TV Restaurants

What Happened to City Tavern After Best Thing I Ever Ate?

Best Thing I Ever Ate, Season 5 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Current status

Closed

As of October 2026, City Tavern has closed — confirmed via inquirer.com, November 2, 2020.

What the source shows: The Philadelphia Inquirer confirmed City Tavern's Old City location shut down after chef Walter Staib exited his National Park Service lease, and Google Places plus the reused citytavern.com domain corroborate that Philadelphia's City Tavern is no longer operating. How we decide a status →

What happened after Best Thing I Ever Ate?

On "Old School", City Tavern served colonial-era fare inside a reconstruction of Philadelphia's 1773 tavern building, with staff in period dress presenting 18th-century American recipes such as game and root-vegetable dishes typical of chef Walter Staib's menu. The restaurant opened on the site in 1994 in the Old City neighborhood, operating as a concessionaire on National Park Service land near Independence Hall. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, City Tavern closed permanently on 2020-11-02, after Staib chose not to renew his NPS lease amid a pandemic-driven drop in the overseas tourism that had supplied roughly 40% of business.

PhillyVoice also reported the closure. Google Places lists City Tavern Restaurant in Philadelphia as permanently closed, and a 2026-09-08 domain check found citytavern.com no longer belongs to the Philadelphia business — it now hosts an unrelated bar in Fort Myers, Florida.

The episode Best Thing I Ever Ate, Season 5

Episode 7
Air date not confirmed
Title: Old School · What was featured: Colonial-era 18th-century recipes at a historic recreated Old City tavern

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Sources we checked 2 references

  1. inquirer.com https://www.inquirer.com/food/city-tavern-revolutionary-war-restaurant-philadelphia-walter-staib-chef-old-city-20201102.html
  2. phillyvoice.com https://www.phillyvoice.com/city-tavern-closes-philadelphia-old-city-covid-19-pandemic/
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Record btiea-0452 · checked by Cal Marchetti.