21-Year-Old Chef RJ Smith Runs Ocho Supper Club at Rittenhouse

RJ Smith is 21 years old, runs a professional kitchen at the Rittenhouse Hotel, and still has papers due Monday morning.

His pop-up, Ocho Supper Club, locked down a limited residency at one of Philadelphia’s most recognizable addresses. Service runs every other Sunday through July 26. That’s not a typo. A junior at Drexel’s culinary program is putting out an eight-course Afro-Caribbean tasting menu at the Rittenhouse and collecting write-ups from the Inquirer before he’s collected a diploma.

The concept traces back to a family trip to Jamaica, where Smith started thinking seriously about the flavors he wanted to build around. Ocho is Spanish for eight, which maps directly to the course count. Simple. Clean. The whole thing fits.

It didn’t start at a hotel. It started in a dorm room, and it started cheap. Smith spent eight months saving money, then bought secondhand plates, glassware, and a dining table off Facebook Marketplace for $150. The U-Haul to move it all ran $25. “The food was the most expensive part,” he told Billy Penn. That first dinner leaned rice-based. He made a jerk potato pavé. The philosophy behind it was exactly what you’d expect from someone who didn’t have a hotel budget yet: “It was like, ‘What can I do to these basic or more accessible ingredients in a way that’s super, breathtaking.’”

Smith grew up in Oakland. At 16, cold emails weren’t getting responses, so he didn’t send more of them. He showed up in person at San Francisco’s Ferry Building Farmers Market and walked straight up to the chef de cuisine at Californios, a two-Michelin-starred restaurant. “When you as a chef going on your computer and seeing a resume of a 16 year old, obviously you might keep moving,” he said. “So, I tried to put myself right in their path.” It worked. From there, he built his resume at Royal Izakaya, Provenance, Jean-Georges Philadelphia, and Emmett. None of those are starter kitchens.

By the time Smith enrolled at Drexel University, he’d already cooked alongside Michelin-level talent. Most culinary students don’t hit that kind of exposure until years after graduation. He’s been ahead of the curriculum since before orientation.

On Sundays when Ocho runs service, Smith can spend up to 22 hours in the kitchen. His classmates are elsewhere. He’s in the weeds, plating courses for a dining room in one of the city’s most expensive zip codes, doing the kind of service that doesn’t care that he’s still in school.

He doesn’t describe what drives him in any of the usual ways. “It takes a level of dedication that separates you from a lot of people,” he said. That’s not bravado. That’s 22 hours on your feet while you’ve got homework due in the morning.

The residency at the Rittenhouse Hotel runs every other Sunday through July 26, 2026. If you haven’t caught an Ocho dinner, that window is closing.