plots; and Honeysuckle Provisions, its small-but-beloved brick-and-mortar location for “Dolla Hoagies” and the ambitious UNTITLED. tasting menu dinner series.

The move does mean Honeysuckle has left behind an affordable outlet offering quality food in West Philly for destination dining in Center City, where the $95 dinner menu has priced out some longstanding customers.

“That’s not lost on us,” St.Aude-Tate says, “but there are other ways we’re gathering with community.”

She notes the monthly Open Studio night events they’ve launched with three-course menus for around $50 (including beverage and dessert), plus a nightly à la carte option at Honeysuckle’s bar with plates ranging from $12-$40, not counting the burger. “We do want to open another version of Provisions again,” she says. “But it’s really difficult at a fast-casual price point to give our staff a living wage, bring all these wonderful things together with intentionality, and also stay afloat.”

With decades of fine-dining experience between them, the prix fixe menu they’re producing now is absolutely on par value-wise with similar competition across the city. And this sprawling 89-seat space, four times larger than the cafe, has given their team a vast canvas to fully showcase the multidimensional aspects of the Honeysuckle experience, which incorporates poetry, music, and visual art, as well as food and drink.

A distinctive new beverage program driven by St.Aude-Tate creatively riffs on Caribbean themes (plantain-washed cognac for the Zou Zou; a dirty martini variation spiked with Scotch bonnet peppers and fermented pikliz; a clarified milk punch called Black Cake that tastes like Caribbean fruit cake). There’s a natural wine program coordinated by lead bartender Abbie Beach showcasing Black and female producers, while fermentation director Jamaar Julal pops up throughout the meal with glasses bearing all kinds of surprises, like an earthy kvass fermented from scraps of the delicious acorn bread or the nonalcoholic “Holy Trinity soda” that tastes like Doc Brown’s with an oniony Creole kick.

The industrial wood and exposed brick bones of the former Clementine’s Stable Cafe have been transformed into a veritable gallery for original art, beginning with the vine-wrapped altar St.Aude-Tate constructed near the entrance with Haitian water pots and photos of inspirational elders (Edna Lewis, John Coltrane, Jean-Michel Basquiat). A set of two dramatic paintings hanging over the dining room, created by Tate and entitled Hot Sauce Is Thy Blood, relay a darker tale of personal history — the murder of a great-great-uncle over a land dispute in South Carolina that prompted his family to leave for Philadelphia in 1929. Tate used leftover pulp from chiles fermented for Honeysuckle’s hot sauce to create a black-painted “scar” on both works as a symbol of persistent violence: “You can never experience true joy without this harm being fully acknowledged,” he says.

Being able to bridge such a broad range of emotions through a dialogue between food and art is a difficult thing to do, but it is one of this couple’s greatest gifts. The joy expressed at Honeysuckle is undeniable. That same pulp is used for the “hot Cheetos dust” that shimmers with spice atop the deep-fried chicken thighs that come sandwiched between a flaky biscuit at Sunday brunch, a welcome revival of one of the old cafe’s greatest hits.

The steady flow of new ideas here is as vibrant as ever. Silky pink curls of the outstanding house-cured country ham come bundled over crispy balls of cloud-like hush puppies dabbed with ham fat aioli and the tangy crunch of holy trinity relish. Honeysuckle’s rendition of seafood Alfredo, a fixture on soul food menus across the city, features ribbons of fresh fettuccine, a creamy sauce boosted by garlicky sofrito, and the luxury of a head-on prawn, lump crab, and a half lobster tail.

The barbecued sweet potato looks like a party; the big Beauregard is burnished red with molasses, orange juice, and spice, topped with the crunchy white bursts of tiny popped sorghum, and served over a tangy sweet potato-hoisin miso sauce. Then, suddenly, Tate appears from the kitchen with an off-menu surprise, a garlicky salami cured inside a corn husk, a technique he gleaned from the first-hand accounts of formerly enslaved cooks gathered by the Federal Writers’ Project in the late 1930s.

Such thought-provoking plates recall the UNTITLED. tasting menu series that St.Aude-Tate said was “proof of concept” they were capable of producing destination-worthy dinners, not just the excellent hoagies and black-eyed pea scrapple breakfast sandwiches the market became known for. But if those menus served to a handful of diners each night leaned into the experimental (i.e. the “Clorindy” beef tartare, darkened with squid ink as a metaphor for blackface), Tate likens this current project to Honeysuckle’s “mainstream album,” with so many seats to fill consistently that it must retain some measure of broad appeal.

The recently launched à la carte Sunday brunch, ranging from $13 to $26 a plate, offers a more affordable and easy introduction to the sunny new space in that spirit, with popular draws like that chicken biscuit, a fluffy omelet covered in tangy crawfish étouffée, and a butterflied whole fried porgy over eggs and buttery grits that redefines the classic Philly breakfast.

Honeysuckle’s knockout roast chicken for dinner was also created with that goal of more mainstream hits in mind. It’s marinated for 36 hours in Haitian epis (a peppery green Caribbean spice blend) before being butter-roasted and served with charred collards dressed in a spicy candied lemon syrup. (It might have been even a home-grown chicken had a fox not devoured the entire flock of 50 birds they were raising on the five acres they are currently cultivating in Pipersville at Ploughshare Farms with farmer Teddy Moynihan.)

That chicken is also reflective of a greater-than-ever presence for Haitian flavors drawn from St.Aude-Tate’s family background. The contemporary update to Haitian spaghetti (dubbed “$Pay4Haiti” in a nod to rapper Mach-Hommy), made with fresh chestnut flour noodles in a punchy seafood gravy featuring crawfish boudin and West African-style X0 sauce, had a depth of fermented spice that still resonates in my mind.

It’s no small feat to scale a cafe into a much larger operation with more than twice the staff and a more structured and formal style of dining, but the warm and enthusiastic front-house staff, led by Beach, Jalal, and manager Chelsea Martin, have made the new Honeysuckle feel like a naturally complete and welcoming experience.

If anything feels like a slight step back from the previous location, it would be the desserts, which were less compelling than the savory courses. The 7-Up cake with black lime preserves icing was the most satisfying choice, while a Champagne water ice floated tableside with a pour of bubbly was a festive finale. My favorite Honeysuckle sweet, though, came at brunch. The French toast looked completely normal, but, whoa. ... What sorcery transformed me into such a ravenous French toast-devouring beast? The pillowy shokupan bread soaked in Haitian rum custard? The foraged juneberries tumbling over a vanilla cloud of whipped sour cream? The deep amber sweetness of real maple syrup?

“Everything [else] is a secret,” Tate tells me, as if I needed any more reasons to keep coming back. The Honeysuckle journey continues to bloom in the most magnetic, original, and delightful ways possible.

631 N. Broad St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19123, 215-307-3316; honeysucklephl.com

Dinner Wednesday and Thursday, 5-10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, until 11 p.m. Sunday brunch, 10 a.m.-4p.m.

Four-course prix fixe, $95. Brunch plates, $13-$26.

Wheelchair accessible.

Not ideal for gluten-free diners, but modifications can be made on many dishes.

Dinner highlights: daily harvest; hush puppies with country ham; Haitian spaghetti; epis roasted chicken; barbecue sweet potato; McDonald’s Money burger; hot tamales. Brunch: chicken biscuit; fish and grits; crawfish omelette; French toast.

Drinks: The well-rounded beverage program features Haitian rums, natural wines, inventive house-ferments, and cocktails finely tuned to the Afrocentric theme showcasing Black producers and Caribbean ingredients.