At the Rittenhouse Hotel, 21-year-old RJ Smith settled into a side table with a window view, overlooking one of Philadelphia’s most iconic parks in one of its most coveted neighborhoods.
While most of his peers at Drexel University are spending their Sunday tossing a frisbee on the quad or prepping for an exam — he is getting ready for dinner service and will spend up to 22 hours in the kitchen. Every other Sunday, until July 26, the hotel’s dining room is his.
The much hyped Ocho Supper Club, which began out of the chef’s dorm room, will be at the hotel for limited run residency.
Chef Smith is tall and like many 21-year-olds still growing into themselves, a bit lanky. He’s soft spoken and has a polished, controlled energy.
“It takes a level of dedication that separates you from a lot of people,” he said. “Having the ability to narrow down my focus onto something that is so particular.”
In this manner, he speaks like an athlete in training.
“What keeps me so excited every day is the understanding that I don’t have it figured out and that I never will. And the continuing striving for perfection, which is something so unattainable — something that I think will continue to push me in the direction that I need to go.”
Smith is careful about the message he wants to deliver, something he admits to. “I like to keep my thoughts and my words as concise and as impactful as possible,” he said.
Ocho Supper Club’s eight course menu has gotten a lot of buzz, including multiple write-ups in the Inquirer and 6ABC.
His story is indeed impressive. The wunderkind hails from Oakland, California and got his start by walking up to the chef de cuisine at Californios — a two-starred Michelin restaurant — at San Francisco’s iconic Ferry Building Farmers Market. He figured the chef there might be out scouting fresh ingredients.
“I sent a lot of emails,” Smith said. “But I mean, when you as a chef going on your computer and seeing a resume of a 16 year old, obviously you might keep moving. So, I tried to put myself right in their path.”
From there, his reputation precedes itself — with gigs learning in kitchens like Royal Izakaya, Provenance, Jean-Georges Philadelphia and Emmett. During his own well-reviewed supper club at Drexel, he hustled to put together his own dining experience, saving up money for eight months and then spending it on second-hand plates, glassware and a dining table he got off of Facebook Marketplace for $150 (plus $25 for the U-Haul to move it).
“The food was the most expensive part,” he said. “It was like, ‘What can I do to these basic or more accessible ingredients in a way that’s super, breathtaking.’ And so that’s what most of the first meal was — more rice based dishes. I did this jerk potato pavé.”
The idea for Ocho’s Afro-Caribbean flavors came after Smith took a family trip to Jamaica and got to reconnect with that side of his heritage.
“People often come into the restaurant thinking that they’re eating food that I grew up eating. And that’s really the polar opposite… my family wanted to be American,” Smith said.
“Having so much history of our culture erased through different trade, whether that was resources or whether that was people, a lot of trade went on that was unrecorded, and so I can’t have an exact pinpoint. My dad’s side of the family are really passionate about what makes us, us.”
This strong message, sense of determination and follow through is getting Smith noticed.
“I had read about RJ,” said Gregg Skowronski, managing director of the Rittenhouse hotel, who scouted the young chef. “I had been trying to get into his supper club three times, kept getting waitlisted, and then finally had an opportunity to go try his food and just experience the whole supper club service.”
Smith’s Afro-Caribbean flavors blew him away.
“I was thoroughly impressed by what he was able to do in a limited kitchen space. And his team, they were just energetic, passionate, in addition to just the quality of the food, it was the fact that it was something that Philly has never seen before.”
An Oakland Start
Smith grew up with two older sisters in Oakland, California. His parents separated when he was very young. His mother worked in education, sometimes at his school, while his father worked in real estate and has been in different sales and executive positions. The family moved around a lot — switching spots every two to four years.
“It was never within the same school district,” Smith said. “That was definitely something that as a kid, it was really hard. I felt like I didn’t have super close friends.”
While Oakland may be one of the more expensive cities to live in the country, 14% of residents there live below the federal poverty level, according to census data.
“Looking back on it, it was super eye opening to be able to see different paths of life, different styles, even different school districts,” Smith said. “I learned the same thing twice, and it was completely different. And I think that world lens is something that really applies to me everyday.”
While no one in Smith’s immediate family is in the food industry, cooking has always been in his DNA. His grandma Rusty inspired many of his culinary passions and his love for produce. She has a green thumb and the two would work in her garden. His uncle, Patrick Keilch, has almost 30 years of kitchen experience.
“He’s been interested in [the culinary industry] for a long time and I bit my tongue and encouraged him because it’s a hard life, but he seems to want to do it,” Keilch said.
Keilch noted that Smith has had a strong interest in cooking since he was around eight or nine, but also had a “wild” side to him as a kid.
“I remember going out to eat with him and he’d run around the restaurant and get in everybody’s way,” Keilch said. “He would also eat anything… Once he was finished running around the restaurant at some Vietnamese place in Oakland, he sat down and ate a whole bunch of squid, which disgusted his mother, but he was into it.”
