7 Restaurant Reviews That Explain Philly Dining in 2024

From left: Amy’s Pastelillo’s; Kampar; and Little Walter’s. / Photographs by Mike Prince, Neal Santos, and Gab Bonghi

2022 was a mess.

2023 was better, but still kind of a scattered, meandering poem about nothing — vibes, sure, but no real narrative.

2024, though? It started for me with one of the most memorable meals I’ve had in longer than I can remember, then ended with the best meal I’ve had in years. And in between those two defining points were 12 months of eating my way through a city that felt like it’d finally found its tempo again, its flavor, its voice after a long stretch of inconstancy and not really knowing what it wanted to say.

I mean, look at the spread in reviews: Bastia on one side, Breezy’s on the other. From pastelillos and fried plantains in the rain at Amy’s, wild Korean chicken wings at a sports bar in Phoenixville, and caviar and potato chips in Haddonfield, to Roman street-punk pizza from Joe Cicala, beers with the neighbors at Royal Tavern, and Ange Branca’s nasi lemak at her re-imagined (and community-focused) Kampar 2.0. And through all of it, it felt like everyone, everywhere understood that this was Philly’s year. Like there’s nothing left to prove here, and no one left to convince that this is one of the best food cities in the world right now. So now we could all just cook what we love and eat what we love and pour drinks and get weird and not have to worry what anyone thought. Philly could just be Philly — equal parts Citywides and sauvignon blanc, hoagies and haute cuisine — and fuck ’em if they don’t get the joke.

I love this town. I truly do. I talk as much shit about the scene as anyone (and probably more than most), but I will shout it from the top of the highest lamp post when we’re on our game. And this year, Philly was definitely on its game. So in case you missed it, here’s a kind of greatest hits roundup of the best reviews of the year–just a taste of what it was really like to be eating and drinking in Philly in 2024.

And it began with…

Illata

February, 2024

Cappelletti with mushroom brodo and tuna with capers and puffed buckwheat at Illata / Photograph by Bre Furlong

“Twice in all my years doing this have I fallen in love with a salad.”

That’s how my year began: falling in love with a salad. And I regret nothing.

“Citrus — that’s what the menu called it. Just citrus. And in the description? Kohlrabi, cara cara orange, house-made XO sauce. What came was a plain white plate and, in the middle of it, a UFO. A translucent ravioli filled with marmalade. A blob of thick, sticky XO sauce, bricked in with pinky-red sections of orange, a careful brunoise of kohlrabi, and all of it shingled over with razored slices of kohlrabi cut so thin, I could see right through them.

It looked ridiculous, but it ate like a bomb — gorgeously sweet and deceptively funky and salty and crisp and restrained, all at the same time. It was an arrangement meant to unfold in pieces — a nip at the outside first, then that shocking kick of citric sweetness, then, hidden in the middle of it all, this mound of explosively funked-up, fish-sauce-y, dark, and vicious XO sauce. It laid me flat, I swear. And put me on edge for the rest of the night, because if a kitchen could do that, who knew what it might do next?

And now, guess what? It’s gone. Off the menu, as if I dreamed it.”

Illata is the Philliest restaurant imaginable — a scrappy, experimental DIY BYO on in Grays Ferry with a handful of highly in-demand seats and a menu that changes like a mood. It’s run by a team that loves what they’re doing and filled with people who understand that cooking is a craft that exists without borders, without rules, and, in the best cases, without expectation.

Cantina La Martina

March, 2024

Chicken tacos / Hannah Albertine

“In Cantina’s first year, Jiménez was a James Beard Award finalist for Best Chef Mid-Atlantic. Now, in its second year, he’s received another nod from the foundation, this time for the national honor of Outstanding Chef. And that all makes sense, because everything he makes in this kitchen — ­everything he touches – becomes the best version of that dish you’ll ever try.”

And that’s not an exaggeration. There’s a lot of very good Mexican food in Philly these days, but what Dionicio Jimenez and his crew are doing at Cantina is just a step up. The classics are handled with care and precision, and when this kitchen tries its hand at fusion, all bets are off. The red pozole ramen, for example, somehow stands as both one of the best pozoles in a city that doesn’t offer nearly enough pozole on its menus AND a solid bowl of ramen in a city that probably has a few too many.

Royal Tavern

May, 2024

Royal Tavern — and its burger — is back! / Photograph courtesy of Royal Tavern

It was spring in Philly, and I was looking for some good company, so I decided to check in on the Royal Tavern — re-opened after a long post-COVID nap with Nick Macri in the kitchen and its legendary burger back on the menu. For a very short review, it had everything: hoagiemouth accents, a date night going wrong, cold beers and a burger, and a story about a cat ending a romantic entanglement in the best possible way.

Nothing deep. Nothing meaningful. Just Philly being Philly.

