With Honeysuckle Provisions, co-founders Omar Tate and Cybille St.Aude-Tate are offering something comfortingly familiar but also radically new. Their Afrocentric grocery store and cafe opened last month in West Philadelphia to serve a neighborhood where fresh, organic produce and healthy food options were in short supply. Building on over a decade of experience working as chefs mostly in New York City—with both also running successful pop-ups until the pandemic hit—the couple wanted to create a different kind of food space. Honeysuckle Provisions directly supports Black farmers, dismantles toxic kitchen culture, and celebrates Black foodways with menu highlights like the BLACKenglish muffin (named after a James Baldwin essay), or a cup of the COWPEAcoffee (a nod to George Washington Carver). Throughout their careers, both chefs have used food as an outlet for sparking impactful conversations: Omar is an artist and poet, who was named Esquire’s Chef of the Year in 2020 and was featured on the Time100 Next list in 2021. Cybille has cooked at the James Beard House, appeared on the TV show Chopped, and explores her Haitian heritage through culinary projects like a recent dinner hosted with the family of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In the last three years, the couple fell in love, got married, had a baby (with a second on the way), and launched Honeysuckle Provisions—but, as you’ll hear, they’re just getting started. 

To see what’s on the menu (and in the online shop) at Honeysuckle Provisions, head here. You can also learn more about Omar and Cybille’s work here.

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