Steakhouse chain Medium Rare will open a restaurant in Fishtown

Since 1986, when he left his native Cherry Hill for college, Mark Bucher has been plotting his return to the Philadelphia area.

Last week, Bucher moved a step closer as he and his business partner, Tom Gregg, signed a lease for a Fishtown location of Medium Rare, their casual national steakhouse based in Washington, D.C.

The restaurant, projected to open in the fourth quarter of 2024, will occupy a new building at 1540 Frankford Ave., next to Suraya, the popular Levantine restaurant.

Medium Rare is not one of those plush rooms with hundred-dollar steaks and a wine list that stretches forever. It’s a neighborhood place with an industrial feel and such whimsical touches as French lessons in the restrooms. Bucher said the Fishtown location would have a little more than 100 seats in just under 4,000 square feet.

Medium Rare, founded in 2011, specializes in steak frites, the thin-cut culotte, which customers can get prepared to their desired doneness. Topped with a “secret sauce,” it’s served with hand-cut fries, mixed green salad, and bread for a fixed price. Right now in Washington, it’s $28.95, plus over-the-top desserts. There also is a conventional brunch menu on weekends.

“If you are a vegan or vegetarian like Mark’s wife, we have an amazing grilled portobello mushroom with a fire-roasted red pepper sauce you can have instead of the steak that is to die for,” the menu says.

There are three Medium Rare locations in the D.C. area, one in Baltimore, and one in New Orleans. Next up will be Midtown Manhattan and Boston, and there is another on the books for San Francisco, Bucher said.

This Philadelphia opening is actually 11 years behind schedule. In 2013, Medium Rare had a signed deal in Center City at the Rittenhouse Square space that, after litigation was settled, became the home of the CookNSolo group’s Abe Fisher and Dizengoff. (Abe Fisher closed last year to make way for an expanded Dizengoff, now a work in progress.)

The Fishtown location followed a lot of looking and a few scuttled deals, Bucher said. “We had a deal in Northern Liberties that we were ready to move forward on and that didn’t pan out,” he said. Two Center City restaurant spaces didn’t work out. “We’ve probably gone through three real estate brokers to try to help us find the right spot, and Joe [Scarpone of MPN Realty] hung in there.”

Medium Rare grew out of Bucher and Gregg’s dinner 15 years ago at a steak-frites-only restaurant in Paris. At the time, they had BGR: The Burger Joint. “We looked at each other and said, ‘You know, we can Americanize this,’” Bucher said.

Shortly after, “someone showed me a site for burgers that didn’t work because there was no lunch business at the site.” Bucher figured that it would work well for steak frites. “So I called Tom and I say, ‘Hey, I found a site for our restaurant.’ He goes, ‘What restaurant?’” Bucher said it took a year to get the secret sauce to their liking. They sold BGR in 2015.

Bucher has a solid reputation in the D.C. restaurant world. In the beginning of the pandemic, he began delivering free Thanksgiving meals to homebound seniors. This morphed into Feed the Fridge, a nonprofit that uses donations to pay restaurants, which supply free meals provided daily to boys and girls clubs, park-and-rec centers, schools, and youth centers.

Feed the Fridge will expand to Philadelphia, Bucher said. “My belief is restaurants and chefs can solve hunger by providing people ready-to-eat meals as opposed to ingredients they get from the food pantry, and it’s been proven to be successful.”