Copyright The Philadelphia Inquirer
Forty-nine chefs under one roof means one thing: The first-ever Inquirer Food Festival. Nearly 50 of Philly’s most dynamic chefs and bakers will take over The Fillmore on Saturday, Nov. 15, for a distinctly Philly food festival complete with pasta-making and cake-decorating workshops, a very unserious hot dog competition, and a tasting hall filled with bites from some of Philly’s most-talked about restaurants. The lineup spans both Philly institutions and newer chefs committed to shaking up our city’s underdog food scene: Think cannolis from Isgro’s Pastries alongside crisp turnovers from Amy’s Pastelillos, or Cantonese favorites from Sang Kee Peking Duck House served next to Black Dragon, Kurt Evans’ West Philly ode to the Chinese takeout counter. General admission — a $149 ticket — scores guests unlimited food from all participating chefs, plus daylong access to all festival programming and a complimentary 6-month subscription to the Inquirer. An extra $100 earns guests For $249, VIP guests get a private lounge, free parking, and expedited entry so you have more time to eat. Who are the 49 chefs and bakers that will make the Inquirer Food Festival feel like an extra big slice of Philly? Let’s meet them all: A good party needs a few remixes. At the Inquirer Food Festival, 10 Philly chefs will be collaborating with one another to create exclusive dishes that defy genre. A micro-bakery inside a “middle-class fancy” Italian restaurant? Those are the very Philly — and very real— circumstances that brought together Scampi owner Liz Grothe and Rougarou Baking’s Paige and Zack Wernick. Grothe started as a sous chef at Oloroso and Fiorella who used her days off to transform her living room into Couch Cafe, a delicious irreverently supper club that let Grothe flex her pasta skills. Now Grothe owns Scampi, a Queen Village BYOB where the up-and-coming chef infuses Italian tasting menus with the principles of her Oklahoma upbringing: hot food, and a lot of it. The Wernicks’ Rougarou Baking moved into Scampi this October, slinging babkas, tarts, handpies and brown-butter chocolate chip cookies out of the space every Sunday. The semi-permanent pop-up, Zack Wernick has said, is a reflection of his Philadelphia Jewish heritage and his wife’s favorite Creole flavors from growing up near New Orleans. Kurt Evans is building a mission-driven food empire: His second restaurant Black Dragon Takeout employs previously incarcerated cooks, giving them experience with classic Chinese staples fused with soul food flavors, like egg rolls stuffed with collard greens and General Tso’s chicken coated in barbecue sauce. The restaurant is “unapologetically Black,” wrote The Inquirer’s Elizabeth Wellington, down to its fortune cookies stuffed with classic quips. Rice & Sambal owner Diana Widjojo has also created her share of iconic food moments. Widjojo was a James Beard Award semifinalist in 2018 for her work at Hardena, the family-run South Philly Indonesian restaurant that Widjojo made famous in 2020 after stuffing pizza boxes with banana leaves topped with and artfully arranged mounds of Indonesian classics. That same plating finesse is apparent at Rice & Sambal, where the Saturday-only Liwetan feast is tour of 24 different Indonesian staples as beautiful as it is tasty, according to food critic Craig LaBan. I’ll take my pasta whiz wit, please. Matt Rodrigue taught history in Bucks County before becoming the chef de cuisine at Marc Vetri’s acclaimed South Philly pasta bar Fiorella, where he leads a kitchen that churns out perfectly shaped clouds of gnocchi and agnolotti stuffed with sweet polenta. Rodrigue even helped Vetri bring a Fiorella outpost to Las Vegas in 2023. It looks just like the location on Christian street — down to the cash register and sugar caddies. Chef Ari Miller has lived many lives in Philly’s food scene: Miller owned the cozy farm-to-table BYOB Musi until 2022 before pivoting to grow FrizWit, a roving cheesesteak pop-up that earned big-ups from Conde Nast Traveler for its all-local ingredients. Now Miller mans the kitchen inside Kensington’s Post Haste, which was named one of the Best Bars in America by Esquire in 2024 for its elevated cocktails and bar food (both of which are locally-sourced). Think of this collaboration as a pop-up within a pop-up. Miled Finianos runs Habibi Supper Club, an intimate dinner party series inspired by Finianos’ Lebanese grandmothers and draws from their recipes for meat-stuffed grape leaves, crispy arayes, and other homestyle Arabic favorites. Finianos’ is just one