Stephen Starr’s next restaurant, the Pelican Club, will be a Greek spot on Rittenhouse Square
The Pelican Club, a nod to the Greek mascot Petros the pelican, will evoke the jet-set glamour of Jackie O and Aristotle Onassis. It will be Stephen Starr’s fourth restaurant on Rittenhouse Square.
For his fourth restaurant on Rittenhouse Square, Stephen Starr said he wants to evoke the jet-set fantasy of Greece of the Onassis era: yacht-club luxury, island sensuality, cosmopolitan polish.
That explains the photos of Jackie O and Aristotle Onassis on the window posters that went up last week on the former Devon Seafood Grill at 18th and Chancellor Streets.
Starr told The Inquirer that the new restaurant, to be called the Pelican Club, is expected to open in October. It will be his ninth restaurant in the neighborhood, his 19th restaurant in Philadelphia, and his 41st in an empire that stretches from New York to Miami.
The Pelican Club will be across the lobby of the Parc Rittenhouse apartment building from his Paris-style brasserie Parc (which opened in 2008), a half-block up the street from steakhouse Barclay Prime (2004), and across the square from Italian powerhouse Borromini (2025). Starr also owns the nearby Continental Mid-town (2004), Butcher & Singer (2008), the Dandelion (2010), El Rey/Ranstead Room (2010), and The Love (2017).
The Pelican Club will occupy nearly 9,000 square feet — slightly smaller than Parc but larger than Barclay Prime. Like its neighbors, it will have outdoor seating facing 18th Street.
The Pelican Club’s concept took shape after Starr reconsidered several possibilities for the high-profile corner space, empty since December 2024 and owned by Starr business partner Allan Domb, the former city councilman and mayoral candidate.
“I walked in and started wondering what it should be,” Starr said in a call from Miami Beach, where his steakhouse Slim’s opens Tuesday. “I kicked around several different ideas, but none of them really felt correct for that room. It needed to be something that made sense there.”
Starr said he had considered Middle Eastern and Japanese concepts, but his mind kept returning to Greece. “I know Greek concepts have been done here before, but not in the way I thought it should have been,” Starr said.
To shape the project, he turned to Ken Fulk, who also designed Starr’s old-school revival of the Occidental in Washington, D.C., which opened in March 2025.
Starr said Fulk “just fell in love with the space and came up with a great idea for how it should look.”
Though Starr wants to keep most details about the Pelican Club close to the vest for now, he said the bar area in front would evoke the living area of a yacht. The back of the restaurant, he added, will feature “very sexy booths.”
Starr said he came across the story of Petros the pelican, long associated with Mykonos, and was drawn to both the image and the symbolism. “It’s this mythical, legendary figure, kind of a protector of the island,” he said. “I thought the name was awesome, and we loved the pelican imagery.”
But he decided against using a plainly Greek name for the restaurant.
“‘Pelican’ kept sticking in my head, and Ken loved the image too,” Starr said. “The Pelican Club gave us the imagery we were looking for, plus something a little more intriguing. You don’t quite know what it is right away.”
Starr said the Pelican Club would be rooted in Greek cooking, with touches extending into the Mediterranean. He said he has been auditioning chefs from Greece — several have already flown in for tastings, and another is due from Athens this week — as he looks for “something authentic” from someone who “really grew up with the food.”