Pod, Stephen Starr’s futuristic College Metropolis restaurant, will shut simply earlier than its twenty fifth anniversary. The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported the information confirmed by the College of Pennsylvania, the restaurant’s landlord, the place it sits adjoining to campus. Resy reservations won’t be accessible after February 22.
When Pod opened in 2000, it was a sushi spot identified for its Area Age eating room designed by the esteemed Rockwell Group, with whom Starr has labored on many ventures. The room featured a sushi conveyor belt and cubicles set inside pods with interactive lights that diners may change. Finally, it flipped to be a menu that was extra broadly pan-Asian. Starr redesigned the restaurant on its twentieth anniversary, flipping to Kpod, and serving Korean meals. Nevertheless, it by no means fairly discovered its footing. But, it wasn’t completed making flips.
“Once we reopened the house as Kpod in 2022, our prospects stored asking us, ‘The place’s the sushi?’” Starr informed Eater in 2024. “So we listened to them and transitioned the house again to its unique beloved idea, a Japanese restaurant and izakaya, however this time with a little bit of a grown-up twist.”
When the restaurant flipped once more, it made homages to the unique iteration, specializing in bigger parts and returning to the extra college-student-friendly color-changing pods. But it surely by no means went again to its early design: “We’ve mentioned farewell to the retro-modernist all-white house accented with coloured lights in favor of a extra modern look with pure woods, plywood paneled ceilings, and heat lighting,” Starr informed Eater.
When Pod first opened, it was Starr’s third Philly restaurant, following the Continental in Outdated Metropolis (which closed in 2020), and Buddakan. The Inquirer reviews that Pod has acted as an incubator of types. It’s a web site the place among the metropolis’s high cooks have labored over their careers, together with Michael Schulson who went on to assist open Buddakan’s New York location earlier than returning again to Philly.