of many Philly supper clubs that use food to bridge the gap between strangers. Timothy Dearing’s Úle (pronounced “ooo-lay”) is a 20-seat tasting dinner that plays with fermentation in all its forms, from pots de creme made with sourdough to pickled herring plated atop toasted rice. It’s been a big year for chef Phila Lorn, who opened East Passyunk oyster bar Sao in September with his wife Rachel just one day after nabbing a coveted spot on Food & Wine’s list of Best New Chefs for his work at Mawn. The Lorns opened the Cambodian-inspired BYOB in 2023 and have dealt with the problem of facing too much success ever since. Mawn’s dinner reservations sell out in seconds and foodies occasionally tailgate lunch service, which features a “flat-out delicious” crab fried rice, according to Craig LaBan, and warm bowls of deli-esque chicken noodle soup. Alex Kemp is on a similar trajectory. Kemp is one-half of the power couple behind My Loup and Her Place Supper Club, the tasting dinner series Amanda Shulman turned into an approachable-yet-quietly luxurious Rittenhouse Square restaurant in 2021. Kemp takes on more of the reins at My Loup, overseeing a menu complete with garlick-y escargot rolls and the occasional foie gras. His command of French cuisine did help shortlist the bistro for an Outstanding Restaurant Award from the James Beard Foundation in 2024, after all. Now, Kemp and Shulman are preparing for their next venture: The Pine Street Grill, a neighborhood-y Fitler Square haunt set to open by the end of 2025. It wouldn’t be a Philadelphia food festival without friendly competition. During the Inquirer Food Festival, nine local bakers will go to toe-to-toe to see whose signature confection reigns Philly supreme — at least according to a panel of top secret judges. Baker Ashley Huston is best known for her whimsical and ultra-glittery confections, from strawberry-lavender pop tarts dusted with edible pink sparkles to buttercream-frosted layer cakes topped with edible flowers. Huston turned her West Philly micro-bakery Dreamworld Bakes into a Kensington brick-and-mortar at the end of 2024. There, her small staff churns out sweet and savory pastries in a space painted the same shade of green as Huston’s home kitchen. Chris DiPiazza’s Mighty Bread is the main attraction on South Philly’s sleepy Gerrit Street. Not that it matters: Lines form on weekdays to score one of DiPiazza’s football-sized sourdough bread loaves or supersized chocolate cookies and on weekends for brunch. DiPiazza launched Mighty Bread in 2015 in a West Philly commissary and has since taken his bread — and sourdough starters — to new heights. Mighty Bread was a James Beard Award semifinalist for best bakery in 2023 and will soon have a second location near Rittenhouse Square. Perhaps they’ll offer DiPiazza’s semolina-inspired beer there, too. You’ll always find your way back home, or so the saying goes. Ex-Eater Philly editor and Delco native Dayna Evans lived in New York (where she delivered sourdough on a bike) and Paris (where she couldn’t get good bagels) before landing back in Philly to eventually open Mt. Airy’s hottest bakery with her partner Sam Carmichael. Downtime Bakery sells its bagels, pastries, and fresh-out-the-oven pies on a set daily schedule to level the playing field for everyone who isn’t an early bird — and they make a pretty excellent tomato pie, too. This family-owned bakery has stood at 1009 S. Christian Street since 1904, where they’ve served pastries to seemingly everyone, including Pope Francis. Isgro Pastries is a local institution through-and-through, thanks in part to its perfectly-piped cannolis and airy powder-sugar coated ricotta-chocolate chip cookies, which Inquirer deputy food editor Jenn Ladd once called “the ultimate Philly cookie.” Gus Sarno — the grandson of Isgro creator Mario Sarno — bought the store from the second generation of the family in 1970s. Sarno is semi-retired according his son Michael, who plans to move production out of the iconic South Philly rowhouse in 2026. Kenan Rabah baked his way through stints at High Street and Lost Bread Co. before breaking off on his own to start Majdal Bakery, a Middle Eastern pop-up turned Queen Village brick-and-mortar. Rabah’s menu reflects his upbringing in the Israeli-occupied Syrian territory of Golan Heights, featuring savory sumac chicken-stuffed fatayer, flaky boreks, and babka muffins. The safeha flatbreads steal the show, writes Craig LaBan, its pliant sourdough-esque texture the perfect canvas for eggs, cheesy labneh, or roasted carrots. Lila Colello’s pink pastry ATMs