The new Honeysuckle is the most ambitious restaurant yet this year

Like the vine that shares its name, Honeysuckle has had many twists over the last five years under founders Omar Tate and Cybille St.Aude-Tate. It’s been a pop-up, a residency, and most recently a grocery store, takeout shop, and supper club with the “UNTITLED” dinner series, all exploring and celebrating the culture and foodways of the Black diaspora and how they shaped American cuisine.

Shortly after the couple opened Honeysuckle Provisions in West Philadelphia in 2022, they realized that the economics were not working.

“Cybille and I are very good at running restaurants,” said Tate, referring to the fine dining restaurants where they had worked previously. “We tried to apply that and adapt it to a grocery and sandwich takeout model. And you would think, ‘Oh, food is food, you know?’ But that’s not the case. The money is so different.”

Tate said smaller places usually have a small staff — Honeysuckle had 17, “paying everyone far more than a reasonable wage, which is what you’re supposed to do” — and outsource a lot of food. Honeysuckle made everything in-house and supports a farm. “We decided to push it as far as we could until we could find our true selves again,” he said.

That brought Tate and St.Aude-Tate to 631 N. Broad St. in North Philadelphia, the former Clementine’s Stable Cafe, where the new Honeysuckle will open April 24. It’s nearly four times the size of the West Philadelphia storefront and includes a bar.

Teddy Moynihan, an owner of Plowshare Farms (and recently of the farming nonprofit Pasa), is now on Honeysuckle’s payroll as its farmer. The workforce on Broad Street is double the size of Provisions, Tate said. “Now the farm becomes more important because there are more seats, more things, more intention, more money involved, and it can be a greater feature as a part of what we do,” Tate said.

Dinner will be served Wednesday to Sunday — no groceries, no all-day service, and “no breakfast,” Tate said. “I’m planning on going to sleep this time around and being with my kids.”

The heart of Honeysuckle is a $95 fixed-price menu, or $135 with two drinks during dinner and a wine with dessert. Dishes and drinks will be available a la carte at the bar.

Tate and St.Aude-Tate consider it fine dining — “not tablecloth-stuffy, but it will feel personal and thoughtful and it’s about intellect, curiosity, and fun,” Tate said.

A few add-ons include oyster stew ($35), aged NY strip steak ($35), twice-cooked pork shoulder ($20) with fried green plantains (banan pez), and an over-the-top double-patty cheeseburger with truffle, caviar remoulade, and edible gold on slices of shokupan (Japanese milk bread) — you were expecting Stroehmann? — for $55, beef tallow fries included.

Tate is calling the burger McDonald’s Money — “until McDonald’s tells us we have to change it.” (Which it almost certainly will.) It’s a tribute not only to his Philadelphia upbringing but to a bit from Eddie Murphy’s iconic standup special Raw (as in, his mom made her own huge, elaborate burgers on white bread because they didn’t have money for McDonald’s).

“The inspirations don’t always just come from ‘what’s in season,’” he said. “You’re pulling from your own life. The refinement comes from where skill and practice meet imagination.”

Tate made tiny versions of the burger last year as part of a course of his “UNTITLED” dinner series. “When we came here, we were like, ‘Well, why don’t we make it in a fully sized meal?’” Tate said.

There will be just 20 of the burgers per night, with no modifications accepted, and no pre-orders.

Within six months, Tate said, they plan to revive “UNTITLED,” a more curated and pricier experience than the usual fixed-price dinners.

When they first toured the former Clementine’s, St.Aude-Tate said, “it felt very Honeysuckle-esque with the wood and the industrialness of some of the elements of the space.” Honeysuckle’s “living room,” or bar lounge — with 17 seats including five in the window — is decorated with sofas, books, and art pieces. Some are Tate’s own, including a water vessel modeled after one he found in the basement of the historic Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Others are joint projects with his frequent art collaborator, Gregg Moore, including Colonoware — earthenware made by enslaved Africans in colonial times. A local blacksmith crafted cast-iron flatware.

