Tuesday, March 15, 7:00 pm
Members $90, guests $115

The Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia, located in a landmarked bank building, is as impressive a setting as they come. Classical pillars flank the entrance, a domed ceiling soars over the lobby, and in the former bank vault, guests linger over drinks and cigars. Since last year, when Terence Feury came on board, the hotel has had a chef to match the surroundings.

Feury grew up in New Jersey, and there was definitely something in the genes. (His brother, Patrick, was the chef at Susanna Foo, another Philadelphia landmark; now he’s at Nectar in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.) Terence Feury attended the Academy of Culinary Arts and after graduation he moved to New York, where he worked his way through some of the hottest kitchens of the 1990s—Peacock Alley, Alison on Dominick, and finally, Le Bernardin. At the last, Feury became enthralled with the amazing seafood emerging from the kitchen.

In Philadelphia, Feury took his new skills and applied them to the seafood menu at the acclaimed Striped Bass, where, as executive chef from 1999 to 2003, he won much praise. Writing in the Courier-Post, Beth Addono described his “passionate menu” as “nothing short of spectacular,” while R. W. Apple Jr. noted in the New York Times that Feury had “refreshed a tired menu with distinctive, unpompous dishes.” Small wonder that in 2000 Restaurant Hospitality magazine named him a Rising Star Chef, and in 2002 he was nominated in the category of Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic by The James Beard Foundation.

At the Grill in the Ritz-Carlton, Feury has revamped the menu and turned the restaurant into a hot spot. StarChefs.com has named Feury a Rising Star, while Philadelphia and Arrive magazines both dubbed him a Young Chef to Watch. Best of all was Craig LaBan’s three-bell review in the Philadelphia Inquirer last year, headlined, “With a star chef creating memorable meals, dining at the Ritz-Carlton is as it should be.” LaBan noted that at Striped Bass, Feury had made his mark as “one of the city’s finest chefs” whose “seafood repertoire is vibrantly flavored and seemingly inexhaustible.” LaBan continued, “The Grill finally has a local star to hang on its dining room door. The early results have been spectacular.”