Honeysuckle Provisions – Afrocentric café and grocery – officially opens Saturday

Cybille St. Aude-Tate quickly corrects herself when she talks about the folks who shop at Honeysuckle Provisions, the new Afrocentric grocery and café set to open this Saturday, Oct. 29 near 48th and Pine.

“Not customers … neighbors,” said St. Aude, an accomplished Haitian-American chef who runs the shop with her husband Omar Tate, a Philadelphia native who was named Esquire magazine’s “chef of the year” in 2020.

So why are two food heavy hitters who have been featured in Vogue, Food and Wine and Esquire and made their names in the super-competetive New York dining scene opening a gourmet takeout shop in West Philly? For Omar, it’s about coming home. He grew up in Germantown and his mother has lived in West Philly – on Parrish Street – for years.

“I feel a part of West Philly more than any other part of Philly,” - Omar Tate

For both he and Cybille it’s also about expanding the Black entrepreneurial footprint in Philadelphia. Through their umbrella organization Honeysuckle Projects, the couple plans to expand the concept, which couples food and community within a Black and Afrocentric framework. The framework, for example, draws on the work of George Washington Carver, who centered the innovative use of staple ingredients, like sweet potatoes.