CITY GUIDES | PENNSYLVANIA
The Best Philadelphia Restaurants Right Now
From Michelin-starred tasting menus to barbacoa, Israeli skewers, handmade pasta, and one of the country’s best Thai restaurants.
By Maria Rodriguez
Updated July 8, 2026
Baby’s
AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Spain to Seattle.
I spent my childhood summers in South Philly at my Abuela’s house, where food opinions were treated less like preferences and more like family law.
Never whiz on a cheesesteak. Ralph’s had the best red sauce. John’s still made the best water ice. These were not arguments. They were facts, delivered with the confidence of someone who was not open for a debate when it came to processed cheese.
Now I’m back in the city regularly for work, eating my way through the restaurants that have opened, changed, settled in, and somehow earned a place beside the spots my Abuela would have approved. I’ve kept a running list over the years, measuring the newcomers against the old standbys, the fine-dining rooms against the sandwich counters, the polished tasting menus against the places that know exactly what they are.
These are the spots I keep coming back to, the best restaurants right now in Philadelphia.
Baby’s Kusina + Market
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This all-day café, market, bakery, and BYOB dinner spot from Raquel Villanueva Dang and Tam Dang brings Filipino cooking to Brewerytown. By morning, that can mean barako coffee, ensaymada, bibingka, and Filipino-inspired doughnuts. Later, the kitchen moves into savory territory with dishes like bangus sisig, crispy milkfish, eggplant salad, and coconut-pandan rice. The place has the brightness of a neighborhood café and the ambition of a restaurant trying to widen Philadelphia’s idea of Filipino food one meal at a time.
Best for: Filipino pastries, barako coffee, and BYOB dinner in Brewerytown
Casa Mexico
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Casa Mexico is Cristina Martínez’s Italian Market restaurant, a colorful, full-service follow-up to the lamb barbacoa that made her one of Philadelphia’s most important chefs. The tacos are still the anchor, with slow-cooked lamb, handmade tortillas, consommé, salsas, onions, cilantro, and pickled vegetables. But Casa Mexico gives the meal more room to move, with cochinita pibil, esquites, quesadillas, tostadas, and cocktails. Martínez built her reputation on barbacoa, but this restaurant shows the range behind it.
Best for: Barbacoa tacos and cochinita pibil
Emmett
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Chef Evan Snyder calls the cooking at his Olde Kensington restaurant modern Levantine, though the menu wanders through the greater Mediterranean with harissa, sumac, hawaj, wood smoke, French technique, and some big swings. The rye tartlet with Wagyu tartare eats like a pastrami sandwich in miniature. There may be sesame madeleines with baharat butter, corn agnolotti with tahina, dry-aged duck, or halibut off the charcoal grill. The dining room has the low light and exposed-brick warmth of a neighborhood restaurant, with the polish and voltage of a place that knew immediately it was playing for bigger stakes.
Best for: Modern Levantine cooking and a special-occasion dinner in Olde Kensington
Fiorella
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Fiorella is Marc Vetri’s pasta bar inside a former South Philly sausage shop, and the building still gives the restaurant some of its charm. It’s small, tight, and built for the kind of dinner where pasta is the point, not the middle course you hurry through on the way to something bigger. The menu changes, but the appeal stays steady: careful dough, good sauce, a little Vetri polish, and the feeling that the kitchen knows exactly how much to do. In a city with serious Italian credentials, Fiorella still stands out.
Best for: Handmade pasta in a tiny South Philly dining room
Friday Saturday Sunday
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Friday Saturday Sunday has been part of Philadelphia since the 1970s, but Chad and Hanna Williams turned the Rittenhouse address into one of the city’s defining restaurants. The upstairs tasting menu moves with precision, personality, and just enough surprise, while The Lovers Bar downstairs makes a strong case for arriving early. The Michelin star made official what had already become clear at the table: the cooking has ambition, the service has rhythm, and the whole restaurant feels fully in command.
Best for: Michelin-starred tasting menus and polished cocktails
Gabriella’s Vietnam
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Gabriella’s Vietnam brings a broader, more personal view of Vietnamese cooking to East Passyunk. Chef Thanh Nguyen cooks with the confidence of someone sharing very specific dishes with a city still learning the range of the cuisine. There are savory crepes, water fern dumplings, clay pot fish, herbs, heat, funk, sweetness, and crunch. Gabriella’s feels personal, generous, and alive, the kind of place where one dinner mostly makes you aware of how much more you need to try.
Best for: Regional Vietnamese dishes beyond the usual standards
Hearthside
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Over the bridge to Collingswood, chef Dominic Piperno cooks with the confidence of someone who trained under Greg Vernick and Joey Baldino, then built his restaurant around a wood-burning hearth. The menu changes often, but it tends to live in that very good zone of handmade pastas, seafood off the fire, dry-aged steak, and seasonal vegetables that pick up smoke and char without losing themselves. You might see cavatelli with roasted mushrooms, scallops with Calabrian chiles and buttered leeks, or bronzino for two with crisp skin, olives, artichokes, and caper berries. The room is warm, polished, and still unmistakably BYOB South Jersey, which means the right bottle from home can turn dinner into something that feels like a small private victory.
