Is this Philly’s best bar for romance?

The first time Rittenhouse resident Amy Marren went to the moody downstairs bar at Friday Saturday Sunday as a single person, she had a thought: “This is lovely — beautiful — but it’s too romantic. I’m never doing this again.”

Little did Marren know she’d be celebrating her wedding at the same space some 15 months later. It was where she and now-husband Michael Eck had their first date, and where they celebrated their engagement. When the couple found out they could buy out the restaurant for an intimate reception, it was a no-brainer.

“When I think back about how I didn’t want to go there because it was too romantic, standing there at our wedding, I was like, ‘This is unbelievable,’” Marren said.

The downstairs bar at Friday Saturday Sunday is low-lit and intimate — just 13 seats reserved for walk-ins, with a rail for lingering just behind. The broad marble bar, antique mirrors, and plush zebra-patterned seats — not to mention some of the city’s best cocktails — give it a luxe feel that’s perfect for a first date. The space was branded the Lovers Bar in 2023, officially taking on the nickname that general manager Maxine Peabody coined after observing so many couples returning to commemorate a special moment. “Lots of lovey-dovey vibes,” Peabody said of the bar’s aura, gesturing to husband-and-wife owners Chad and Hanna Williams, who got married in the space in 2016, while their overhaul of Rittenhouse’s oldest restaurant was still under construction.

“I always like to say [Chad and Hanna] put a love spell on the restaurant,” Peabody said.

The Lovers Bar may not exactly be the Center City spot where you’re most likely to meet your spouse — that goes to McGillin’s Olde Ale House, which tracks its meet-cutes leading to marriage in a spreadsheet — but the bar at Friday Saturday Sunday has a decades-old reputation as one of the most romantic spots in Philadelphia. “Every single person in the place often seems to be in the process of discovering how to turn a quiet meal into a low-key but intensely romantic date,” late Philadelphia restaurant critic Jim Quinn wrote in 1988.

In Friday Saturday Sunday’s initial incarnation, from 1973 to 2015, the dining room was downstairs and the bar — called Tank Bar — was upstairs. Both spaces were dimly lit, but Tank Bar, opened in the mid-’70s, had a distinct vibe, with a 135-gallon aquarium casting a room-defining glow. Midnight blue fabric tented the ceiling; backlighting created the appearance of tiny twinkling stars above. Former Inquirer columnist Karen Heller described Tank Bar as “a fluid dream, an extremely romantic setting, possibly setting the scene for the best date ever and consequently, pretty much putting an end to all others.” Current Inquirer critic Craig LaBan repeatedly named it among the city’s most romantic spots, as did other writers. It was a magnet for couples — not all of them out in the open.

“One of the things about being a romantic, darkly lit, cozy restaurant is it can be a bit of a cheaters’ bar,” Friday Saturday Sunday’s original owner, Weaver Lilley, said. “One time the TV station, Channel 6 or whatever, came and wanted to come up to the bar. I said, ‘Yeah, sure’ without thinking.” When he told the current patrons cameras were on their way, “the place almost evacuated.”

Plenty of the couples were on the up-and-up, too. “It was so common for people to come in and tell us that they met there, or they had their first date there, and they’re married now, they’ve got kids, and they’ve moved to the suburbs and they don’t come back very often,” Lilley said. “It was a standard thing.”

Lilley, a photographer who just published his first book at age 81, used to photograph couples at the restaurant every New Year’s Eve and send the prints to them afterward. “Some of the people came every New Year’s Eve, so they had 10 photos,” he said. “It must have been like time-lapse photography to look at them.”

In 2015, when Chad and Hanna — then engaged — bought the restaurant from Lilley, they committed to keeping the name and the bar’s amorous atmosphere, albeit manifest in a very different setting. The Williams spent a year and a half renovating the restaurant top to bottom before reopening in 2017. They were so strapped for funds, they had their contractor marry them in a Quaker ceremony in the unfinished kitchen. “We just figured we’d put some good juju on space,” Hanna said. “We showed up unannounced in a dress and a suit to our general contractor’s surprise and handed him the vows that he had to read for us.”

In the past eight years, the Williams have heard from so many couples with significant attachments to the space, “it kind of became a theme,” Chad said. “We were a neighborhood restaurant when we opened, but we noticed this pattern that kept happening. People chose this address as a place to celebrate big milestones.”

There’s been plenty of new additions to Friday Saturday Sunday’s romantic legacy, too, like Marren and Eck’s. Three couples — and one baby — have come from staff pairings alone, Peabody said.

Between the old and new Friday Saturday Sunday, one thing remains unchanged, as Peabody sees it: “It seems people come together here.”