Why a Beloved Restaurant Traded Philly for Delco

Fond chefs Lee Styer and Jessie Prawlucki Styer / Photography by Ed Newton

In celebration of Delco restaurants and the people who make them great, we are declaring this Delco Eats Week. Check back daily for stories from the sprawling print feature on the county’s food scene in the October issue of Philly Mag.

Chef Lee Styer still has chicken liver mousse on the menu every night. Foie gras seared in the pan and crosshatched with knife cuts. There’s roasted shrimp with saffron sauce and an angel hair gâteau; octopus and potatoes with chorizo, dusted with smoked paprika; and the same French onion soup he served for years in South Philly.

“French technique,” he says. “But we can always do something with a raw fish — a ceviche or a crudo. Something with Southeast Asian flavors. It was always a global menu, but with French influences. Contemporary American. That’s what they used to call it.” Then he pauses. “That means you can just do whatever you want, right?”

Fond was always like that. In its original incarnation, it was a tiny BYOB at 1617 East Passyunk that opened in 2009. Lee, along with his wife, pastry chef Jessie Prawlucki Styer, and FOH pro Tory Keomanivong, did three years in that space (which would later become Laurel), then bought a building about 200 feet away at 1537 South 11th Street, put in a bar, and moved the whole operation there. For years, 11th and Tasker was a destination. Successful and beloved.

Clockwise from top left: Charred octopus, chicken liver mousse, roasted shrimp, and pork belly at Fond.

Then COVID. Then lockdown. Vaccine cards and empty dining rooms. Fond struggled. Lee did curbside sandwiches, worked alone in the kitchen. Though the restaurant made it to 2021, it was never the same.

“Even in the city, it wasn’t fun those last couple years,” Lee tells me. The crowds weren’t the same. Finding staff was a constant struggle. Plus, he and Jessie had moved out to Media with their two young kids (they have three now — ages 11, 9, and 2) right after the start of the pandemic, and between the commute and fighting to find parking every day? The grind was becoming untenable.

So Fond closed. The Dutch (an all-day brunch concept Styer had opened with then-partner Joncarl Lachman in 2016) moved into the 11th and Tasker space. And even though Lee and Jessie did the occasional pop-up or special event dinner in the space featuring hits from the glory days, Fond, for the most part, was done.

Except …

There’d always been something about Fond that’d bothered Lee. Even at its height, the restaurant had always drawn an older crowd. Not retirees, necessarily, but grown-ups with spouses and kids. And particularly during Fond’s last couple of years in East Passyunk, “the older people just stopped coming in.”

On the phone from the restaurant in Wallingford, he explains how he used to hear from “hundreds of people — like, dozens at least, every week. They’d say how they used to live in South Philly, but now they live in the suburbs. It’s that thing. You get married, have kids, move to the burbs.” And these people — these Fond faithful who’d known the place when they were younger, who maybe met there or fell in love there or just considered it their own special neighborhood place — now had to make a special trip into the city just to go. And no matter how much you love a place, you’re never going to go as often when it’s 45 minutes away as you did when it was right around the corner.

Shrimp with saffron sauce at Fond

So Lee and Jessie decided to bring Fond back to life. They found a space on Providence Road that reminded Lee a lot of the old Fond: “40 seats, a similar size. Not an old rowhome, obviously, but a tiny kitchen, storage in the basement, and still no walk-in.” They would do lunch and brunch, dinners most nights. A short, executable menu — just a handful of apps and five entrées, plus whatever specials made sense. And the best thing? It was just two miles from their house.

Fond 3.0 opened in Wallingford in October of 2024. The menu is classic Fond: swordfish with braised kale, bacon and a garlic vichyssoise, pork belly with Okinawan sweet potatoes and an escarole-Dijon jus. But he also does Dutch baby pancakes the size of a fancy church hat at brunch, and a prime rib dinner special on the second Sunday of every month. I ask Lee if he misses the energy of working in the city, and he says yes … but also kinda no. All those years in the industry? In the heart of the city? It can be hard to let go of. He doesn’t like not knowing what’s happening in Philly like he used to. People come in now, he says. They ask him about new restaurants in the city, and he has no idea. He and Jessie are focused on where they are. On the kids and their million kid things. They have a garden at the house that, in classic South Philly form, Lee estimates as being “three or four rowhome-sized.” Coming from the city (where they had six feet of herbs growing for the kitchen and thought it was a lot), it seems huge, but it’s still only enough for a few specials at the restaurant, a handful of plates. “Enough to play with,” he says, but no more than that.

Chicken liver mousse and octopus at Fond

“I’m getting older,” he tells me. “Some days, you wake up and you’re like, why the fuck did I do this? [But] I don’t miss the late nights.” He says it’s rare for the new Fond to get a reservation past 8 p.m. People come in earlier. They leave earlier. By 9 p.m., things are quiet. “It’s good to be able to just come home.”

Published as “Fond of Delco” in the October 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.