Best for: Wood-fired cooking and a serious BYOB dinner
Her Place Supper Club
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Her Place still feels like a dinner party, though at this point the party has a Michelin star and one of the hardest reservations to land in the city. Chef Amanda Shulman and Alex Kemp built it around a format that sounds almost too casual for the cooking: a small dining room, a fixed menu of about seven courses for $110, dishes that change often, and servers who make the whole thing feel loose. Then the food lands. A little pasta, something roasted, something rich, something clever, and suddenly the supper-club premise makes sense. It’s intimate, personal, and far more serious than the name lets on.
Best for: A dinner-party-style tasting menu with real precision
Irwin’s Upstairs
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Irwin’s sits on the eighth floor of the Bok Building, which gives it one of the great restaurant approaches in Philadelphia: up through an old vocational school, out into a dining room with skyline views, then into a menu that leans Sicilian with real purpose. The kitchen works in crudo, caponata, swordfish, pasta, citrus, pistachio, anchovy, and good olive oil. The wine list stays in the low-intervention lane. It’s the kind of restaurant that understands the view is useful, but dinner still has to carry the night.
Best for: Sicilian-leaning plates with skyline views
K’Far
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K’Far is chef Michael Solomonov’s Israeli bakery and café in Rittenhouse, built for the hours when coffee, pastry, and lunch start to run together. The Jerusalem bagel is the move, stretched into an oblong loop and served with za’atar, olive oil, and enough chew to make a normal bagel feel like a rough draft. There are borekas, rugelach, salads, sandwiches, shakshuka, and coffee, plus the steady pleasure of dropping in for pastry and realizing you’ve accidentally ordered a full meal. Even at breakfast, K’Far has the polish of a restaurant group that knows exactly how to feed people.
Best for: Israeli pastries, breakfast, and an excellent Jerusalem bagel
Kalaya
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Nok Suntaranon opened the original Kalaya in Bella Vista with recipes that traced back to her mother’s market stall in Trang, Thailand. The Fishtown version is bigger, louder, and now one of the most decorated restaurants in the country, but the food still has that personal gravity. The dumplings arrive pleated like little pieces of architecture. The curries are fragrant, bright, and serious about heat. In 2026, Kalaya won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant, which felt less like a surprise than the rest of the country catching up.
Best for: Southern Thai cooking with national-award pedigree
Laser Wolf
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Michael Solomonov and Steve Cook’s Israeli skewer house in Kensington is built around charcoal-grilled meat, fish, vegetables, and a table-filling spread of salatim. Dinner starts with hummus, hot pita, and small bowls like lutenitsa, babaganoush, hawaij potato salad, green beans with garlic and harissa, and Yemenite pickles. Then come the skewers and mains: chicken shishlik, Romanian beef kebab, koobideh, swordfish, whole dorade, or eggplant, all cooked over the fire. It’s loud, plant-filled, and best with a group, partly because the salatim alone can make a two-top feel like a math problem.
Best for: Salatim, charcoal-grilled skewers, and a loud group dinner
River Twice
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River Twice is small, focused, and deeply tied to the Mid-Atlantic. Chef Randy Rucker builds the menu around regional ingredients and whatever the local purveyors are carrying at their best. The result can be quiet, clever, and occasionally strange in the right way: seafood, vegetables, sauces, and textures arranged with real intention. It’s an East Passyunk restaurant with tasting-menu discipline and neighborhood-restaurant warmth, a combination Philadelphia does especially well.
Best for: Inventive Mid-Atlantic tasting menus on East Passyunk
Scampi
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Liz Grothe’s Queen Village BYOB still carries the vibe of the supper club she used to run out of her Northern Liberties apartment. Grothe is Filipino American, grew up in Oklahoma, cooked at Fiorella, and turned all of that into a restaurant about pasta, shrimp, Italian diaspora cooking, and the little ways food changes when it travels. The set menu is a reasonable $80 for five courses and shifts often by region and obsession. But the restaurant’s name tells you plenty: shrimp scampi with Australian prawns, handmade pasta, Caesar toast with boquerones, maybe a dessert that veers into Filipino flavors. It’s serious food in a dining room that refuses to act too serious.
Best for: Handmade pasta at a playful Queen Village BYOB
Vernick Food & Drink
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Greg Vernick’s Rittenhouse restaurant remains one of the city’s most reliable places for polished cooking that still feels relaxed. The famous toast section still tells you plenty about the place: good bread, good toppings, no need to complicate the pleasure. Then come the raw dishes, pastas, roasted meats, and vegetables handled with the same calm confidence. It’s a special-occasion restaurant you could talk yourself into on a Tuesday.
Best for: Polished Rittenhouse dining that still feels relaxed
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