Lisa Ling on why Asian food in Los Angeles matters.
A black cod goes from the Pacific to Shibumi.
Keeping cool when the kitchen gets hot.
One restaurant’s many pandemic pivots.
Two different takes on Indian food.
Every day’s a hustle at Woon.
From Asian farms to Los Angeles restaurants.
Why in L.A. they’re not boring.
Three restaurants breaking boundaries.
Mastering values at Yang’s Kitchen.
Two chefs go behind the blade.
Omakase and ramen join the neighborhood.
The coronation of soju and makgeolli.
Three women open the bar they want to walk into.
Indonesian community through cuisine.
On working with Mom and Dad at Anajak Thai.
Los Angeles before sushi.
Inside the staff ritual of eating together.
Three Vietnamese restaurants expand the city’s palate.
One chef has some thoughts.
Waking up Los Angeles to Burmese cuisine.
The couple behind Shiku goes with the flow.
An ode to those who keep them going.
Michelle Bernstein embraces the competition.
One restaurant’s epic journey from debt to success.
The couple behind Boia De and Walrus Rodeo play by their own rules.
Vermouth gets a bar of its own.
On the business of BBQ in Miami.
Recipes for navigating an uncertain economy.
The secret to never getting old in a town obsessed with what’s new.
How two pioneers of omakase introduced Miami to a new way of dining out.
Chasing a childhood memory one arepa at a time.
Why Miami’s mainstays of Middle Eastern food aren’t phased by the influx of glossy newcomers.
David Foulquier on his shapeshifting ambitions.
The Black chefs behind a vegan movement in Miami.
Two Cuban sandwich masters talk shop.
A new generation’s take on the classic Jewish deli.
Miami’s mavericks of sustainable growing and dining.
An intimate glimpse inside restaurants after the last customer leaves.
Creating a culture where employees stick around.
A new kind of bottle service takes root in Miami.
The art of staying put in a changing city.
The city’s ventanitas created a culture all their own.
Philadelphia Magazine’s food critic on the irrepressible attitude that is the key ingredient of the city’s restaurants.
How one restaurant gave birth to many.
The cheesesteak may be the global mascot of Philly. But a contingent of pioneering chefs and restaurateurs have made the city a hub of vegetarian innovation.
The city’s Eritrean-Ethiopian restaurants serve up more—way more—than delicious food.
How Juan Carlos Aparicio baked his way to running a restaurant (that isn’t a bakery).
How Alex Tewfik went from being a food editor in Philly to owning one of the best restaurants in town.
Two restaurants that share a belief in how cooking can be force for change.
How Chutatip Suntaranon channeled her upbringing in Thailand—and life spent flying around the world—into one of Philly’s most singular restaurants.
Stopping by the warehouses in Kensington where artisan upstarts are breathing new life into the city’s food scene.
The Ongoing Evolution of Philly’s Classic Sandwiches.
Chloé Grigri, Amanda Shulman, and Ellen Yin on upending the rules of the game.
Mike Solomonov takes stock of his journey.
When a customer becomes a friend.
Ange Branca was forced to close her beloved restaurant in 2020. That was just the beginning.
How do you build a restaurant in a space that was never meant for a restaurant? In Philly, a city of Revolutionary Warera buildings and colonial row houses and ancient warehouses, it can be a bit like playing Tetris with Benjamin Franklin.
Three Philly couples get frank and intimate in sharing their recipes for romance.
Inside the world of homespun pop-ups and unexpected collaborations that have made Philly’s dining scene like nowhere else.
The classics are easy enough to master by anyone with fine liquor and a recipe.
The city has long been a vibrant hub of Vietnamese food. Today, a new generation is striking a balance all their own—between creativity and tradition, innovation and memory.
An ode to the unsung heroes of restaurant kitchens from a comedy writer who couldn’t take the heat.
A cell phone has been invented that allows you to send one text message to your younger self. What do you write?
Philadelphia Magazine’s food critic on the irrepressible attitude that is the key ingredient of the city’s restaurants.
If they thought about us at all, it was only in reference to our cheesesteaks.
