Let My Loup’s Eclectic Menu and Effortless Elegance Surprise You

Spread at My Loup / Photography by Michael Persico

I want to tell you that loving My Loup is easy, but it’s not. I want to tell you that you’ll see it immediately, know it immediately, understand what it is about the place that makes it so special immediately, but you won’t. Or anyway, I didn’t.

It’s hard, this place, because it looks like it should be one thing and feels like something else. Because there is this beauty and care in the fan of figs against white china and the scallop with chervil and apple, but eating here just feels like a meal at a friend’s house. Like an after-hours industry dinner at a great bistro once all the regular customers have gone home. It’s rigorous and offhand at the same time — just something thrown together for fun, without any tyranny of expectation. The kind of thing the people who really know how to cook cook when no one is looking.

The dining room at My Loup

I like the bookshelves and those quilted banquettes and the LOUD way the bartenders laugh when something strikes them as funny. I like the way the back window looks out over nothing — just a curve of brick, maybe an alley, a narrow space going nowhere — but frames it like it’s the most deliberate view in the world. And I like how all of that together makes the room feel like the menu tastes: studiously casual. Meticulously cool.

But it’s hard to see that when you first step inside. It’s a place with a lot of buzz, with expectations set sky-high. And all of that can sometimes be like static masking a pure signal. It gets in the way. If you’re not careful, you can miss what is great about My Loup amid everything that’s supposed to be great.

First, though, some background. This place — this shotgun bar and beautiful back dining room at 20th and Walnut, just a block off Rittenhouse Square — is chef Amanda Shulman’s first restaurant restaurant. It’s full always, sold-out always, swank but not stuffy, French but not rigorously so. It’s the place Shulman opened (along with fellow chef and fiancé Alex Kemp) after her other spot, Her Place Supper Club, blew up huge and made her famous.

The menu is tight, and international in a way that feels biographical rather than manufactured. There are Italian panzanellas and Spanish boquerones, French côte de boeuf and split bones with roasted marrow and cold roast beef au poivre that wouldn’t have been out of place on the menu at St. John in London, plus the occasional matzo ball, Sweet Amalia oyster, or spike of poblano heat to keep things interesting. The plates are beautiful without being architectural, crowded without being overwhelming, a little bit goofy when you least expect it.

Halibut with clams and maitake mushrooms at My Loup

In the kitchen, they fry ham croquettes to order — two bites, hot and crunchy, gooey with cheese holding the whole thing together. They do plateaus de fruits de mer for the table, pile caviar with trimmings on English muffins for the millionaires, and pickle shrimp in this sharp, bright brine, pack them in oil with a couple leafy herbs in little glass jars, and serve them alongside house-made aioli and plastic-wrapped packets of Saltines. It’s delicious. Junk food for line crews sacked out on their days off.

Does it make sense yet? It feels so easy but tastes like genius. There’s a purposefulness and a definite style, but those never get in the way of the joy of simply serving food you love to people who might fall for it, too. There’s no space here for not feeling good, because there’s no room for it, no time. It’s all whiskey and gin, pickled shrimp and Saltines, gentle service that comes to the table like a friend, makes suggestions, brings plates, then clears out.

Pickled shrimp and Saltines at My Loup

It was a room full of excited conversation and wine-bright eyes, so loud sometimes it was hard to think — which, for a guy like me, is sometimes exactly what’s necessary. It was a single, incredible piece of halibut drowned in a chanterelle-studded mussel beurre blanc so smooth I had to spoon it up like soup and so rich that I can still almost taste it when I close my eyes. It was exactly as delicious as I expected Shulman’s food to be, but with none of the self-important baggage that can come when a chef suddenly finds herself at the center of so many conversations.

My Loup chef Alex Kemp

It took time for me to see how cool and comforting My Loup can be — how the brilliance of the kitchen and the cozy graciousness of the floor can come together like an anesthetic against bad moods and worse days. Loud or quiet, fancy or plain, the best restaurants on their best nights exist as soothing rooms where strangers can come together and feel like things might get better after one more plate or one more drink. So many places try to be that. So many try to manufacture that. And so many of them fail.

But My Loup doesn’t. It is, right now, one of the most joyous rooms in town.

3 Stars — Come from anywhere in Philly

Rating Key
0 stars: stay away
★: come if you have no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in Philly
★★★★: come from anywhere in America

Published as “Ode to Joy” in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.