New tasting menu dinners at Honeysuckle Provisions are provocative and delicious

Dinner began with a sour and musky sip of wild orange wine followed by a candy chaser of jellied kombucha cubes that we plucked like berries from a branch of thorns.

“In experimentation, I’m never seeking pleasure: I’m seeking information,” said chef Omar Tate, in his trademark knit beanie, relishing the startled reactions of the diners he’d invited into his kitchen. This was the first sensory smack of his new tasting menu dinner at Honeysuckle Provisions called UNTITLED., whose eight courses are written in all caps as a menu poem on ripped paper. And that was the intended effect. Like so many bites in this meal, it contains the seeds of symbolism and multiple meanings drawn from Tate’s observations of Northern Black life and foodways. They bloom through the compositions.

This first stanza, “SOUR_KIDS,” is the signpost that we’re entering unknown territory in a dinner where the possibility for displeasure and pleasure, he warns, is equal: “We have to be satisfied with either in life. You just never know until we reach that destination.”

I’m going to drop a happy spoiler here: Pleasure is a lock on virtually every beautiful plate, from the sweet-tart pop of those hibiscus-ginger pâte de fruits to the silky truffled eggs, toothy house ramen, schmaltzy fried Cornish hens, and foamy plantain-chocolate confections we were about to devour.

That should be no surprise to anyone who’s followed Tate’s work at Honeysuckle Provisions, the Afrocentric market and cafe in West Philly launched in 2022 with his partner, wife, and co-chef, Cybille St. Aude-Tate. Honeysuckle’s daytime takeout fare of smoked turnip “dolla hoagies,” Haitian meat pies, black-eyed pea scrapple breakfasts, and fried chicken thighs sandwiched in the world’s flakiest biscuits are the epitome of good flavors and craft using ingredients largely sourced from local Black farmers.

The emergence of Tate’s dinners in January, which harken back to the pop-ups that first brought him national acclaim in New York City prior to his Philly homecoming during the pandemic, has lent an exciting new element to Honeysuckle’s evolving mission to, as St. Aude-Tate says, “concentrate on our food and the stories we’re trying to tell about our community.”

Those provocative and artfully cooked stories are what make UNTITLED. special. There are similar experiences in the area of intimate open-kitchen tastings, from Her Place Supper Club to Heavy Metal Sausage. But Tate is a singular talent, and unique in his ability to weave poetry, music, philosophy, and art (including ceramics made both for the chef and by him) into compelling food narratives that evoke the nostalgia and struggles of growing up Black and economically disadvantaged in Germantown. It’s a background that he says often left him feeling like “an outlier” in the fine dining kitchens where he got his start, where other, predominantly white young chefs would wax poetic about farm-to-table ideals.

“I couldn’t necessarily relate to that experience ... so I was always thinking about how we can treat the food we grew up with in the hood from Papi stores as our agriculture or crops. When junk food references appear on the menu, it’s a reflection of that,” says Tate. His amuse-bouche take on Sour Patch Kids, or the vivid orange spice powder he calls “hot Cheetos dust,” made from the dehydrated chiles of Honeysuckle’s fermented hot sauce blended with nutritional yeast, which powders the shatteringly crisp crust of his fried chicken, are succulent examples of artisan junk food makeovers.

Tate never forgot being teased in his early kitchen jobs for discussing his own childhood food memories, “like eating instant noodles for dinner, or being hungry, but not really realizing you’re poor when you’re a kid. The idea of poverty and food insecurity, especially for a child, doesn’t exist until it’s imposed on them through conversation. ... It was a revelation to me, because ramen night was always my favorite dinner of the week.”

His tasting menu reply — HAVE YOU EVER BOUGHT FOOD FROM A DOLLAR STORE AND CALLED IT DINNER? — is an inspired bowl that rejects the “victim” label of that memory through the joyful jujitsu of reimagining packaged ramen in its most soulful, handmade form. Oversize ceramic “Instant Noodles” cups are filled with wiry alkaline noodles rolled in-house from local Castle Valley Mill wheat, then ladled with a luminous broth that’s been continuously fortified for months with chicken, turkey, and rabbit. A finely minced garnish of celery, onions, and peppers sizzled in chive oil and cilantro, plus a house Creole spice pack tinged with smoked dried shrimp, adds extra punch. A side of smelts cured in dried shrimp and country ham XO, a nod to the canned fish Tate often ate growing up, adds the possibility of even more intensity for this hauntingly savory bowl.

