RESTAURANT NEWS | PENNSYLVANIA

Jean Is the Intimate Philadelphia Follow-Up to Emmett

JEAN | MAP | INSTAGRAM

By Maria Rodriguez
6:14 a.m. ET, July 11, 2026

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.

The team behind Philadelphia’s Emmett is heading upstairs for a tasting menu built around the cooking of North Africa and the Mediterranean’s southern coast. A seven-foot hearth will take up much of the room at Jean. That leaves space for just 15 diners.

Chef Evan Snyder and Julian van der Tak plan to open the restaurant late this year on the second floor above Emmett, their Philadelphia restaurant that opened in 2025 and quickly racked up the accolades, including landing on our list of Philadelphia’s best restaurants. Jean will serve a hearth-fired tasting menu shaped by North Africa and the Mediterranean’s southern coast, with coastal Morocco among the places guiding the cooking.

van der Tak and Snyder

The restaurant will occupy a converted living room in the city’s Fishtown/Olde Kensington neighborhood. Jean is the restaurant Snyder and van der Tak originally imagined opening downstairs before the realities of the space pushed that concept in another direction. Emmett ultimately took shape on the ground floor, while Jean now brings that earlier vision to life one flight up.

The hearth will sit at the center of the dining room and the menu. Specific dishes have yet to be announced, but the cooking will lean heavily on fire, served in a space closer in scale to a private home than most tasting-menu restaurants.

Emmett Jean Restaurant Philadelphia Chef Evan Snyder Julian van der Tak

General manager and wine director Marissa Chirico is building the beverage list around Old World wines and batched classic cocktails.

Jean will also pull together work from several local makers. Lauren Rider and Megan Stover are creating custom ceramics, while Philadelphia’s Remark Glass will supply the glassware. Moroccan architecture and 20th-century post-impressionist art will guide the room’s bold colors.

Restaurants often become whatever the building allows. Jean gives Snyder and van der Tak a chance to return to the idea they had before Emmett took shape downstairs—and find out what it becomes one flight up.