Friday, Saturday, Sunday Always Feels Like Home
The Philadelphia institution is both a neighborhood bar and destination restaurant.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:
Cover Story: Philadelphia’s Friday, Saturday, Sunday manages to be both a special occasion restaurant and a neighborhood bar. Here’s how the crew behind this spot does it.
March’s Featured Field Guide: Our featured guide this month is our brand-new Philadelphia Field Guide, which is a three-day itinerary to the city that includes recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, and more. Paid subscribers get our Philadelphia Field Guide plus free access to our full library of city guides and our Google Map, which has more than 650 recommended spots across the country!
The Order: Seek out this Thai-inflected spicy chicken sandwich when in Austin, Texas.
Weekend Reading: Creative deviled eggs, Omaha steakhouse culture, plus bucket-list luxury resorts in Hawaii.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday’s Brotherly Love
PHILADELPHIA, PA. — When you go to Friday, Saturday, Sunday, get there at 4:40 p.m. The first floor, called the Lovers Bar, opens promptly at 4:45, and if you’re there when the doors open, you can be in the first wave of people to snag a seat. Those 14 chairs will likely be filled by 5, so if you miss this first wave, that’s okay — you can perch along the rail and have a cocktail while you wait. The bar team is expert at managing the flow of the room and keeping everyone with full glasses. But that first rush will give you a front-row seat to understanding how this place works. You’ll also feel like one of the regulars — nearly everyone who walks through the door is greeted by name. If it’s your second or third visit, you probably will be, too.
When we began making annual visits to Philadelphia in 2021, Friday, Saturday, Sunday was quite literally our first stop. We’ve been back every year since. Paul MacDonald and his team behind the bar are making the best cocktails in Philadelphia, and chef-owner Chad Williams serves stellar food. But great cocktails and food alone don’t create such a special neighborhood gathering place. It’s the hospitality that does that.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday has been an anchor of Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse neighborhood for decades. Ten years ago, Chad and Hanna Williams bought the restaurant and updated it. In 2023, they won a James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant.
“When we bought it, it was very much a fixture in the neighborhood,” Chad Williams tells me. “It had been there for almost 40 years. It had been through a few generations of Philadelphia restaurants, so we knew we were taking over a landmark. For us it was a question of — what do we want to do with it? We decided to keep it a neighborhood restaurant and serve the folks who live there and then from there it evolved into what it is today.”
What it is today is two-fold. In the beautiful dining room upstairs, there’s an eight-course, $165 tasting menu that’s ideal for a special night out. Downstairs, at the cozy Lovers Bar, you can still get that tasting menu, or you can order off the à la carte menu. The best move though, which we did on our last visit, is to sit at the bar and order a tasting menu to share, then supplement with à la carte dishes. (That the restaurant even allows you to do this is worth noting.)
Whether you order the tasting menu or à la carte dishes, the food is universally delicious and reflects Williams’ approach. “We search for those sparks of inspiration and follow them,” he says. “They can come from anywhere — an idea that we’ve had, a dish we’ve eaten somewhere else, someone’s family recipes.” The menu changes to reflect the seasons, with greater evolution during the summer, when Williams and his team capture the “seasonal or micro-seasonal items.” But some dishes are Friday, Saturday, Sunday classics.
“The sweetbreads have been on forever and those are still my favorites,” Williams says of the tasting menu dish, which pairs the unctuous sweetbreads with mushrooms and plantains. He also points to the shrimp cocktail as another signature — Williams makes these by poaching the shrimp in a court bouillon with fennel, onion, citrus, wine white, and spices. “The shrimp are cooked at two temperatures so they get a really snappy exterior and the inside is just done and still creamy.”
Perhaps our favorite dish is the octopus and beans, a take on menudo that’s made with a broth of chicken stock and beef and pork bones, and includes pinto beans, poached and charred octopus, and pickled vegetables. Eaten on a late December evening, it was a dish that warmed us up. “There’s a lot of depth in it and the broth is a labor of love,” Williams says. “Some things that have been on the menu for awhile, you’re like how can I eat this every day? But that and the roast chicken I probably have three or four times a week.”
For Williams, offering two menus allows diners to come to the restaurant more frequently. “For a lot of people, coming and having a tasting menu is a special occasion event — they’re not going to come three or four times a year,” he says. “The bar allows them to experience the restaurant and our hospitality and the flavors we do on a more frequent basis. You can drop by on a Wednesday night after work. We put the same amount of love and care into the bar menu as the tasting menu. It’s a little more free flowing at the bar — it’s really fun.”
The Lovers Bar is a really fun place to spend time, whether you’re having dinner or just grabbing a cocktail. MacDonald offers a tight cocktail list along with a new menu that highlights the Fibonacci cocktails that have become a Friday, Saturday, Sunday signature. (We’ll have more on this menu in an upcoming newsletter.) The way that he approaches the bar speaks to this sense of creating a neighborly environment.
“I have always — even before Friday, Saturday, Sunday — adhered to the philosophy that a cocktail bar works best when ordering is more based on conversation than on putting a stack of paperwork in front of a guest,” MacDonald says.
