SouthSide, the Bynum Brothers Event Space Next Door to SOUTH

There is a room on Mount Vernon Street with a wall of windows and a skylight over it, and most of the people who ought to be booking it have never heard of it. Before I go one sentence further, my name, Harry Hayman, sits on this page, and I am not a neutral party about this particular room. I have worked inside this operation. Read what follows as somebody who knows the place from the service side and not as somebody who wandered in one evening and came away impressed. The thing I keep bumping into is not a marketing problem I can fix with enthusiasm. It is a plain information gap. People who plan events in this city for a living, people with a budget and a guest list and a date circled in November, walk right past SouthSide without knowing it is there.

The Harry Hayman disclosure, in full

It is difficult for me to pretend I am completely objective here, so I will not try. When SOUTH opened on North Broad Street, WHYY’s coverage of the opening quotes me by name as the general manager, talking about the beverage program. Before that and after it, I spent years inside the Bynum Hospitality Group, which is the company that owns SOUTH and SouthSide. My own professional history has their rooms in it.

That should change how you read me, and I think it should change it in one specific direction. Discount my adjectives. I will always like this room more than a stranger would, because I have watched what happens in the kitchen behind it on a night when a hundred plates have to land at once. What you should not discount are the checkable parts: who owns it, what the space physically is, what it can seat, who the family behind it is, and what they have built over three decades in Philadelphia. Every one of those is verifiable without taking my word for anything, and the rest of this piece is mostly me pointing at other people’s reporting.

What SouthSide actually is

SouthSide is the private event and catering space next door to SOUTH Restaurant and Jazz Club, at 1410 Mount Vernon Street in Philadelphia. Their own site describes it as the companion space to the restaurant, available for weddings and wedding receptions, corporate luncheons and dinners, cocktail parties and rehearsal dinners. In practice the calendar is wider than that list: birthdays, fundraisers, holiday parties, association dinners, panel nights, the whole range of occasions where a group of people needs a room, a meal and somebody competent running the clock.

The physical room is the part photographs undersell. The SouthSide description names floor to ceiling windows across the entire front of the building, tall windows down the whole left side, and high ceilings with skylights, which is why the space reads completely differently at a lunch than it does at a black tie evening. The front wall opens so the room spills onto a patio. There is optional staging, which can be a real stage for live performance or a raised dais for a speaker and a panel. Seated dining runs from thirty to one hundred guests, and non seated gatherings go up to one hundred and fifty. It is inside walking distance of the Pennsylvania Convention Center, City Hall and the Met, which matters more than it sounds when half your guest list is arriving from out of town.

The food comes out of the same kitchen sensibility as the restaurant. When 6abc covered the opening in 2022, the dishes they singled out were braised short ribs and deviled eggs with angry mama chips, which tells you the catering menu is not the usual banquet compromise. There is a full premium bar and a professional floor staff, and the team runs an event start to finish rather than handing you a shell and a vendor list. That last part is my own account of it, from the inside, and it is also the single largest reason I recommend the room to people who have been burned by a venue that rents you four walls and disappears.

Robert and Benjamin Bynum, and the club their father built

SOUTH is owned and operated by brothers Robert and Benjamin Bynum, and so is SouthSide. They are second generation hospitality people, and the first generation is a genuine piece of Philadelphia music history rather than a family anecdote.

Their father, Benjamin Bynum Sr., opened the Cadillac Club on Germantown Avenue in North Philadelphia in 1965, with his wife Ruth keeping the books. The Philadelphia Music Alliance lists the artists who came through that room: Nina Simone, B.B. King, Count Basie, Gladys Knight, Fats Domino, Kenny Gamble, and a young George Benson and Aretha Franklin. Billy Paul thought enough of the place to name his 1968 debut album after it. When the music changed, Bynum Sr. changed the room with it and opened Impulse. He kept working into his nineties, and WHYY’s obituary records that he died in October 2021 at ninety eight, with his sons already three decades into carrying the trade forward.

In April 2025 the Cadillac Club was honored on the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame alongside Pep’s Musical Bar and the Showboat. The Inquirer noted that it was the first time since the Walk of Fame began in 1987 that venues and their owners were included among the honorees. Robert and Benjamin worked in their father’s bars and clubs through high school and college. They did not inherit a brand. They learned a craft on the floor, which is a different thing entirely, and you can feel it in how their rooms are run.

A thirty five year run of rooms in this city

The brothers went into business together in 1990 with Zanzibar Blue, a jazz club that started on 11th Street and later moved into the Bellevue. It ran seventeen years and closed in April 2007, and Lou Rawls, Chick Corea and Chuck Mangione all played it. When the Inquirer asked Robert why they never revived the name, his answer was that “we would be competing against the memory that people had.” In the same conversation Ben described the method: every day, they look at a large part of what they do as being what jazz is based on, and the word he used for it was improvisation.

The list of rooms behind them is long. Warmdaddy’s, the blues club and Southern kitchen. Brave New World and Deluxe, on the nightclub side. Relish, the brunch and jazz room on Ogontz Avenue in West Oak Lane, which they took over in 2009 after arriving as consultants at the invitation of Dwight Evans, and which they ran for well over a decade. When Billy Penn reported its closing in January 2023, the detail that stayed with me was the brothers committing to help find an African American operator to take the space on.

Then there is Green Soul, their healthier Southern and African diaspora kitchen, which Philadelphia magazine reported in 2018 was moving to 1410 Mount Vernon Street, directly beside SOUTH. That is the same address that is now SouthSide. The room you would book for your holiday party has already been two of their concepts. They keep the bones and rethink the use, which is exactly what thirty five years of operating teaches you to do instead of walking away from a good lease.

Why the ownership story is the bonus, not the reason

Here is where I want to be careful, because the easy version of this piece writes itself and it is the wrong version.

The easy version says: book SouthSide because it is Black owned, second generation, family built, a piece of Philadelphia history. All of that is true and none of it is the argument. If you book a room for its ownership story and the room turns out to be mediocre, you have spent somebody else’s evening on your own politics, the toast runs late, the food arrives cold, and you quietly never book there again. That helps nobody, least of all the business you were trying to support.

The argument runs the other way around. Book it because it is a genuinely good event space, with a kitchen that can actually cook, a floor team that has done this for years, natural light most banquet rooms would trade a wall for, and owners who are physically present. I have never once dealt with the Bynums as absentee landlords. They are in the building. That is my observation rather than a documented fact, and I offer it as such, but it is the thing I would most want a client to know. Then, having made the right call on quality, you also get the rest of it. Robert has said plainly that they feel a responsibility to the African American community “to be a place where the African American community can come and feel comfortable.” When Resy wrote about SOUTH in December 2025, the chef Kurt Evans, who worked there, described the standard the brothers set: “They set a tone of excellence without ego.” Tonii Hicks called it “the first restaurant in Philadelphia where I had an entirely and unapologetically Black experience.” That is a room that trains people and sends them out into the city better than it found them.

So no compromise is being asked of you. That is the whole point, and it is why the ownership line belongs at the end of the pitch rather than the front of it. Philadelphia has a long habit of treating its own institutions as scenery until somebody from elsewhere writes them up. A family that has been putting music and food in front of this city since 1965 should not have to wait for that. The room is there, on Mount Vernon Street, with the light coming through the skylight. Go stand in it before you sign a contract somewhere else.

The Harry Hayman disclosure, in full

What SouthSide actually is

Robert and Benjamin Bynum, and the club their father built

A thirty five year run of rooms in this city

Why the ownership story is the bonus, not the reason

Sources and references