have long captivated customers inside Ambler’s Weavers Way co-op, Irv’s Ice Cream, or Ardmore’s Free Will Collective: Tap your credit card and out comes a frozen gluten-free croissant, danish, or bagel with heating instructions. Colello is the baker-du-jour at Flakely, the Manayunk-based gluten free confectionery Craig LaBan has praised for its well-laminated croissants and crusty-yet-chewy kettle-boiled bagels. Forget fondant, buttercream frosting is all the rage in Philly, thanks in part to Mallory Valvano’s cake studio and now catering operation Party Girl Bake Club. Valvano specializes in lambeth-style cakes piped with neon-tinted buttercream frills that look almost like psychadelic 80s wedding cakes. Valvano also hosts fake cake decorating workshops, where attendees learn piping techniques by transforming styrofoam gravestones and cheap mirrors into works of art. Former High Street pastry chef Siobhan McKenna started microbakery Feels Like Sunday as an ode to the slow Sunday mornings she used to spend eating coffee cake with her grandparents. McKenna has hosted pop-ups at Downtime Bakery and Dreamworld Bakes, bringing with her elevated versions of home baked classics, like coconut cream pie topped with vanilla bean whip, banana bread, and coffee cardamon cinnamon buns. Between the collabs and piles of baked goods, Inquirer Food Festival attendees can nosh on bites from some of Philly’s best chefs in our curated food hall. You can even bring a Tupperware for leftovers — we won’t judge. When Amy Rivera-Nassar converted her popular pastelillos pop-ups into a Kensington brick-and-mortar in 2024, she got the neighborhood to embrace Puerto Rico’s signature crispy turnovers. Amy’s Pastelillos are crisp and stuffed with inventive takes on standard fillings like tangy guava barbecue pork and yuca with beans, making them a favorite of Philly chefs (like Bolo’s Yun Fuentes) and the Latino diaspora. After the pandemic (and a rent hike) closed the first iteration of Ange Branca’s acclaimed Malaysian BYOB Sate Kampar in 2020, Branca followed a string of successful pop-ups with Kampar 2.0. The new Kampar combined a first-floor tasting menu from a chef-in-residence with a second floor social club that’s all Branca, until a fire swept through and devastated the kitchen. Branca is rebuilding as we speak, and fans look forward to the return to form. Here’s hoping that Kampar 2.0 will include the sleeper hit burger that wraps two patties inside an omelette. Carlos Aparicio is no stranger to accolades: His Mexican East Passyunk BYOB El Chingón has scored coveted spots on Craig LaBan’s Top 10 and the New York Times’ 50 best restaurants in the U.S. list. Aparicio grew up in San Mateo Ozolco, Mexico, and fills his menu with references to the tiny Puebla town, like cemita sandwiches piled high with adobo-spiced pork or beef milanese. Aparicio opened a second outdoor-only location in Fishtown this summer. At Porco’s Porchetteria , you can get lunch and lunchtime dessert from the same window. Chef Chad Durkin opened Porco’s and its sister bakery Small Oven Pastry shop in Point Breeze in 2019, specializing in over-stuffed pork sandwiches and frou-frou pastries, like tahini cookies swirled with black cherry jam and passionfruit-sesame tarts. Durkin’s vision has had some slight upgrades in the last six years: You can get the sandwiches on sesame seed buns now and swirls of gourmet soft serve in the summer. Partners Chad and Hanna Williams turned Friday Saturday Sunday into a James Beard-award winner and haven’t let up since. Chad’s upstairs tasting menu changes with the seasons but remains a favorite of Craig LaBan by melding Caribbean, Asian, and soul food references that “sing with originality.” The downstairs Lovers Bar lives up to its name as a first date favorite with sweet, stone-cold martinis. The couple now have even bigger plans for the restaurant, including a next-door expansion. Dave Conn spent most of his career helping star restauranteurs Jose Garces and Stephen Starr tweak the menus at places such as Amada and El Vez. Now, Conn refines his own vision at Alice, the casual American bistro he opened with his wife Sarah at 901 Christian St. in 2023. There, Conn uses a charcoal grill to roast bone-in chunks hamachi collars adored by Craig LaBan and cook a thick burger topped with Cabot cheese and caramelized onions. Chef Eli Collins has overseen the kitchen at a.kitchen — the ground floor restaurant inside Rittenhouse Square’s AKA Hotel — since 2017, where he serves up a show-shopping burger, beautiful New Jersey oysters, and seasonal pastas. A.kitchen is one of the few buzzy Philly restaurants where you can almost always snag a table, and its James Beard-nominated wine program helps Collins’ menu hit just right for date night. Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef Evan Snyder first came to Philadelphia by way of quiet Queen Village restaurant Redcrest Kitchen, but Snyder hit his stride this year with Emmett, which opened on Girard Ave. this year. At Emmett, Snyder plays with Levantine-inspired flavors that he perfected after two years of low-waste pop-ups. Dinner at Emmett “eats like a journey,” wrote Craig LaBan, featuring crispy duck shwarma, citrus-y lamb kibbeh, and sesame madeleine cookies that can be plus-upped with caviar. Former LMNO executive chef Frank Ramirez headed just two blocks down Front St. this year to open a Mexican restaurant of his own, Amá. There, the menu is reminiscent of of Ramirez’s life growing up in Mexico City — where all of the country’s regional cuisines converge — and features a mix of tacos, ceviches, aguachiles, and seafood prepared under the lights of a dazzling open kitchen. Amá “[redefines] the possibilities of contemporary Mexican cooking in Philadelphia,” wrote Craig LaBan, who praised what has since become Amá’s most photographed dish: the seasonal tlayuda, which splays bright yellow zucchini flowers on an open-faced tortilla topped with burrata, pesto, and Oaxaca cheese. Sang Kee Peking Duck House has held down a strip of 9th Street in Chinatown since 1980, churning out crispy sizzling duck and dutifully accurate Hong Kong-style congee to consistent crowds of regulars. And unlike some institutions (*cough* the art museum), Sang Kee comes back stronger after setbacks: When a mysteriously damaged steam pipe shut down the restaurant just before Christmas in 2024, owner Henry Chow lobbied the city to find a solution that would allow Sang Kee to reopen just in time for a packed Christmas Day lunch service. Chef Ian Graye’s inspiration for his vegan Italian joint Pietramala was simple, he told the Inquirer: a restaurant he’d enjoy working at, and one so good he’d come by even on his days off. Graye keeps a tight seasonal 10-dish menu of vegetable forward pastas and — gasp! — no meat substitutes, making for carrots that become bolognese, mushrooms that become nuggets, and very silky tofu custard. The inventive take on vegetables has landed Pietramala on repeated Inquirer “best of” lists and a nod as one of Bon Appetit’s best new restaurants when Pietramala first opened in 2023. Not even a matcha shortage can keep Càphê Roasters down. The cafe is a favorite of horror director M. Night Shyamalan and for good reason: The 2025 James Beard semifinalist was one of the country’s first Vietnamese cafe-roasteries when it opened in 2021, pairing frothy lattes and strong brews with fluffy egg sandwiches and banh mi from executive chef Kevin Huynh. Now, Càphê Roasters has plans for a major expansion, taking over a former Kensington roller rink. Sisters Mebruka Kane and Hayat Ali have been quietly building a homestyle Ethiopian empire on Baltimore Ave., first with Ali’s coffee shop Alif Brew and later with their joint fried chicken venture Doro Bet. Where traditional Ethiopian coffee service shines at Alif, Kane’s anything-but-traditional gluten-free chicken is the centerpiece at Doro Bet. Crisp and seasoned with berbere spice imported from Adis Abba, Doro Bet’s wings got big ups from USA Today as part of the guide to the best restaurants across the U.S. in 2024. Chef Mehmet Ergin’s Northern Liberties BYOB Pera Turkish Cuisine is named after a ritzy neighborhood in Istanbul, but the menu is nothing but vivid renditions of Turkish classics — doner kebab, manti, and a smorgasborg of mezze accompanied by fluffy pitas. Not only is Pera halal, but its cozy atmosphere also makes for a perfect first date. Chef Michael Brenfleck’s acclaimed Polish bar gets its name from his late grandfather Walter, a man whose proud 5′5″ stature only shrunk with age. Brenfleck not only mined his family cookbooks to develop the menu for Little Walter’s, but also dove deep on Babbel to master the Polish language. The result: a “spirited next-gen tribute to Polish cuisine,” wrote Craig LaBan, complete with four different types of pierogies, smoky kielbasa, and a cocktail menu inspired by Poland’s rich drinking culture. Last year, Brenfleck’s pierogies were named among the best dishes the New York Times food team ate throughout 2024. After opening up top-rated Washington D.C restaurant Sushi Ogawa and omakase Kappo, second-generation Sushi chef Minoru Ogawa