Honeysuckle Provisions has closed. Honeysuckle is coming next year.
Omar Tate and Cybille St. Aude-Tate say the "expanded version of Honeysuckle," coming in February 2025, will allow for "limitless possibilities in experiential dining and events."
Honeysuckle Provisions, Omar Tate and Cybille St.Aude-Tate’s market, cafe, and dinner destination, has closed its West Philadelphia storefront after two years, though the chefs promise to return in 2025 with a “full dining concept” called Honeysuckle.
In an email to their subscribers, the couple said they hope to open their new location, which they promised to disclose in forthcoming weeks, around Feb. 1. They acknowledged that “this news is a bit abrupt but we’ve found an opportunity that needed to be secured as quickly as possible.”
The move portends more seating, as well as additional dining options and cocktails. “We are ready to be a restaurant in more than spirit alone,” they wrote, promising “limitless possibilities in experiential dining and events.” They are still offering catering.
Tate told The Inquirer that they were not prepared to discuss more at this time.
Honeysuckle Provisions grew out of the Germantown-born Tate’s exploration of Black American foodways from a non-Southern perspective. A fine-dining chef who worked at such Philadelphia restaurants as Russet and Fork, he spent eight years working in New York, where he launched the Honeysuckle project.
Honeysuckle’s pop-up dinners, booked six months out, included poetry and music and were largely held in a Wall Street penthouse — “high above the site of one of America’s more prominent slave auction blocks,” Tate wrote in an essay in Esquire.
The pandemic sent Tate back to Philadelphia, where he resurrected Honeysuckle as a takeout. Inquirer critic Craig LaBan said the feasts were “one of the most intriguing happenings of Philly’s pandemic food scene.”
For all of Honeysuckle’s culinary intricacy, Tate said he and St.Aude-Tate had a mission to make food simple. “As a chef, I learned that simple food is grown in the garden of someone’s grandmother’s provincial home — not sold over the counter at the corner store,” he wrote in an Inquirer essay two years ago. “How simple is a bag of rice exchanged for gov’ment dollars through bulletproof plexiglass, while blunt cigar-shaped bubble gum the color of Easter vibrates in your peripheral vision? Buying a bag of rice shouldn’t be more complex than its carbs.
“When I decided to open Honeysuckle Provisions as a grocery store, it was to simplify this exchange,” he wrote. “My wife, Cybille Aude-Tate and I wanted to close the distance between simple food, necessity, and desire.”
Honeysuckle Provisions launched in 2022 in a former food market on South 48th Street, championing ingredients largely sourced from local Black farmers. Its daytime takeout menu included smoked turnip “dolla hoagies,” Haitian chanm chanm buns, and a chicken-biscuit sandwich dusted in house “Hot Cheetos” dust. Earlier this year, the couple added a tasting-menu dinner served four nights a week called UNTITLED, whose bites included handmade ramen (an homage to dollar-store noodles) and beef tartare tinted black with squid ink (a reference to the blackface used in Clorindy, Broadway’s first Black cast musical).
“Pure originality is an elusive virtue, and Honeysuckle has that on lock,” reads The Inquirer’s latest assessment, which placed Honeysuckle Provisions on its list of the 76 most vital restaurants in the Philly region.