Best of Philly

Best New Restaurant

2026 Best New Restaurant, ’Burbs

Carversville Inn

The Carversville Inn has stood in Bucks County since 1813, but Milan Lint and Mitch Berlin’s revival is no dusty antique. After a down-to-the-studs renovation, the couple reopened last May with six upstairs suites, a humming bar, and a restaurant where an original fireplace meets glittering chandeliers, vintage monkey sconces, and vibrant art they’ve collected during their travels. Tony locals are lured by the vibes — dimly lit rooms, candlelight, Saturday night live piano — as much as they are by the perfect French-brasserie menu. Chef Dara Tesser, who comes via New York’s Gramercy Tavern and Prune, turns out consistently excellent dishes like bouillabaisse, steak frites, and trout amandine, plus a cherry-on-top ice cream sundae, drizzled in house-made peanut brittle. Read More »

6205 Fleecy Dale Road, Carversville, PA | 267-406-9162 | Website

2026 Best New Restaurant

Sao

If tipping back a freshly shucked oyster usually transports you to Cape Cod or coastal Washington, a tray at Sao delivers you straight to the tropical shores of Cambodia. Phila and Rachel Lorn’s East Passyunk follow-up to beloved BYOB Mawn carries over those same dazzling Southeast Asian flavors, this time in raw-bar form. Oysters come with Cambodian peppercorn fish sauce mignonette and spicy-tart Lao sauce. Crudos are dressed with smashed chili-crisp cucumbers or Honeycrisp apple slivers and ponzu. Even the excellent chicken cutlet, hidden under a flurry of parm, gets fish sauce caramel and salty pickles. The restaurant’s biggest difference: a full bar. Order the Jabroni Negroni. Read More »

1710 Passyunk Avenue, Philadelphia, PA Website

2025 Best New Restaurant, Burbs

La Baja

Dionicio Jiménez made a name for himself at Cantina La Martina, doing a recognizable, fairly traditional Mexican cafe menu touched here and there with bursts of international fusion. But at La Baja — his new restaurant in Ambler — he has found the freedom to cook a menu built entirely around his varied history. From burratina cheese with black mole and kampachi tostadas with uni and Persian cucumbers to risotto with short rib braised in Mexican chocolate, it is a one-man canon, a purely biographical cuisine. Read More »

9 North Main Street, Ambler, PA Website

2025 Best New Restaurant, City

Little Water

Randy and Amanda Rucker’s new Rittenhouse spot explores everything the couple loves about a life spent close to the land, close to food, and in those intersections where earth and water meet. The smartest dish on a menu full of culinary digressions is the highbrow/lowbrow combination of an excellent peekytoe crab salad mounted atop a sharp-edged, perfectly architectural block of golden hash brown. The best is a piece of halibut, beautifully cooked and set adrift on a cloud of aerated potatoes. There’s nothing here that isn’t brilliant, considered, and heavy with personal history. Read More »

261 South 20th Street, Philadelphia, PA Website

2024 Best New Restaurant, Suburbs

Rosemary

It takes a lot to get city folks to travel to Delco for dinner, but that’s just what Starr management alum Philip Breen did last year when he opened this sophisticated spot. Barbuzzo/Fork/Stateside vet George Sabatino does amazing things with handmade pastas and vegetables, which make up a good portion of the menu. And the baked oysters, scallops in a celery root puree with black truffles, and all things brunch are big hits. Read More »

25 East Hinckley Avenue, Ridley Park, PA Website

2024 Best New Restaurant, City

Illata

Illata is small, scrappy and weird. It is BYO, 20 seats, white walls, warm light and a DIY pass-through window hacked into an old doorway. It is a menu as short as a poem, dishes that come and go like the tides, citrus salad with homemade XO, ricotta gnudi with crushed hazelnut, and sourdough smeared with butter. It is absolutely delicious and completely indefinable except to say that it might be the most perfectly Philadelphian restaurant we’ve seen in some time — speaking to the way we eat right now, the way we’ve eaten forever, and the way we all hope to eat on our best nights out. Read More »

2241 Grays Ferry Avenue, Philadelphia, PA Website

2023 Best New Restaurant, City

Mawn

This self-described noodle house with “no rules” twists and merges Southeast Asian classics — banh chow chopped up and bathing in fish sauce, khao soi silky with Neighborhood Ramen’s homemade noodles, galangal-marinated rib-eye skewers marked by chef Phila Lorn’s own Cambodian roots. Mawn knows exactly who and what it is without anything to prove. The sour-sweet-savory dishes will zap you out of your bullshit day and into the moment, psychedelic Cambodian rock will make the small space come alive, and you won’t be able to remember what 9th Street was like without this BYOB. Read More »

764 South 9th Street, Philadelphia, PA Website

2023 Best New (Old) Restaurant

Kalaya

With palm trees sprouting from the center of a perpetually busy dining room and a bar slinging lemongrass-infused cocktails, the new Kalaya — a partnership between Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon and Defined Hospitality — certainly looks different than it did in its Bella Vista days. But in the face of the inherent Philadelphia skepticism that greets any beloved space’s evolution, Kalaya’s southern Thai dishes still pack the same delightful punch. And Suntaranon still floats around the dining room, sometimes holding someone’s baby, always representing a menu that pays exquisite homage to her heritage. Read More »

4 West Palmer Street, Philadelphia, PA Website

2023 Best Best New Restaurant, 'burbs

De La Terre BYOB

Downingtown may seem like a long way to go for dinner, but chef Andrew Hufnagel (ex of Zola, Dandelion and Jean-Georges) makes the trip worth it with this French BYOB that can do hyper-classic onion soup spiked with sherry, a charcoal-roasted squab with strawberry rhubarb and spring onion soubise, or kombu-poached shrimp with yuzu mayonnaise, all without breaking a sweat. The kitchen trades classical stuffiness for a bright, restrained experimentalism (and occasionally serves a really good cheeseburger, too), making De La Terre the best restaurant you’re going to find in the last place you’d ever look. Read More »

47 West Lancaster Avenue, Downingtown, PA Website

2022 Best New Restaurant, City

Her Place Supper Club

What began as a temporary deal in a shuttered pizza joint is now a full-blown, deeply personal restaurant. Amanda Shulman has transitioned Her Place Supper Club from a short-term project to a permanent operation while retaining its sublime French and Italian-ish food and a human touch so integral to the original concept. Coming here feels like having dinner at your cool new friend’s house — if your friend made the best steak tartare and fries in the city, always seemed to keep a truffle hidden somewhere in her kitchen, and had a wine and cocktail program crafted by Julianna Bursack. Her Place may have started as a pop-up, but lucky for us, it’s not going anywhere. Read More »

1740 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA Website