The Kitchen Comes to You: Inside Lacroix’s Reimagined Weekend Brunch
Lacroix at The Rittenhouse traded its famous Sunday buffet for a weekend brunch of tableside carts, dishes finished in front of you, and live music.
For more than two decades, brunch at Lacroix meant grabbing a plate and walking straight into the kitchen. The buffet was set up right on the line at The Rittenhouse Hotel with chefs working all around you, and over in the dessert room, cooks were toasting s’mores and churning liquid-nitrogen ice cream to order. You went to the show.
Now the show comes to you.
The second-floor restaurant at 210 West Rittenhouse Square has rebuilt brunch from the ground up. It now runs Saturdays and Sundays now, from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., with the self-serve buffet saved for the holidays, and in its place is something closer to a performance staged one table at a time. Carts roll up beside you. Frosting goes on while you watch. A cocktail gets smoked about a foot from your elbow. We spent a Saturday morning up there, and it’s a very different brunch from the one this room built its name on (in the best possible way).
A Brunch With a Reputation
To get why this is a big deal, you have to know what Lacroix’s brunch has meant to Philly. The restaurant opened in September 2002 in the space that had been ThreeTops, built as a showcase for chef Jean-Marie Lacroix after his long run at the Four Seasons, where he’d turned the Fountain into an institution. He spent the better part of a year at The Rittenhouse overseeing construction of the restaurant that would carry his name, then moved on in 2006. His kitchen kept turning out talent anyway, including Townsend Wentz, Matt Levin, and plenty of other cooks who went on to run kitchens all over town.
Through every chef change, brunch was the constant. Years ago, The Inquirer’s Craig LaBan noted that even when lunch and dinner had trouble finding their footing, brunch had always earned top marks. The Daily Meal picked it as Pennsylvania’s top brunch in 2020, and Philadelphia magazine gave it a Best of Philly nod for Over-the-Top Brunch in 2024. People saved it for anniversaries and for in-laws they wanted to impress. (We’ve booked it for no reason at all, more than once!)
Today the restaurant holds a AAA Four Diamond rating and the hotel has a MICHELIN Guide Key. After 24 years, nobody would have blamed them for leaving a beloved brunch exactly as it was. They went the other way, reserving the buffet for the busiest holidays, and reimagining what brunch could be for the neighborhood.
From Help-Yourself to Hospitality
The food was never the issue, and it still isn’t. What changed is how it gets to you. Instead of you doing laps around a buffet, the kitchen does the traveling now, bringing dishes out, finishing some of them right beside you, and pulling you into the process along the way.
“We all love this menu,” Aman Gopinath, Lacroix’s food and beverage director, told us. “It’s brought a new energy to us.” You can feel it in the room. Servers linger at each table a bit longer, mostly because a lot of them have something to make for you.
Because brunch only runs two days a week, everything is prepped the day before or that morning. “Nothing’s been stored for weeks,” Gopinath said. Chef de Cuisine Joshua Quintana’s team sources locally wherever it can, with chefs reaching out to farms and smaller vendors they know personally rather than ordering everything off a big distributor’s truck.
The experience starts well before you sit down, though. You cross the hotel lobby, climb a marble staircase past a massive masquerade painting at the landing, and come out into a sage-walled hallway. Then the dining room opens up, spacious but still somehow intimate, with windows over the Square that keep it bright even when it’s pouring outside. All those greens are no accident, by the way. The color scheme is borrowed from the park right outside.
Brunch on Wheels
You’ve probably had guacamole smashed at your table somewhere, or a Caesar tossed next to you. Brunch carts rolling through a dining room? That’s newer territory, and according to Gopinath it’s something not many places in Philly are doing right now.
The cart to plan your whole morning around carries the Giant Browned-Butter Cinnamon Roll. It’s sized for four, and it’s finished right at your table with brown butter frosting and cinnamon, as much or as little as you want. We asked for extra frosting. Zero regrets. It was our first time having brown butter on a cinnamon roll, and it will not be our last.
One catch: Lacroix makes only 10 of them per brunch. The dough proofs overnight, then again for a few more hours, and it’s competing for oven space with everything else the pastry team has going, so there’s no whipping up a bonus batch mid-service. We showed up at 11:30 and had no trouble. “If you came at 1:45, we might not have it,” Gopinath said. So try to get there early or ask about it when you book.
