Pumpkin, the South Street BYOB, to close Sunday after almost 20 years

Chef Ian Moroney and Hillary Bor say they will close their Graduate Hospital-area restaurant, Pumpkin, after service Sunday, just shy of its 20th anniversary.

“We decided it’s time,” said Moroney, who, with Bor, turned a shuttered deli on what was once a grim commercial strip into a cozy, casual-but-elegant BYOB.

Moroney said the closing could be attributed to a “combination of a lot of things — the economy, not doing enough business, and an unfavorable landlord situation.” Moroney and Bor also have been locked in a dispute with the city over the restaurant’s streetery, which when it opened in summer 2020 at the height of the pandemic restrictions initially doubled its seating and served as a lifeline.

In 2022, the city issued new guidelines for streeteries, and Moroney and Bor pivoted once again, hiring an engineer and an architect to help design a structure to meet the new regulations. At eight seats, it would be considerably smaller than the original structure. The process took 16 months and cost about $50,000, Bor said last spring.

That new streetery opened in March. About four weeks later, the city notified Moroney and Bor that street paving would start this summer and that they had till June 30 to dismantle it. In early July, the city announced that the repaving would be delayed till after Labor Day.

At the time of the reprieve, Moroney told The Inquirer: “Restaurants are struggling as a rule. So when something like this happens... could we close? It’s conceivable.”

Today, Moroney said: “It’s not a great time to be a 20-year-old restaurant. We’ve tried our hardest to stay. It’s just not in the cards.”