St.Aude-Tate, whose family emigrated from Haiti, now oversees one of the city’s most interesting new bar programs, stocked with spirits like Haitian rums and clairin and informed by ferments found in beverage specialist Danny Childs’ James Beard Award-winning book, Slow Drinks.

The wines are natural and biodynamic, emphasizing producers who are women, as well as people of color. They’re trying to bring in West African palm wine — a challenge because it’s not on the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board list.

“Instead of getting big, classical drinks on there, like a Negroni or a martini, we wanted to do our twist or our reimagination through the lens of being among Black culture,” St.Aude-Tate said.

St.Aude-Tate came up with a dirty martini known as Lajan Sal (“dirty money”), made with lacto-fermented pikliz, the sour Haitian condiment, as well as Japanese white rice vodka and dry vermouth. The drink called Black Cake tastes like its namesake, the Caribbean holiday fruitcake. In-house fermentation director Jamaar Julal created a “holy trinity” soda, a vegetal, Cel-Ray-like blend of onion, celery, and bell pepper, to be used as a mixer or served as a nonalcoholic beverage.

“It was one of those things that we kind of threw up in the air to see if it works, and it did,” St.Aude-Tate said. “I guess that’s the beauty of Honeysuckle, in general. It’s having fun and taking flavor a step deeper, but it is still grounded in kind of the things that I grew up with and the things that surrounded us within our food experiences and our food journeys.”

At a second bar, not customer-facing but visible from the dining room, Julal is making beers, wines, and assorted fermented things, including the amuse-bouches that greet each customer. “It’s really a lab that supports and is the undercurrent of a lot of things that we’re putting on the menu,” Tate said.

Honeysuckle will also offer a membership that will give people the opportunity to attend workshops and events at Plowshare Farms.

The South Philadelphia-born, Germantown-raised Tate, 38, worked at the upscale restaurants Russet and Fork 15 years ago before he headed to New York, where in 2017 he launched his celebrated Honeysuckle project, a series of pop-ups that explored the Black American experience through art, poetry, food, and music. (Sample dish: “Smoked Turkey Necks in 1980s Philadelphia,” commemorating the 1985 MOVE bombing, included a poem and companion dish dusted with ash on a plate of smoking hay.)

St.Aude-Tate, 37, grew up on Long Island and cooked in restaurants there, as well as Maryland and Massachusetts before starting a catering company and pop-up concept, Caona, that channeled her family’s Haitian roots. (She studied Caribbean culture and aesthetics at University of Maryland, giving St.Aude-Tate’s approach to food and drink an academic flair that’s earned invitations to cook for the U.S. Haitian Embassy and for the estate of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.) She also wrote a children’s book in 2012 and competed on a Chopped episode in 2017.

They met at the Charleston Wine and Food festival in early March 2020, sharing boiled peanuts — now a starter on the new Honeysuckle menu, served with peanut miso broth and chilies.

Two weeks later, the pandemic shut down the world. Tate moved home to Philadelphia, where his Honeysuckle pop-ups became weekly pickups at South Philly Barbacoa. Inquirer critic Craig LaBan called Tate’s themed menus “among the most intriguing events of Philly’s pandemic food scene.”

Tate and St.Aude-Tate got engaged right away and were married that August. They have two sons, Jupiter and Apollo; Tate’s son, Bashir, 17, is a high school senior.

When looking to find a new space for Honeysuckle, the couple sensed good vibes on Broad Street right away. Benjamin and Robert Bynum, who own South across Broad Street, have been helpful and supportive — even giving them a table from one of their restaurants. “It feels right,” St.Aude-Tate said. “I mean, 48th Street felt right for us, too. It’s very hard for us to find a place in America that doesn’t feel right for us. And I think that’s a testament to all the work that we’ve done.”

That said, Tate and St.Aude-Tate, who still live near the previous location in West Philadelphia, miss rolling out of bed and going to work. “It’s been a little bit of adjustment, but I really feel think North Broad is the best place for us at this point of our business life,” St.Aude-Tate said.