The Rodin Museum Garden Bar returns to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway on Friday, May 29 for a 14-Friday run through August 28, opening at 4:00 PM and serving beer, wine, craft cocktails, and small plates in the museum’s reflecting-pool garden until 8:00 PM. The pop-up has been a summer ritual on the Parkway since 2018, run by Constellation Culinary Group in partnership with the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

What separates the 2026 edition from prior summers is everything that has been added around it: a new Constellation-operated food truck called Rising Up Kitchen that splits its time between the Rodin and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a single-night appearance by the Crossing Choir on Friday, July 17 at 6:30 PM.

The Garden Bar itself is the kind of program that knows exactly what it is. Free admission to the garden, Pay What You Wish admission to the Rodin Museum’s collection inside, leashed dogs welcome, weather permitting. That straightforward proposition is part of what has kept the program returning year after year. The 2026 season adds two genuinely interesting wrinkles on top of that.

The Rising Up Kitchen Food Truck Operates at Both the Rodin and the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The most meaningful addition is the new Rising Up Kitchen food truck. The truck takes its name and visual energy from Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments, the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition currently exploring how Sylvester Stallone’s fictional fighter became one of the city’s most enduring monument figures. The menu draws from Philadelphia’s vernacular — roast pork sandwiches with provolone, cheesesteak egg rolls with long hot aioli, Bavarian soft pretzels, brown butter chocolate chip cookies — alongside a fruit salad bowl, frozen desserts, non-alcoholic beverages, and themed water bottles. The cohesion between the truck’s branding, the exhibition’s subject, and the city’s food vocabulary is the kind of curatorial-meets-culinary alignment that doesn’t happen often at this scale.

The truck’s service schedule is the second thing worth tracking. At the Rodin Museum Garden Bar, the truck rolls in every Friday evening alongside the bar’s regular service. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s North Entrance, it operates every Saturday and Sunday from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM, running May 24 through September 7 — five days earlier than the Garden Bar’s May 29 opening and almost two weeks longer at the back end. Readers in the area for the PMA’s Rising Up exhibition or the Rocky steps have a clean food option built into the visit.

The Crossing Choir Performs at the Rodin Museum Garden Bar on July 17

The 2026 season’s single-night highlight is Friday, July 17 at 6:30 PM, when the Crossing performs in the garden. The chamber choir was founded in Philadelphia in 2005 under conductor Donald Nally, has won two Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance, commissioned more than 175 new works, and has toured internationally as one of the most significant American voices in contemporary choral music. Hearing them in a garden setting — outdoors, in an intimate space surrounded by Rodin bronzes — is a different proposition from hearing them in a concert hall. The performance is included with Garden Bar admission, which is free.

The choir’s appearance is the kind of one-night detail that converts a casual Friday Garden Bar visit into a planned destination evening. Block off July 17 now.

What Surrounds the Rodin Museum Garden Bar

It’s easy to forget, walking through the museum’s garden with a glass of wine, that the space is one of the more significant outdoor sculpture installations in the United States. Eight Rodin works are installed in the garden and across the museum’s exterior. The Thinker and The Gates of Hell have stood in their original locations since the building opened in 1929.

Following conservation work undertaken by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Adam and The Shade returned to their original places within the arches of the Meudon Gate for the first time since 1963, and The Age of Bronze and Eve have returned to the niches on either side of the portico overlooking the reflecting pool. A version of The Three Shades, a generous loan from Iris Cantor, occupies a space on the building’s west side that had been vacant for most of the last eighty years. The garden also draws from the Parkway’s broader spring and summer cultural calendar — institutions like Calder Gardens further down the corridor are running programming in parallel, making the stretch one of the most concentrated cultural pedestrian zones in the city for the season.

Planning Your Visit to the Rodin Museum Garden Bar

The Rodin Museum Garden Bar sits at 2151 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, between Logan Square and the Philadelphia Museum of Art proper. Garden Bar entry is free, and admission to the Rodin’s interior collection is Pay What You Wish during bar hours. Tables are first-come, first-served. The program runs weather permitting. Leashed four-legged friends are welcome in the garden, which makes the Rodin Museum Garden Bar one of the few summer programs on the Parkway built to actually host the dog walker as a paying audience rather than tolerate them at the edges.

The Rising Up Kitchen food truck launches at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Saturday, May 24 — five days before the Garden Bar’s opening Friday. The Crossing performs on Friday, July 17. The full Garden Bar program runs through Friday, August 28.

About Post Author

Allan Lane

Philadelphia born and bred, Allan Lane is the Publisher and Editor in Chief of digital magazines. He launched his first publication, SportBikes Inc Magazine in 2010, followed by dosage MAGAZINE in 2019. Recently, Allan launched his third online publication, Club For Man. As a journalist, Allan covers fashion, lifestyle, culture, art, and motorcycles.

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