“The fact we’re enjoying that very thing in a fashion that feels like luxury directly across from a Dollar Days? That’s not lost on me,” says Tate, noting his South 48th Street neighbor.

Tate and St. Aude-Tate are keenly aware of the price point challenge of presenting handmade food that’s been ethically sourced from local farmers and prepared by staff paid fair wages in a neighborhood where similar examples are few and far between. The market’s daily takeout fare, almost entirely under $15 an item, achieves that goal admirably, while the seasonal CSA harvested from Honeysuckle’s one-acre plot at Ploughshare Farms in Pipersville brings a 20-week taste of heirloom watermelons, rare limas, and the sweet potatoes used in the market’s signature YAMZbread. But the couple’s early goal of also selling produce retail was not a hit, given the required price and competition: “We’re not farmers or grocers, we’re chefs,” Tate concedes.

The tasting menu serves up a self-deprecating inside joke in that regard with THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A GROCERY STORE. It’s a riff on the most elemental shopping list — milk, bread, and eggs — transformed into a sublime brunch fantasy of YAMZbread toast brushed with a smoked pork-infused milk jam, caramelized onions pickled in foraged Asian pear vinegar, and a velvety yellow blanket of soft-scrambled eggs topped with shaved Perigord truffles — a fittingly bougie touch for a $110 tasting.

Honeysuckle is still refining how many diners it can squeeze into its small front market space (currently eight, but perhaps more later in the kitchen), and training the service staff to make it all hum when the second seatings begin in mid-March. St. Aude-Tate harbors visions of her own Haitian-themed tasting menus in the future, too. Meanwhile, charming general manager and fermentation director Jamaar Julal is a steady presence, assisting Tate in executing his vision while the chef provides the running footnotes on every course.

Tate’s ongoing art project, Urban Flora, is the current driving theme. It explores literal ingredients foraged from the Philly landscape, like the golf ball-size Trifoliate oranges harvested from someone’s yard and fermented into funky wine by Julal. But it also considers urban infrastructure and the “relationships of Black folks to one another as flowers in the garden that is the city,” perpetually under threat from violence. It can underpin a dish as seemingly innocuous as a pretty salad made from wild purslane, fermented icicle radishes, and pickled mushrooms in chicken of the woods garum with sassafras vinaigrette. A mushroom course with celery root and apples sparked by Tate’s favorite Jay Electronica song, “Better in Tune With the Infinite,” is an earthy allegory for the spontaneous collaboration of social activism.

And then there is the chunk of black asphalt Tate found that inspired the look-alike dark sculpture he passed around beside the course entitled PETRI-FRIED CHICKEN. As we savored the delicately crisped, schmaltz-confit Cornish hens dusted with the lip-tingling spice of more hot Cheetos dust, we learned that this crusty black object is an actual piece of chicken Tate fried, dehydrated, and then coated in carbon months ago. Surprisingly, it doesn’t smell.

“It’s completely petrified,” he says. “We can put it in my tomb.”

But first, there is the water ice palate cleanser before dessert, a bright American persimmon quencher topped with milk jam and a fiery-sweet dab of Scotch bonnet jelly. Then pastry chef Aya Iwatani, an alum of Zahav and the Modern, delivered a moist dark chocolate cake sandwiched between plantains in multiple forms — jammed, foamed, gelled, and pulverized into green plantain leaf powder. This confection was as experimental and as thought-provoking as the rest of the meal, a tribute to the exploited African workers of the chocolate industry. But as the final destination of this fascinating tasting, it left no doubt that pleasure can play a key role in this experience, too.

310 S. 48th St., 215-307-3316; honeysuckleprovisions.com; dinner reservations on Open Table.

Dinners Wednesday through Saturday, with two seatings beginning for the next available meals in mid-March, at 5 and 7:30 p.m. Reservations for $110 prepaid tickets are released one month to the date in advance on Open Table.

Market breakfast and lunch takeout: Thursday through Friday, 8 a.m.-3 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

Wheelchair accessible.

BYOB.

Very few gluten-free options.