Adsum Receives Praise

Brian Freedman praises Matt Levin’s food at Adsum as being complex, effortless and unpretentious.

The majority of the food here is more complicated than it seems, but the flavors are typically spot-on. The dishes have clearly been considered holistically—every component counting. Shrimp-salted whole black bass, for example, would have been successful even on its own. But with a spicy, avocado-slick green sauce (Levin’s take on a salsa verde) and the crackle of popped wild rice, the flavors flowed together into the taste equivalent of an old Electric Light Orchestra EP.

Then there were the pierogies, miraculous half-moons of slippery pasta dough filled with an ethereal puree of potato, topped with butter-fried onions and plated with sporadic dollops of smoky buttermilk. The iconic Polish comfort food was brought up to date without losing its sense of identity—a brutally difficult trick to pull off.

Adsum [Philadelphia Weekly]
Adsum [Official Site]