“As he’s gotten older,” he said, “he’s sort of got a poise that belies his age.”
That poise was already taking shape by the time chef Smith walked up to the chef de cuisine at Californios.
“RJ is a really eager and amazing young person,” said Val Cantú, chef and co-owner of Californios. “He joined the team with minimal experience in a professional kitchen, and just really snapped into place, made himself useful, made sure he was part of the team in a way that was helpful, but not in the way. And he’s a taller guy.”
Dining at Ocho
Dining in the Rittenhouse Hotel is a very Philadelphia experience. Unless you like to be up late, we do recommend the 5 p.m. slot over 8 p.m. (There’s only two times, and we didn’t actually get seated until around 8:30).
Once inside, it’s hard to beat that view overlooking the park. The menu at Ocho included a curry kanpachi covered in a large tortilla chip, melt-in-your-mouth cod, and jerked duck with a scallion emulsion. It’s the kind of tasting menu where you get a little piece of chocolate to cleanse your palette right before your actual dessert. The chef came out and chatted with various tables to check in on the food. On our way out, we were gifted a little mason jar filled with Ocho curry powder.
Still, even in the elegant setting with the park view, we kinda wished we were eating at that Drexel dorm room. We can imagine that there was some extra magic tasting the elevated flavors at the used-dining table in the curated space with mismatched dishware, instead of at a luxury hotel where they are anticipated. Expectation can flatten surprises.
In fact, part of the reason Skowronski hired Smith was to change the public perception around the hotel.
“The Rittenhouse is a historic hotel, and it has long been an icon within Philadelphia,” Skowronski explained. “But it also has had an intimidating factor about it.”
Many people, he said, don’t know that they can head inside for a drink, and may feel the building is “too fancy” for them.
“Philadelphia is a very approachable city,” he said. “And we want to make sure that people do feel comfortable coming in here. So having RJ come in has really helped diversify the portfolio, or the guests that come in here each night.”
Following the Ocho Supper Club residency, he plans a roughly multi-million dollar renovation for a steakhouse restaurant called the Ruxton. The vision is to reposition the space as a Rittenhouse Square destination, akin to Parc or Borromini, with a stronger appeal to local clientele.
A new approach
While some Gen-Zers may feel timid ordering takeout via phone call instead of a delivery app, Smith isn’t afraid to go out and get what he needs done.
This quality has put him on a different path than your typical executive chef — who spends years (often decades) in the kitchen before they start their own venture. His job and the publicity and pressures that come with it is out of the depths of many 21 year olds. After all, would you want strangers reading about you at that age?
“To a certain point it starts to get surprising when people know things about me that I didn’t tell them,” Smith said. “People assume that they know me. And that’s something that’s a little weird — someone walking up to me like I know them and I’ve never seen them in my life.”
Chef Nicholas Bazik of Provenance recalls when Smith worked part-time as a prep cook helping out with one of his pop-ups, while also juggling Ocho Supper Club at Drexel.
“Right now, more than ever, there’s more opportunities to present yourself to the general public that otherwise would never have been available to you before,” Bazik said, noting the ways in which Instagram has changed the industry.
“He and I took very different paths. I was very adamant about working as much as I possibly could before even entertaining the idea of opening something. So I waited until I was 38 to do something, and I started at the same time.”
The viral quality of RJ’s story and prodigy status, in addition to his solid flavors, are undoubtedly part of the young chef’s rise. Still, Bazik was wary of the idea of heading a kitchen so young.
“The benefit of putting in the work is that you can succeed and fail on someone else’s dime, essentially, because you’re an employee, but you also get to learn how restaurants work,” he said.
Chef Cantú also recognizes the unique situation that Smith finds himself in and the pressure that comes with it. He’s hopeful that Smith can handle it.
“It’s pretty rare to meet people like him in general, chef or not a chef,” Cantú said. “I certainly didn’t know what I was going to do in my life at 16. And to kind of head first like that, is really special… His concept will continue to evolve and evolve. And that’s just how it goes whenever you begin to open a restaurant.”
The longer we sat with Smith, the more relaxed he became. His words became less polished and more casual — his posture easing as he sank into his seat. We chatted about the college student outside of his chef identity. He’s close with his sisters. He gets emotional talking about his family. He likes being outdoors.
“Back home, I love mountain biking,” Smith said. “I love hiking… I love to get to Wissahickon. I don’t have a bike right now, but I love biking down the pier, being outside and not in the city… I kind of just want to be off the map, just fend for myself.”
Smith is graduating from Drexel’s culinary program this spring and his residency ends in July. After that he’s free to go wherever he wants.
“I want to stay in Philly for some time,” he said. “Like, really build something here, and at some point I see myself moving back… but not in the near future.”
“I think that the Philly food scene is definitely now my favorite,” he added. “I think it’s the grittiest food scene. People don’t take no for an answer, whether that’s, ‘Oh, I can’t open a restaurant. I’m going to do pop ups.’ Or whether that’s, ‘Oh, this is my restaurant, this is where we’re at.’”
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