W hen John Adams arrived in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress, he immediately went out to eat. “Dirty, dusty, and fatigued as we were,” he wrote in his diary that night —August 29, 1774—“we could not resist the Importunity, to go to the Tavern, the most genteel one in America.” A few days later, when George Washington rode into Philadelphia, he made straight for the same establishment. City Tavern had opened the previous year , backed by a group of wealthy Philadelphians who’d