Temple University Guide: Best Restaurants, Bars & Hotels (2026)

Whether you're a Temple student still working out your regular spots, a first-year learning North Philadelphia, a parent in for move-in or Homecoming, an alum back for a game, or a prospective student seeing the campus for the first time, this guide covers the restaurants, bars, cafes, hotels and campus landmarks worth knowing around Temple.

Start with the geography, because it explains almost everything else. Temple's Main Campus sits at 1801 N. Broad Street, about 118 acres in the Cecil B. Moore neighborhood of Lower North Philadelphia, roughly a mile and a half north of Center City. Broad Street runs straight through the middle of it, which means the campus reads as two halves either side of a wide arterial, stitched together by Liacouras Walk, the pedestrian spine that carries most of the foot traffic. The academic core is compact and genuinely walkable, roughly bounded by Diamond Street to the north, Oxford to the south, 16th to the west and 11th to the east. What surrounds it is a working residential neighborhood, not a strip of college bars, and the honest version of this guide says so.

One naming note worth respecting: local residents formally rejected the "Templetown" nickname in 2014 and petitioned Google to restore Cecil B. Moore on its maps. The avenue itself was the Golden Strip of jazz clubs and dance halls through the 1940s, 50s and 60s, and it's still the main student-facing commercial corridor.

The other thing to understand is that Temple's two biggest venues are nowhere near each other. Basketball and Commencement happen on campus at the Liacouras Center on North Broad. Football is five miles south at Lincoln Financial Field, shared with the Eagles. That single split shapes where you stay, what you pay to park, and how you get around on a game weekend. The good news is that the Broad Street Line runs from Cecil B. Moore station straight down to NRG station at the stadium with no transfer, which is a cleaner campus-to-stadium trip than almost any program in the country can offer.

Temple eating splits into three areas that do genuinely different jobs. On campus and on the Broad Street blocks around it is the walk-to tier: fast, cheap, halal counters and Vietnamese, the food that fills in between classes. North Broad, a short ride south, is the parents' dinner cluster, and it's unusually good for a stretch most visitors drive past without stopping: four serious restaurants inside a few blocks of each other, two of them run by James Beard winners or nominees. Fishtown and Northern Liberties, east and southeast, is where the destination cooking is, and where you go when the visit is about the meal rather than about convenience.

Plan around the closed days, because this neighborhood has some awkward ones. SOUTH is closed Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Cicala is closed Monday and Tuesday. Honey's serves breakfast and lunch only and shuts at 2pm on weekdays. And at Reading Terminal, the Pennsylvania Dutch merchants don't trade on Sundays, so a Sunday visit gets you a noticeably quieter market.

Temple's nightlife is a short list on campus and a much longer one twenty minutes east, and it's worth being clear about which is which.

On or beside campus there are three, and they're the ones students actually mean. Maxi's sits right on Liacouras Walk. Pub Webb is across Broad on Cecil B. Moore. And The Peabody occupies the old Draught Horse space, which closed in February 2021 after twenty years when the bar and the university couldn't agree on a lease. If an older guide sends you to the Draught Horse, it's long gone.

Everything else here is in Fishtown, Northern Liberties or Kensington, which is a rideshare or a Market-Frankford Line trip rather than a walk, and which is where most Temple students end up on a Friday anyway. The Frankford Avenue run in particular puts a beer garden, a music venue and an arcade bar within three blocks of each other.

Temple has a real coffee culture for a commuter-heavy campus, and three of the four stops below are within a short walk of Broad Street.

Saxbys on Liacouras Walk is the campus default, and it's student-run in a literal sense. Richie's is the family-owned one with the longest history here. Champ's is a diner that happens to do the coffee students rate over the chains. The fourth, La Colombe in Fishtown, is a proper destination rather than a campus errand, and belongs in a Fishtown morning.

Two more worth knowing that aren't separate pins: Stella's Cafe on the first floor of Charles Library pours La Colombe and means you don't have to give up your study table, and there's a second Saxbys at Temple Fox, 1801 N. 13th Street, which is easy to confuse with the Liacouras Walk one.

Temple has exactly one hotel on campus, the Conwell Inn, and it has 22 rooms. That number is the single most important fact in this section, because it means the closest bed to your student's dorm sells out first for every big weekend of the year.

After that the choices split. North Broad and Center City put you on the Broad Street Line, which is the practical connection to campus and, on a football Saturday, to the stadium as well. The Aloft at Broad and Arch is the pick here, and it's on Temple's own partner list. Fishtown is the other direction entirely: two small, design-led properties that make sense if the trip is as much about the city as the campus, and if you'd rather have a neighborhood than a lobby.

Two things to plan around. Temple publishes a hotel partner list through Undergraduate Admissions, not through the commencement office, and the Conwell Inn carries the promo code TEMPLEMADE. And the tightest weekend of the year is Homecoming and Family Weekend, October 5 to 11, 2026, because Temple combines the two into one week rather than running a separate Parents Weekend, with a home football game on the Saturday. Book that one early.

Temple's visitor-facing campus is compact enough to cover properly in a morning, and most of it runs along or just off Liacouras Walk.

Start at the Welcome Center, 1101 W. Montgomery Avenue, with the entrance on North 12th Street, because that's where every campus tour begins and registration is required. Tours run weekdays at 10:30am and 2:30pm. From there the Bell Tower, Charles Library, Founder's Garden and the Howard Gittis Student Center are all within a few minutes' walk of each other, with the Liacouras Center and the Temple Performing Arts Center out on Broad.

For parking, Temple's own admissions pages point tour visitors to the Montgomery Garage at 1859 N. 11th Street, which runs $6 an hour, takes cards only, and is not validated.