Fitler Square Park Just Turned 130. The Restaurant Catering the Party Opened Nine Months Ago.

"An everyday restaurant, the kind of place we wish was a five-minute walk from our house." That's how chefs Amanda Shulman and Alex Kemp described the concept they were building at 2227 Pine Street back when it was still under construction and still nameless to anyone outside the neighborhood. Nine months after that quiet December opening, their restaurant was handed the catering contract for the biggest civic event Fitler Square has thrown in years: a party marking the park's 130th anniversary and its fountain's 50th.

That's not a small thing to hand a newcomer. It's worth understanding why it happened, because it says more about how this neighborhood actually works than any restaurant review could.

A Corner That Keeps Finding Its Next Act

The space at 23rd and Pine has never sat empty for long, but it has changed hands more than most people walking past it today would guess. It was Stix, a vegetarian restaurant, from 1997 to 1999. Then a location of the Greek restaurant Dmitri's took over and stayed until 2014. A branch of the wine bar Tria ran there from 2015 to 2017. Cotoletta followed and closed after a five-year run. Then, in December 2025, Pine Street Grill opened in that same corner space, right across from the park itself.

Four concepts in under three decades on one corner isn't neighborhood decline. It's a corner that keeps working, no matter who's behind the counter. What changed with this latest turnover is who was doing the opening.

Shulman and Kemp weren't newcomers to Philadelphia's dining scene when they took the space. Shulman, a Vetri alum, opened Her Place Supper Club in 2021, an intimate dinner-party concept that built her a following well before critics caught on. Kemp, who trained at Montreal's Joe Beef and New York's Eleven Madison Park, joined her behind the bar at My Loup in 2023, three months before the two married. By the time they signed the lease on Pine Street Grill, Her Place had just picked up Philadelphia's first-ever Michelin star, awarded at a ceremony at the Kimmel Center on November 18, 2025, with My Loup landing on the Guide's Recommended list.

Pine Street Grill was a deliberate pivot away from that pedigree, not a continuation of it. The couple had a baby girl in January 2025, and the menu they built reflects the life that followed: matzah ball soup, spinach-artichoke dip, a rotisserie half-chicken, a kids' menu, and a smashburger built on a seeded milk bun. Half the dining room is held for walk-ins. It's the kind of restaurant designed to be walked to, not driven to for an occasion.

The Neighborhood Already Had Its Own Comeback Story

Pine Street Grill wasn't the only kitchen in Fitler Square getting outside attention that same November. A few blocks away, Sally, the pizzeria and natural wine bar owned by Cary Borish, picked up a Michelin Bib Gourmand at the same ceremony. Sally isn't chef-driven marketing in the way some of its Bib-recognized peers are. Restaurant writer Jacob Fink, who covers Philly dining and lived nearby for four years, put it simply: "people that like Sally love Sally."

The restaurant's name carries real family weight. Borish named it for his grandmother Sally, a lifelong Center City resident whose son, the late Neil Stein, built restaurants across the city including the Fish Market and Marabella's, and whose daughter Sheryl, Borish's mother, founded Marathon Grill. Borish preserved the wood-burning oven from the space's previous life as Mama Palma's rather than tear it out, then built a sourdough-and-natural-wine program on top of it. Across the street, he and business partner Mike Parsell also run Mr. Rabbit, a coffee shop and bakery in a converted dry cleaner's storefront.

So before Pine Street Grill ever opened, the two blocks around the park already had a restaurant family with three generations of Philadelphia food history behind it. That's the context the newcomers walked into.

What's Actually Standing Around the Park Right Now

Within a short walk of Fitler Square Park, current listings and reviews from 2026 point to a lineup that includes:

• Sally, pizzeria and wine bar, Bib Gourmand recipient
• Mr. Rabbit, coffee and bakery
• Trattoria Carina, Italian
• Cafe Lutecia, French cafe and weekend brunch spot
• Ambrosia, BYOB Italian
• Pine Street Grill, American comfort food

None of the older names disappeared to make room for the new ones. Cafe Lutecia is still the sidewalk-table spot for a Sunday croque madame. Ambrosia is still one of the few BYOBs in a neighborhood that doesn't have many. What changed is the amount of outside attention pointed at a two-block radius that used to get less of it.

The Party That Put a Number on 130 Years

Fitler Square Park itself dates to 1896, which makes 2026 its 130th year as public green space in the middle of the neighborhood. On September 18, Friends of Fitler Square Park marked that anniversary, along with fifty years of the fountain that anchors the park's center, with Fitler Fête: A Soirée in the Square, a ticketed evening for adults built around dinner, drinks, and music.

Dinner was catered by Pine Street Grill.

Getting handed that job matters more than a single night's booking. Friends of Fitler Square Park is the organization that runs the park's recurring civic calendar, including a Friday-night summer concert series that has brought in acts like banjo and guitar player Wanamaker Lewis, a nearly four-decade fixture of the Philadelphia music scene, and The Rookery, an Irish traditional group. The same organization also has a direct hand in the neighborhood's other fixed weekly ritual: a farmers market that's run every Saturday inside the park since 2003, now operated by Brogue Hydroponics as part of The Food Trust's network. These are the people who decide what a neighborhood's traditions actually look like from one year to the next, and for its 130th anniversary dinner, they picked the restaurant that had been open for nine months.

Why That's the Real Story

A restaurant scene turning over is normal in any Philadelphia neighborhood. What's less normal is a civic institution handing its biggest anniversary of the decade to the newest kitchen on the block, while the pizzeria two streets over collects a Michelin Bib Gourmand on family history that goes back three generations.

Both things happening in the same twelve months says something specific about Fitler Square: this isn't a neighborhood that treats new arrivals as an interruption to be tolerated until they either fail or blend in. Pine Street Grill got put directly to work on the thing the neighborhood cares about most, its own park, in year one. Sally got recognized for staying exactly what it already was. There isn't a formula here that rewards one approach over the other. There's just a park, a Friday concert series, a Saturday market that's been running for over twenty years, and a community organization willing to hand its biggest night to whoever earns it, regardless of how long they've had the lease.

That's a harder thing to find in a neighborhood than a good burger. Fitler Square happens to have both right now.

Jamie Smith Raphael tracks these shifts block by block, because knowing which corner just changed hands for the fifth time and which restaurant just got handed the keys to a 130-year tradition is part of actually knowing a neighborhood. For a longer conversation about what's happening on the ground in Fitler Square, reach out to Philly Luxe Living.