Kampar

July, 2024

A few items from Kampar’s a la carte menu. / Photograph by Neal Santos

In the heat of summer, I wandered into Ange Branca’s Kampar, wondering if this new, double-decker, community-focused restaurant with its dedicated residency kitchen on the first floor and upstairs bar and kongsi could possibly stand up to the original spit-and-duct-tape Sate Kampar. Then this happened.

“At the bar, they’re trying to invent a coconut-water daiquiri.

It’s a custom job, a one-off, an experiment made with homemade rice milk and coconuts and just the right rum pulled from the wall behind the bar, and all of this is happening during service — early, in that strange runway moment after the first tables have arrived but before the liftoff of a full dining room, which, I think, is the best possible time to eat at a place like Kampar. It’s when it lets its guard down. When it is its most true self.”

I ended up spending most of the night there, just slouching at the bar like a character in a Graham Greene novel, drinking gin, and eating nasi lemak and beef rendang and thick-cut steak fries drenched in brown curry. It was a wonderful night. So good, in fact, that I just kept going back anytime I was in the neighborhood.

And several times when I was nowhere near the neighborhood.

People are always asking me where they should take friends or family coming in from out of town when they’re looking to show Philly off, and Kampar is what I tell them, 11 times out of 10. It is both totally of this city and unlike anything else in this city, and if you haven’t been already, you really need to check it out immediately.

Amy’s Pastelillos

August, 2024

Amy’s Pastelillos / Photograph by Mike Prince

Amy’s recently got tagged as one of the best new restaurants in America by Esquire magazine. And I’m not saying that I’m better at this whole food writing thing than the good people at Esquire, but I did tell y’all about Amy’s first…

“I try to figure out what my favorite thing about the place is, but I can’t. The stewed pink beans are a comfort. The sweet plantains are gooey with caramelized sugars, soft just the way I like them, and so sweet and delicious I could eat two orders back-to-back and still want a third. The pollito bowl uses the stewed chicken from the pastelillos, but cut into chunks, served over soft white rice with pickled onion and avocado and mashed tostones I love the way other people love garlic or bourbon or Beyoncé. It tastes like chicken soup made solid. Dressed with the house hot sauce it sings like a choir on Sunday.”

Little Walter’s

Also August, 2024

A spread of nostalgic Polish dishes at Little Walter’s. / Photograph by Gab Bonghi

Yeah, August was a good month to be a professional eater.

“In the dining room, the waitress comes around again. She asks if everything is good, and I just nod because my mouth is full of pierogi. She sees her opportunity and tells me a story. She’s Ukrainian, she says. Her mother is very Ukrainian. And one night, she brings the pierogi ruskie home to her and tells her that she has to try them. That they’re the best. But no, her mother won’t.

‘She says, No,’ the waitress tells me. Makes a face like her mother’s face — pursed lips, suspicious eyes. She raises a finger and wags it, doing an impression of her mother’s voice. ‘No, we don’t eat the Russian pierogi. Russian pierogi will never be the best.’
Her laughter fills the room, making the guys in the kitchen look over to see what’s so funny.
And in that moment, I love the place completely. I love it like I love sour cream. I love it like a hundred pierogi.”

I’ve written thousands and thousands of additional words about Little Walter’s since I wrote those few. And if I haven’t already convinced you that you need to go to this place and see what all the fuss is about, then that’s on you. There’s only so much I can do.

Bastia

November, 2024

Dishes featured on Bastia’s dinner menu. / Photograph by Birch Thomas

“Next was herbed pork belly with roasted new potatoes over Sardinian flatbread called pane carasau. It was perfectly trimmed and fanned, roasted with wild maquis herbs, the potatoes split and cooked hard so the insides steamed. It would’ve been the highlight of almost any other table in the city. Here it was just the thing we pushed aside before descending like starving wolves on the best swordfish I’ve had, possibly ever. Brochettes, on skewers, grill-charred but meltingly soft on the tongue. Served with black rice, with a walnut pesto that could’ve made shoe leather sing, with a smear of gently spiced labneh that added just the slightest touch of acid, there was nothing about the dish that wasn’t perfect. Like the egg raviolo they used to do at Res Ipsa after the sun set on Walnut Street, made to split and bleed yolk into a warm brown butter sauce, it was a dish I knew I could eat one bite of and remember for 20 years.”

Bastia was where I ended my year, and there is no other room in the city where I would’ve rather done it.

Nothing about the place wasn’t perfect. Nothing about it wasn’t beautiful. It is a restaurant that is so good — and so confident in its goodness — that it hardly seems to try. Dinner here is relaxed, casual, delicious and satisfying in ways that go far beyond the sating of any simple hungers. It is remarkable simply because it is the kind of place that can remind even a jaded, cynical, over-fed bastard like me that this is what dining out is supposed to feel like.