So here, the primary menu has eight drinks. “That’s my ideal number on a menu,” MacDonald explains. “The idea is that we cover as wide as possible a variety of different flavor profiles and characteristics and ingredients to provide something for everyone without having drinks that step on each other’s toes. The menu then can be an invitation to the guest to delve deeper into what the cocktail program is and start a conversation. When you establish your program as being conversation driven, it creates a positive cycle of building relationships with your customers.”
And when you visit Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you’ll see first-hand how this place is home for many regulars. On our latest visit, we saw someone who had been there on our visit the previous year. This didn’t just happen on its own though — it happened because MacDonald and Williams are laser-focused on creating this experience.
“Establishing a group of loyal customers, who buy into what you’re doing and bring their friends, can become a good starting point to establishing a real community hub at your bar,” MacDonald says. “We are a neighborhood bar. We always have been and that's always going to be the soul of what Friday, Saturday, Sunday is. It’s something we work really hard to do and it pays off.”
The bar allows diners “to experience the restaurant and our hospitality and the flavors we do on a more frequent basis. You can drop by on a Wednesday night after work. We put the same amount of love and care into the bar menu as the tasting menu.” — Chef-owner Chad Williams
In 2023, when the team took home the Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant, some regulars made the trip to Chicago. “They came to the James Beard gala and were there to celebrate with us.” MacDonald says.
Perhaps the most striking part of sitting at the bar is watching the team manage the flow of the space. During our visit, the crowd never stopped pouring in but MacDonald and his team kept track of each person in the room, and knew who was up next for seats.
“We focus on the little details of creating a welcoming, homey environment,” MacDonald says. “The seating is one thing we’ve been working on for a long time. It’s an art. It’s difficult. But the conclusion we’ve reached is that everybody can have a better time if we manage the flow of bar seats rather than guests.”
That bit of hospitality is a departure from the experience you most often get at a bar, where eager guests must stake out their future spot and hover over whomever might already be enjoying their evening. “It’s a different system from most bars, where people are accustomed to jockeying over seats,” MacDonald says. “On a super busy night, it might take an hour and a half to get a seat. But you don’t have to spend an hour and a half nervously looking around to see who’s on dessert, who has the check. The onus isn’t on the guest, it’s on us. You can get a drink, order a snack, and stand and wait, but when your seat is up, you’ll get your seat. We'll do that work for you.”
This wasn’t always the system at the Lovers Bar. MacDonald says that pre-Covid, the bar was filled with folks waiting for their tables upstairs.
“The bar wasn’t used as a place to hang out or have dinner,” he says. “But we wanted the bar to be a destination in its own right, so we started doing this to subtly prioritize people who want to sit and hang out and stay at the bar. It promotes an atmosphere of mutual respect, and it’s helped create an egalitarian feel within the bar as an understanding that you have to be respectful of fellow patrons.”
On a recent weekend, this seemingly effortless hospitality paired with the room’s easygoing regulars had a special energy. If you are a part of it, you know that there is nowhere else to be on a Sunday night in Philadelphia.
261 S 21st St, Philadelphia, PA | @friday.saturday.sunday
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Hot Gai from Spicy Boys Fried Chicken
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Austin has a robust food truck scene, and we always find a new favorite when we’re in town. Here’s one you’ll want to seek out on your next trip — Spicy Boys Fried Chicken, which has four locations around the city, including one at Zilker Brewing Company, so you can have a lager alongside (you’ll need it).
Spicy Boys offers three variations on a spicy chicken sandwich. We went with the Hot Gai, with juicy fried chicken topped with Swiss cheese, pickles, chile oil, and mayonnaise spiked with massaman, which is a Thai curry. The other options are the OG, with sweet chili honey, papaya relish, and Thai basil ranch, and the Tingly Gai, with spicy pickles, charred onion aioli, Sichuan pepper, and lemon chile crisp, and which we’re definitely trying next time.
Multiple locations | @spicyboyschicken
ILLINOIS
Retro Party Snack Gets Creative Flourishes: Over at Chicago magazine, Amy wrote about one of her favorite simple pleasures, the deviled egg. In Chicago, Funeral Potatoes chef Alexis Rice rotates deviled egg options on the bar menu at Moonflower each month. “They’re a great drinking food,” Rice says. “It’s like a pickled egg in a jar at the bar. It’s salty and savory, and it goes well with a beer or a martini.” Amen to that.
NEBRASKA
Is Omaha Really America's Steak Capital? Our friends at Midwesterner talked to Omaha food writer Sarah Baker Hansen, a former critic for the Omaha World-Herald, about Nebraska’s steakhouse culture. “I don’t think that the actual steak is much different than the steak you get in New York, Chicago, or any other city where you could go to a steakhouse,” says Hansen. “But I do think there’s something singular about the lore of a steakhouse in Omaha.”
HAWAII
16 Best Resorts in Hawaii: Spring is teasing us in Chicago but sudden temperature drops and snowy afternoons have me daydreaming about warmer climates. Writing for Travel + Leisure, Patricia Doherty shares some top-tier luxury resorts for a tropical getaway to Hawaii. Most of these spots would require quite a splurge, but Maui’s Hana-Maui Resort has me thinking I need to work on my Hyatt points.
— Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
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You know I love this one! Best bar on earth. Beautiful photos!
Absolutely one of the best bars anywhere—you captured how special it is.