If anyone talked about us, it was the same, tired stories: the greased light poles, Santa and the batteries. If they ever mentioned our restaurants it was maybe Georges Perrier, maybe Stephen Starr, and if they had anything at all to say about our scene, it was like a cautionary tale for young cooks: Philadelphia was where you’d end up if you weren’t suited for civilized company. It’s where you went if you weren’t good enough to play with the grown-ups.
For the longest time, nobody gave a damn about Philly. No one cared about us No one liked us. Certainly no one paid any attention to us.
And it was awesome.
Because you know what’s great about being ignored? The way everyone ignores you. The way, with everyone else looking in the other direction, you can get away with almost anything. And for years, that’s exactly what Philly’s chefs and restaurants did. We did backrooms and barrooms and neighborhood joints with hand-written menus that would lay low anything wearing a white tablecloth. We did menus-as-biography in neighborhoods that no tourist would ever find, experimented with nostalgia behind unmarked doors, and ate our culture, our history, our memories of home without ever wondering for a second what people from elsewhere might think.
Did we have some bright lights? Sure. But this is a city that made a temporary hero out of a guy who ate 40 rotisserie chickens for no good reason, so the white-hot star of any given moment was just as likely to be some knucklehead banging out a killer sandwich as it was to be someone lacquering the duck or tweezing on the chervil. So we made being the underdog hot. We made the best nights you were ever going to have in your life from dinners in basements, cocktails in Chinatown, and 20-seat love letters to forgotten foods.
You know what’s great about being ignored? With everyone else looking in the other direction, you can get away with almost anything. And for years, that’s exactly what Philly’s chefs and restaurants did.
Trouble is, people noticed. They talked. And yes, the first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club, but there was no way Philly was going to stay secret forever. Not possible when you’re a stone’s throw away from New York and D.C., when the internet entered our collective pockets and started broadcasting everywhere to everywhere.
So things are different now. These days, Philly is it. Center of the map, point of the conversation, a magnet for awards. All the Big Name chefs, all the cooking shows, all the glossy magazines—suddenly they all care what’s happening here. (I mean, what are you reading right now?) Everywhere you look, there’s a chef with TV makeup on their whites. Everywhere you go, there’s a reporter swimming in the soup. We’re cheap, weird and sexy as hell right now. We’re everyone everywhere’s favorite-y-favoritest flavor.
If the essence of cool is doing exactly what you love and honestly not caring what anyone else thinks, then Philly is the coolest city on earth.
What’s interesting, though, is the way Philly’s restaurant scene has reacted to the sudden attention and adulation. Are we chasing fame? Are we polishing our shoes and smearing the blood off our knuckles? Did we turn toward the warm light of fame like a thousand little sunflowers?
Nope.
If anything, recognition from the outside has only made Philly’s restaurant scene turn more inward and become more sectarian. Chefs who could’ve used the sudden heat bestowed by shiny awards and stage lights as leverage to open big, cold and soulless simulacra of the spots that made them famous instead signed the leases on even smaller properties and spent their nights spinning Cambodian pop music, pouring sunshine instead of wine or serving Jewish-Canadian fusion cuisine to their neighbors, their neighbors’ friends, the people from down the corner, and absolutely no one else.
Philly bites the hand that feeds it just as hard as the hand that doesn’t.
Philly bites the hand that feeds it just as hard as the hand that doesn’t. Also, it bites all the other hands, too. But if the essence of cool is doing exactly what you love and honestly not caring what anyone else thinks, then Philly is the coolest city on earth. I mean, remember back when the Birds won the Superbowl? Remember Jason Kelce’s Mummer’s outfit, his wrecked voice and the song he sang to us and everyone else in the entire goddamn world who wasn’t us?
No one likes us, no one likes us, no one likes us. We don’t care. We’re from Philly, fuckin’ Philly. No one likes us. We don’t care.
The thing that I will always, always, always love about this town is that it works exactly the opposite way, too. Love us, hate us, watch us, ignore us. It doesn’t matter. We won’t clean up. We won’t do what we’re told. We won’t ever be anyone else’s image of what we’re supposed to be. Because we all know exactly who we are on our best days and our worst days, and no matter what anyone else thinks, this city, this scene, these chefs and these restaurants will just never care.
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