In Mount Airy, Toska’s All-Encompassing Menu Is a Crowd-Pleaser

Just a few items on Toska’s extensive menu / Photography by Ted Nghiem

“Explain it to me again?” my wife said.

“It’s three Albanian brothers who opened a pizza shop in Mount Airy,” I told her. “They serve fried chicken and avocado toast and pepper dip and poutine, and I think I need to go there right now.”

I was on my way to Toska — the restaurant, the neighborhood bar, the brewery that opened recently on Germantown Avenue in the old Earth Bread and Brewery space.

Earth Bread held down this corner for more than a decade, but it closed more than a year ago because of COVID, the economy, changing habits — you name it. Then these three Albanian brothers — Leo, Pep and Jim Osmanollaj — took it over. The brothers fled the war in Kosovo for the Philly region in 2000, when they were just kids. They waited tables, worked at McDonald’s, and then, years later, opened a burger place of their own (Haveaburger) in Havertown, then M20 Burgers & Salads, a mini-chain with five locations in three different states.

But Toska is their big swing. And it is wild. It’s like four different restaurants all jammed together into a single space, plus a brewpub just for kicks. It’s like the brothers picked blindly from every suburban chain restaurant you could imagine to build their menu. Only none of it tastes like it’s coming from some plasticky strip-mall chain restaurant. So they end up serving blackberry brambles at the bar alongside their own house IPAs and Kosovo-style lagers; salmon en croûte, Albanian sausage with kajmak clotted cream dip, chicken fingers, poutine, banh mi “pig wings” with a pineapple-y Hawaiian luau sauce, Nashville hot chicken sandwiches, Bavarian pretzels with beer cheese, and 11 different wood-fired pizzas (gluten-free on request).

And they do it all well (except maybe those pig wings, which were kind of grossly sweet-sour and bubblegum chewy), because if you’re going to do chicken fingers, why not do a 12-hour brine and a cornflake dredge and fry them until the batter cracks like glass? And if you’re going to do pizzas, why not use Earth Bread’s old oven and make them wood-fired beauties with springy-soft crusts, perfect charring on the bottom, and toppings like sujuk, caramelized onion, San Marzano tomatoes and fig glaze or short rib, smoked gouda, chili crisp and Korean BBQ sauce?

Goodies at Toska

And you can get all that, sit at the bar with its barrel decor and twists of neon, have a pint, then get some fried cheese curds, elotes, and Albanian qebapa to go, and you still wouldn’t have scratched the surface of what the Osmanollaj brothers are offering here. Because Toska is one of those places where chaos just works.

2 Stars — Come if you’re in the neighborhood

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 “The Ultimate Crowd-Pleaser” in the March 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.