Cart number two is the Build-Your-Own Sundae, and it’s pure fun as you’d pretty much expect. M&M’s, chocolate chips, white chocolate shavings, sprinkles, cherries, caramel, and toasted coconut each sit under their own tiny glass cloche like a very serious little science experiment. You point, they build. The kids at the next table were not the only ones watching.
There was briefly a third. The Spritz Cart mixed drinks tableside at launch, but shaking and straining cocktails between tables led to the occasional runaway ice cube and a little champagne bubbling over, so it’s been retired. The team is still dreaming up new ways to bring that kind of moment to the table, and we would like to formally volunteer for any and all testing.
Made Right in Front of You
The carts aren’t the only place the finishing touches happen at your table. The A.M. Old Fashioned, made with bacon-fat-washed Rittenhouse rye, gets smoked tableside, which means a little curl of smoke and a lot of curious looks from the neighbors.
The cocktail program comes from Danny Childs, the James Beard Award winner behind the Slow Drinks movement, who has worked with Lacroix for close to two years. His influence is all over the bar. Syrups are made in-house, the shelves carry lesser-known liqueurs alongside the big names, and local ingredients get used wherever possible. The brunch list includes an Espresso du Monde with cognac, chicory coffee syrup, China-China, and fresh espresso, plus a Philly Fish House Punch made with Laird’s applejack. Bottomless Bubbles come as your choice of mimosa or Bellini.
Brunch calls for something you can sip slowly over a long meal, Gopinath explained, and spritzes are having a moment. The team wanted to go beyond the usual Aperol, which is where Juliette, a sweeter, less widely used liqueur that suits the mood, comes in. Even the bubbles have a hometown touch. The house cava comes from Barcino and is bottled under The Rittenhouse’s own label.
What Lands on the Plate
The menu is now à la carte and French-leaning, and it’s built for sharing. The Lobster Hashbrowns come with lobster salad, arugula, and hollandaise. The Crab Cake Benedict uses housemade crab cakes and brown butter hollandaise (brown butter is clearly having a weekend here). The LCX Croque Madame stacks Parisian ham, Gruyère, Comté, and béchamel, and the French Toast Suzette dresses brioche up with crème anglaise, blood orange, and Grand Marnier until it looks a lot more like dessert than breakfast.
If you’re a purist (and we respect that), The Traditional is right there with eggs, bacon, and crispy potatoes on green-rimmed Lacroix china. There’s also a For the Table section with escargot, deviled eggs, a baker’s basket, and moules frites, a raw bar with oysters and chilled prawns, and an off-menu Pastry of the Month that sticks around until it sells out. This month, that’s the cinnamon roll. Bringing kids? The children’s menu has a Pancake Skewer and a Toad in the Hole.
Sunday’s Best
The new brunch takes its name from the old tradition of putting on your Sunday best, and Lacroix is gently encouraging everyone to dress up a little. Not black tie, just that outfit you’ve been waiting for an excuse to wear. Live music plays through the whole service, rotating among piano, violin, and guitar, with modern songs reworked for the room. On our visit, a guitarist had the floor, and the champagne coupe tower near the entrance was doing its part too.
A Restaurant for the City
One thing Gopinath was very clear about: Lacroix doesn’t want to be thought of as just the hotel restaurant. Brunch has always been its most local meal. Back in the Sunday-only days, the morning went something like this: breakfast for around a hundred hotel guests (Saturday nights usually sell out), then what he described as a flip of a switch to brunch for another hundred people, nearly all of them locals. Guilty as charged.
The à la carte format is shifting that a little, since hotel guests can now come back after an early breakfast without feeling like they’ve eaten twice. But brunch is still built around the neighborhood. “We’re not just a hotel restaurant,” he told us. “We just happen to be in a hotel, but we are very much a restaurant for the city.”
Twenty-four years in, Lacroix could have coasted on a brunch people already loved. Instead it took the whole thing apart and rebuilt it around the little moments, the frosting, the smoke, the sundae you point your way through.
If you go, get there close to 11:30, ask for the extra frosting, and let us know which cart won you over!
