This New Philly Restaurant Is Raising the Bar for Mexican Food

Amá’s wood-fired octopus / Photography by Bre Furlong

If I were ever going to eat a whole octopus anywhere, it would be at Amá.

It’s a Friday night. We’re sitting under the smooth, white plaster arches and exposed beams in the bright and airy dining room at chef Frankie Ramirez’s stunning new restaurant in Kensington, and our server really wants us to order the octopus. She tells us about the cooking, the presentation, the size of it. It’s the biggest plate on a menu that starts small (buttery-soft slices of scallop served as a Peruvian tiradito in a broth of dashi and tomato; house-made heirloom corn chips with salsas in six different regional variations), hits its stride with half a chicken rubbed with adobo and served with a Michoacán-style atapakua sauce as red as old bricks, then tops out with a whole octopus.

I tell her that we’re probably just going to order a bunch of things to share. Plates upon plates. As many as we can manage.

“However you want to do it, my loves. It’s all up to you.”

Amá is the restaurant Ramirez has been waiting his entire life to open. He is an industry veteran who came to Philly from Mexico City, started out washing dishes at Stephen Starr’s Washington Square (now Talula’s Garden), then worked his way up through a half dozen different restaurants (Morimoto, Parc, Enoteca Tredici, and elsewhere) before most recently leading the team as exec at Starr’s LMNO for four years.

The pepe el grillo cocktail at Amá

And Amá is a distillation of all those years, all those kitchens, all those shifts on the line. There are Japanese flavors, South American inspirations, French techniques, and a bone-deep and abiding love and respect for Mexican ingredients, regional specialties, and traditional preparations. The birria is made with lamb neck and a rich, hot consommé spiked with cascabel and árbol chilis. The milpa salad uses ingredients Ramirez recalls from the family gardens in Mexico — cleared fields that were planted with a little bit of everything, buzzing with the crickets that he now scatters on top of the mixed greens, heirloom beans, cured nopal, and huitlacoche tossed with a cumin-sharp dressing. The huauzontle is tempura-fried. The tuna tostada has a sharp sting of soy, gentled by smashed avocados that make the whole thing reminiscent of 2 a.m. tuna maki eaten standing up at the bar. A brace of swordfish tacos come smeared with labneh, threaded with onions pickled with orange, and a salsa árabe. The swordfish is inspired by the Lebanese practice, popular in Mexico, of rubbing fish with harissa, only here done with a house-made za’atar. Ramirez’s skin-on chicken is a nod to his childhood, when his father would get paid on Saturday, pick up a chicken on the way home, and roast it with adobo. Here, he serves it with a rainbow of small, soft potatoes; it’s meant to be picked apart and folded into the house’s steamy, warm, and slightly chewy tortillas.

Amá’s tuna tostada

We eat ourselves stupid at the table. The sauce from chicken tacos gets on our hands, and we peel the meat from the bodies of giant, wood-grilled zarandeado-style shrimp with our fingers, dipping it into melted macha butter like it’s lobster. The dining room is loud — busy with families, babies in strollers and held on laps, later with friends and neighbors and people jockeying for the last walk-in seats at the long bar. It is a place that operates with such a sense of welcome and humility and honest, overwhelming joy that even early, with only half the tables occupied, it already felt full.

The bar at Amá

There’s no time to eat everything I want to eat, no space here to tell you about the custom roasting and smoking grill Ramirez had installed in the kitchen, or the charmingly awkward first date at the table in front of ours, or how Ramirez brought his mom in from Mexico just before opening­ to teach him how to nixtamalize corn, or even the brilliant tequila- and mezcal-heavy cocktails­ with their tomato shrubs and chapulin garnishes.­ But I tell myself that next time I come here, I will get an Uber so that I can drink my way down the list without having to worry about finding my car. I tell myself that next time, I will come late when the lights are low, close the place, and walk out into a city and a neighborhood that will be defined by food exactly like this in the future, that will remember Amá maybe not as the start of something, but absolutely as a continuation­ of an edible conversation Philadelphia has been having with itself for the past 20 years.

And next time I will absolutely order the whole-ass octopus.

4 Stars — Come from anywhere in America

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

Published as “A Soulful Ode to Modern Mexican” in the September 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.