Award-winning Friday Saturday Sunday restaurant plans to expand with a second kitchen and even more exclusive new tasting menu

For years, Chad and Hanna Williams hunted for a space to open a sequel to Friday Saturday Sunday, their acclaimed Center City restaurant.

They have found it — right next door.

Rather than open something new, the Williamses plan to expand Friday Saturday Sunday, which in 2023 was named the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Restaurant for its intimate airs, top-flight cocktails, and Chad Williams’ eight-course tasting menu, which melds Euro techniques with Caribbean, Southern, and soul food influences.

And they are ready to shoot the moon with an 18-seat chef’s counter that will become part of a new show kitchen serving what they call a “more top-tier experience” — an ideal format for the tastes of the Michelin judges who have officially descended upon the city.

The couple have an agreement to buy the rowhouse at 2048 Rittenhouse Square, where they plan to breach the walls on the second and third floors. The new kitchen will be on the house’s second floor, while the first floor of the home would become a private dining room. Plans for the third floor have not been finalized, they told The Inquirer.

The Beard Award-nominated Lovers Bar on the first floor, as well as the second-floor dining room at the current restaurant, on the corner of 21st Street and Rittenhouse Square, would remain largely as they are.

The two buildings would have separate entrances. According to plans, 2048 Rittenhouse’s facade would receive only minor modifications.

The Williamses went before the Center City Residents’ Association last week to seek neighbors’ support for the planned expansion, which requires a special exemption from the city Zoning Board of Adjustment. The meeting, held on Zoom, turned into a veritable love-in, with CCRA officers and neighbors alike praising the couple, who bought the landmark building in 2015, renovated it from top to bottom, and reopened in 2017 to rave reviews. “I would love to be able to get a table more often,” said one board member, to laughs. Fourteen nearby neighbors indicated support for the project.

The Williamses dashed any neighborhood concerns about additional traffic.

The restaurant now accommodates about 200 people a night, Chad Williams told The Inquirer. “There’s never been a line of Ubers,” Hanna Williams said. With the expansion, they said, they expect to see an additional 40 to 50 customers.

The CCRA said it would not oppose the plans, though it added provisos for trash collection, deliveries, and ventilation.

The ZBA hearing is set for Sept. 10. If the variance is approved, the couple said, the changes would be ready about a year from now.

Chad Williams told The Inquirer that he would offer a new, higher-end tasting menu at the new chef’s counter, while the current offering, now priced at $165 a person, would still be available in the existing space. “As tasting menus go, that’s not crazy, if you consider what else is out there,” he said.

Fixed-priced menus at high-end restaurants around town include Vetri Cucina ($165), Jean-Georges ($198), Provenance ($225), Royal Sushi Omakase ($300, including service), and the kitchen counter at Ambra ($300).

The more exclusive tasting menu’s price and format have not been determined. Lovers Bar would continue offer à la carte dining, as it does now.

Having a second kitchen will be a boon to the operation, the couple said. “They’ve been putting out pretty incredible food from 20-year-old stoves in a really tiny space,” Hanna Williams said.

“We’ve been looking for a second space for a long time, and nothing ever really felt right,” she said. “I think a lot of that is because Chad and I were wondering about how to be in two places at the same time, and does one place suffer because you’re not there.” When their next-door neighbor decided to sell, “it just seemed perfect — here’s our opportunity to have another space and be able to be in both places at once. It seemed like a no-brainer.”

Friday Saturday Sunday dates to 1973, when seven friends each chipped in $2,000 to open a restaurant on the former site of a hippie coffeehouse called the Gilded Cage. It joined what is regarded as Philadelphia’s restaurant renaissance, when such spots as Astral Plane, Frog, and Knave of Hearts enlivened the city’s buttoned-up dining scene with quirky decor, mismatched china, and blackboard menus of eclectic fare such as cream of mushroom soup, chopped chicken liver pate, and stuffed Cornish hen.

Shortly after the opening, cofounder Weaver Lilley bought out his partners and later installed a popular second-floor bar built around a 135-gallon aquarium (thus its nickname, Tank Bar). A commercial photographer by day, Lilley oversaw FriSatSun for four decades before selling in 2015 to the Williamses, who took more than a year to renovate the building. They got married in 2017 in the kitchen shortly before opening.

Hanna Williams, a front-of-the-house veteran formerly in the Jose Garces orbit, is a product of the Philly restaurant renaissance; her father, Charlie Whitaker, was a chef at Frog, and her mother, Christine, waited tables at both Frog and Astral Plane.

Chad Williams, a West Philly native, worked as a chef with Garces at Alma de Cuba and El Vez, moving with him to open Amada in 2006, and even appearing with Garces on Iron Chef competitions. He also worked at Mugaritz in Spain and Saison in San Francisco, and in 2013 opened Tela’s Market in the city’s Francisville neighborhood.