Fond is launching a new monthly Fond wine pairing dinner series in collaboration with The Perfect Pour, turning the East Passyunk contemporary French BYOB into an ongoing wine-education program built around chef-driven menus. The series debuts on Tuesday, May 19 at 6:30pm with “Oregon Wine Month: Let the Pinots Flow,” a four-course evening pouring Pacific Northwest pinots alongside a $125 per person prix fixe from Lee Styer and Jessie Prawlucki-Styer.
What follows the Oregon launch is just as deliberate. June lands on Greece. July arrives with a United States 250th Birthday celebration timed to Philadelphia’s semiquincentennial moment. Each dinner rotates region and theme, with The Perfect Pour curating the wines and Fond’s kitchen composing menus designed to read the room a region is making.
Inside the Fond Wine Pairing Dinner Series Concept
Single-night winemaker dinners are common in Philadelphia, and Fond itself has built a reputation for them — the Bordeaux 2017 vintage dinner earlier this year was the immediate proof of concept. What sets the Fond wine pairing dinner series apart is the monthly cadence and the editorial arc that comes with it. Each installment is built as a chapter, not a one-off, and the cumulative effect is the kind of slow, intentional exposure to regional wine that’s hard to engineer in a single sitting.
The Perfect Pour handles the wine curation, which keeps the program grounded in sommelier-driven storytelling rather than brand showcasing. The Fond kitchen, meanwhile, brings the same contemporary French sensibility that has kept the East Passyunk BYOB on every serious Philadelphia diner’s list for over a decade. Lee Styer and Jessie Prawlucki-Styer have always treated the menu as a structure rather than a list, and that structural approach is exactly what makes a multi-course pairing land.
For enthusiasts already deep into regional wine, the series offers a chance to follow specific producers across courses. For curious diners just starting to build a wine vocabulary, the format functions as the best kind of teacher — one where you eat your way through the lesson.
Fond Wine Pairing Dinner: Oregon and the Pacific Northwest on May 19
The opening installment of the Fond wine pairing dinner series leans into Oregon Wine Month. The May 19 menu opens with a chicory salad layered with pickled blue foot mushrooms, Rogue River blue cheese, and tarragon vinaigrette — a first course that announces the room’s intentions about Pacific Northwest terroir before a single pour.
The second course brings roasted guinea hen with an English peas and fiddlehead fern fricassee, the kind of plate that asks a pinot to do more than play decoration. The third course tilts toward weight: a beef strip loin paired with golden beets, asparagus, and gouda cream, designed to absorb a more structured Oregon red without overpowering the wine’s fruit.
Dessert is a choice between a lemongrass lemon square with brown sugar shortbread, lime leaf whipped cream cheese, and strawberries, or a tangerine vanilla panna cotta with strawberry rhubarb compote and brown sugar shortbread. Either way, the closing pour shifts unexpectedly to a tailored sake selection — a curatorial move that signals how much thought The Perfect Pour is putting into closing the meal with intention rather than habit.
The $125 per person price covers the four courses and the pairings. Pacific Northwest pinot in particular has been having a sustained moment in American wine, and putting it in dialogue with French technique gives the night its creative tension.
What’s Next in the Fond Wine Pairing Dinner Series
The Fond wine pairing dinner series continues on Tuesday, June 16 with a Greece edition, opening the door to Assyrtiko, Xinomavro, and the other indigenous grapes Greek producers have spent the last two decades reintroducing to American drinkers. Greek wine pairs beautifully with the kind of bright, herb-forward composition Fond does well, and the June dinner reads as the program’s natural second beat.
Tuesday, July 14 brings a United States 250th Birthday celebration, timed to Philadelphia’s semiquincentennial year. Details on courses and wines are still pending, but the framing suggests a survey approach — American regions read through the lens of a city that’s spent 2026 reflecting on what 250 years of national identity actually means at the table.
The cumulative effect of three confirmed dinners in three months is durable: this isn’t a promotional moment, it’s a program. For Philadelphia diners who treat fine-dining attendance as a kind of ongoing study, the Fond wine pairing dinner series gives them a regular date on the calendar.
Reservations and What to Know About the Fond Wine Pairing Dinner
Reservations for the May 19 Fond wine pairing dinner are required and available through the Oregon Wine Month reservation page on Resy. The $125 per person price covers all four courses and the curated wine pairings.
Worth noting for new visitors: Fond is normally a BYOB, with guests bringing their own bottles to dinner service. The pairing dinner series is the inverse — Fond and The Perfect Pour handle the wine entirely, which removes the usual planning step and shifts the focus to the courses themselves. The format is a real distinction from typical Fond service and worth understanding before booking.
About Post Author
Discover more from dosage MAGAZINE
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.