3925 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Since Philadelphia is so big, they cannot offer one restaurant week for the entire city, so they break it up by neighborhood. In the fall they offered University City Dining days, a deal that offers a four course meal at multiple places at various prices. Some places you could get a four course meal for $15, others for $25, and yet others for $35. I do not spend a lot of time outside of Center City when I go to Philly, so I wanted to take advantage of this deal. We decided to go to City Tap House for a more casual atmosphere and enjoy a few beers with our meal.
City tap house is awesome! They have an incredible amount of tapped beers, and they offer all kinds of bottled selections as well. They even offer tapped root beer made by the Victory brewing company! They had specials on Anchor Steam beers on the night that we were there because the beer is originally from San Francisco, and the Giants were in town for a weekend series with the Phillies. I kicked back a few because Anchor Steam really does make some fantastic beers.
For our menu choices, we chose the ten spice wings and mini crabcakes to start, the cheesesteak and the potato gnocchi for our main courses, and the strawberry shortcake cheesecake, and the chocolate cake for dessert. I got to try a little bit of everything, and overall I was pretty impressed. Bar food is always something that I take very seriously, and City Tap House offers some pretty delectable fare. The wings were particularly interesting because they had no sauce, and they weren’t fried, but instead tossed in a ten spice mix and baked in the oven. They were incredibly juicy and left me wanting many, many more after I was finished. The crabcakes were also quite delicious. They had a crispy crust on the outside and large chunks of crab on the inside.
The real star of my meal was the cheese steak that I had. I do not usually order cheese steaks from places that are not cheese steak stands, but I decided to give it a shot because the description sounded so awesome. The cheese steak had a beer-cheese fondue on it, with fried onions and a nice rib-eye sliced on it. It was incredibly flavorful, and it completely changed my perspective on cheese steaks. The cheese sauce had so much flavor, and the meat was incredibly tender. I really do prefer cheesesteaks with wiz and onions on them, but this made me realize how good a cheese steak can be in other forms as well. My girlfriend’s gnocchi was also very interesting. I had never had gnocchi like it before, but before then I’d only had gnocchi in Italian restaurants. This gnocchi was a bit less fluffy and it was pan sautéed. It was very different than I am used to, but it was very good. It was served over a bed of arugula with some tomatoes tossed in as well.
The dessert was a little less stellar, but I wasn’t expecting it to really be fantastic. My strawberry shortcake cheese cake was a little too dense and extremely rich, and I found it pretty difficult to eat, so I only ate about half. The chocolate cake was also extremely rich and it was not very tasty. It tasted a little bit like it had just been defrosted, but I do not really know if that is true or not.
I would tell anyone looking for a good meal in University City for a fair price to head over to City Tap House. They have incredible beer selections, and the food is very well done. I would just recommend you get dessert somewhere else. Let me know what you think! Cheers!
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