Medium Rare – a steakhouse with a one dinner entree on its menu – is opening in Fishtown

Medium Rare, a chain restaurant that serves a prix-fixe steak and frites meal, is opening its ninth location Friday in Fishtown.

The restaurant will offer the same single-entree dinner menu that Medium Rare has popularized at its other locations — a Culotte steak with its "special sauce," french fries, a mixed green salad and bread. Dinner costs $32.95; seconds are free on main-course items. For vegetarians and vegans, there's a portobello mushroom entree with a roasted red pepper sauce.

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"There's no daily specials, I don't want to make it sound boring, but we just hit," said co-owner and Cherry Hill native Mark Bucher, who opened the first Medium Rare restaurant in Washington, D.C. in 2011. "Medium Rare hits a certain way, and we're just making sure Philly hits the same way that D.C. or New York City hits to the people that come visit us. It's the same experience."

Dessert options include cakes, pies and hot fudge sundaes for $12, and cocktails, wine and beer are available at varying amounts.

On weekends, Medium Rare will offer several brunch options — steak frites, steak Benedict, steak breakfast sandwich, steak and eggs, or French toast with sausage — for $39.95. Each meal comes with unlimited cocktails, coffee, soda and juice.

Medium Rare has several locations in the Washington metro area, and has opened others in New York, Houston and Dallas. The Fishtown steakhouse is at 1540 Frankford Ave., next to Suraya. It sits 110 people indoors and another 40 outdoors.

Bucher had planned to open the Fishtown restaurant in late 2024, but he said the permitting and building process took longer than expected. His visions for a Philadelphia location has been a long time coming. The team originally started working on a location on Sansom Street 10 years ago, but that lease ended up falling through, Bucher said.

He'd been waiting for the right opportunity to come back in the time since, and felt that Fishtown was the right home.

"For what we do, the neighborhood is perfect, the community is perfect, and the restaurant scene is obviously now much more involved in Philly than even it was in 2017, 2018. So, it just all kind of fell into place," Bucher said. "We got lucky."

Bucher and co-owner Tom Gregg also are expanding their Feed the Fridge program, which stocks fridges at schools and rec centers with home-cooked, ready-to-eat meals. The exact locations are still in progress, but Bucher plans to launch the program in Philadelphia within eight to 10 weeks of Medium Rare's opening — with the help of some local connections.

"My family is a long-standing Philadelphia family," Bucher said. "My grandfather was the head of the Civil Service Commission in Philly in the 70s. So we've got long, deep family roots in the Philly community. So, we're actually digging into those now to figure out the right partners for Feed the Fridge."

Medium Rare will be open for dinner Mondays through Thursdays from 5 to 10 p.m., on Fridays from 5 to 11 p.m., on Saturdays from 2:30 p.m. to 11 p.m., and on Sundays from 2:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Brunch will be available on weekends from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.