chose Philly as the place to combine them. At Center City’s Ogawa Sushi & Kappo, Ogawa and sushi chef Carlos Willis run a $200 per person omakase tasting with a minimalist approach that lets the high quality fish shine. Willis is only in his early 20s, Craig LaBan said in his review, but works the sushi counter with refined knife skills and a showman’s finish. Under the moniker Philly Hummus Girl chef Miranda Stephens to make bespoke mezze spreads for special events and pop-ups. Stephen, who is Lebanese, views her hummus recipes as a tribute to her grandfather, a former chef with restaurants in Australia and the U.S. Stephen’s dips in particular have a reputation of their own: Her whipped labneh is swirled sticky sweet date syrup, for example, and her muhummara is swirled with pomegranate molasses. Despite taking forms as first a pop-up, a grocery store-slash-supper club, and now a fine dining restaurant on North Broad St., Honeysuckle from chef couple Omar Tate and Cybille St. Aude-Tate has always had the same mission: to celebrate the impact the Black diaspora on American cuisine. The current iteration of Honeysuckle feels “close to home,” Tate — who grew up in Germantown — told the Inquirer, and features an ambitious prix fixe menu with Mississippi tamales, mulled wine water ice, and an add-on burger doused in caviar. It took two years of contractor hell for Raquel and Tam Dang to open Baby’s Kusina + Market in Brewerytown, but the result is worth the wait. Inspired by Raquel and Tam’s upbringings as respective first-generation Filipino and Vietnamese Americans, Baby’s is a bright all-day cafe that sells ube lattes and giant breakfast sandos. At night, Baby’s switches to a small dinner menu, dishing out sizzling pork and milkfish sisig served in skillets alongside platters of pepper-mansi wings that feel like elevated version of Jolibee’s. Reuben Asaram is one of a select handful of chefs Taco Bell tasked with transforming the (otherwise perfect) Crunchwrap Supreme. His vibrant butter chicken version is not all that different from the work he did melding Mexican and Indian flavors at Sunny’s Table, Asaram’s two-year long residency on the first floor of Kampar. There, like at his Reuby pop-ups, Asaram leaned into the fun of fusion cooking, serving thick queso fundido with naan made by his mom alongside traditional-ish plates of tandoori chicken. Philly, it turns, out wasn’t big enough for two Dim Sum Gardens: After years of legal back and forth with a former business partner, only Shizhou Da and Sally Song’s restaurant 1024 Race Street remains standing under the same name. This garden of dim sum is famous for its xiao long bao, steaming and slurpable soup dumplings that taste just as good when quadrupled in size and served with a straw, or when frozen to serve at home. When chef Thanh Nguyen opened Gabriella’s Vietnam on East Passyunk St. in 2021, it was part of a mission to show Philly what “real Vietnamese” cooking is, pulling from childhood memories of the leaf-wrapped dumplings and pan-crisped mini-crepes she ate while watching her parents run a seafood market in Saigon. Nguyen was just one class short of graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, but her education is all restaurants: She ran Norristown sandwich shop Banh Mi Bar & Bistro and Melody’s Grillhouse in Ambler before going all in on Gabriella’s, which is named after one of her daughters. Nguyen’s cozy duck congee and fish sauce wings make for the perfect late fall comfort meal. For chef Yun Fuentes, Philly is dotted with reminders of his childhood in San Juan, a place that lives inside all of the dishes at his twice James Beard-nominated Puerto Rican restaurant Bolo. The restaurant, Fuentes told The Inquirer, is inspired by his grandmother’s beauty salon and snacks his grandfather Bolo would serve to customers and their husbands on the patio. Inside the Rittenhouse Square restaurant, the Stephen Starr and Jose Garces alum imbues Puerto Rican staples with a touch of the East Coast, like sorullitos stuffed with cheese from a Chester County farm or mofongo topped with chunks of buttery Maine lobster. Before he was a distinguished baker, Zach Posnan was a distinguished teacher. Posnan won the Lindback teaching prize in 2023 after years of teaching math and science at Kensington’s Conwell Middle School. He then quiet shortly after to go all in on Brass Monkey Bread Co., a pop-up bread bakery that started as a pandemic hobby. Naturally, that means Posnan is a sourdough specialist, turning it into a garlicky tomato pie, soft pretzels, and crusty bagels.
