A high-end supper club channeling the ghost of the man who once wired the building has opened inside Philadelphia's Bellevue Hotel. Mr. Edison, a 150-seat dining destination built around 1940s supper club style and named for Thomas Edison, debuted in late June 2026 on the ground floor of the landmark Walnut Street property, with a menu that leans hard into old Philadelphia dining nostalgia and cocktails built around the inventor's legacy.
The restaurant was developed by restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow, who reportedly told Maxim that Mr. Edison is a place where guests come to have a night. Chodorow earned his undergraduate business and law degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s and went on to launch China Grill in 1987, but according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr. Edison marks his first-ever restaurant opening in Philadelphia. Building owner Dean Adler placed the construction and build-out cost of the venue at $10 million ahead of its launch, per the same report.
The name is no accident. Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera over the course of 1,093 patents, and he personally engineered the Bellevue Hotel's original electrical switchboard system and designed its decorative lighting fixtures when the hotel opened in 1904, according to Maxim. That history now shows up on the menu and in the design, most visibly in a custom 12-foot-tall Ferris wheel installed behind the bar, holding a dozen liquor bottles on motorized spokes that rotate downward on demand for bartenders. PhillyVoice reports the piece was built by design firm Clavel Arquitectos, which also designed the rest of Mr. Edison's dining room.
A Menu Built on Vanished Philadelphia Icons
Executive chef Matt Levin, who previously worked at Lacroix at the Rittenhouse Hotel and now leads Mr. Edison's kitchen, built the menu around dishes with deep local roots. Per Maxim, the restaurant serves a crab galette based on Le Bec-Fin's classic version and offers La Panetière's roasted half duck, reviving recipes from two of Philadelphia's most storied closed fine-dining rooms. PhillyVoice adds that Levin also recreated the signature salad from Jimmy's Milan, a 1950s supper club on 19th Street remembered for its distinct Italian-Russian dressing.
The rest of the menu ranges from sturgeon caviar dip, seared foie gras, and tuna tartare-topped deviled eggs to whole roasted brick chicken, grilled whole dorade, bone-in veal chop Milanese, lobster tortellini, macaroni gratin, and steamed asparagus with whipped hollandaise, according to Maxim. Grand plates for two include lobster thermidor and Chilean sea bass. The Bellevue Hotel states that produce for the seasonal menu comes directly from Chodorow's private farm in New Hope, Bucks County.
Cocktails and a Strict Dress Code
Mr. Edison's bar program leans into its namesake with high-voltage cocktails inspired by Thomas Edison, Maxim reports, including the Patent Pending, made with duck fat, thyme rye, and yellow chartreuse, and the Filament No. 6, a blue cheese-infused martini. The restaurant may also feature a jazz combo performing on a dinner theater stage, reinforcing the supper club concept.
The Bellevue Hotel enforces a strict upscale fashionable dress code that bans athletic wear, sweatpants, flip-flops, slides, open-toed shoes, and sleeveless shirts for men, and requires hat checks at the door, underscoring the venue's effort to recreate a formal 1940s nightlife experience. The restaurant occupies a two-story space with its own dedicated Walnut Street entrance that previously housed a flagship Polo Ralph Lauren store for 27 years until it closed in 2017, per the Inquirer, leaving that prime storefront vacant for nearly a decade before its conversion.
Part of a $187 Million Bellevue Overhaul
Mr. Edison is the culinary centerpiece of a much larger transformation at the 1904 Bellevue Hotel, which reopened in 2025 following a major multi-year restoration. The National Trust Community Investment Corporation puts the total project cost at $187 million, supported in part by $28.7 million in federal Historic Tax Credits. The hotel itself, owned by Hyatt, now has 184 guestrooms and suites, including a 2,000-square-foot presidential suite overlooking Broad Street, according to Maxim.
The restoration converted seven entire floors of the building into 155 luxury apartments and added boutique retail spaces, a lap pool, an indoor track, and pickleball and squash courts as part of the 100,000-square-foot Sporting Club, which is billed as Philadelphia's biggest private gym. A Bathhouse spa branch is set to open at the Bellevue in fall 2026, marking the New York-based wellness brand's first location outside that city, per Maxim. The Bellevue's food and beverage overhaul also brought Pergola, an all-day restaurant on the 19th floor, with plans for a library bar in the former Palm space that closed in 2020, according to the Bellevue Hotel.
The building's current resurgence stands in sharp contrast to a dark chapter in its history. Originally opened in 1904 by hotelier George C. Boldt, the Bellevue suffered a severe reputation and economic setback after a deadly 1976 Legionnaires' disease outbreak during an American Legion convention held at the hotel, as reported by the Inquirer. That history makes the scale of the current adaptive reuse project, and the arrival of a splashy new supper club on its ground floor, a notable turning point for the Broad Street landmark.
