Provenance Lands on Bon Appétit’s List of 20 Best New Restaurants

Just a few of the 25 courses Provenance serves each night. / Photograph by Breanne Furlong / Photography by Breanne Furlong, originally in Provenance Is Philly’s Most Ambitious Restaurant — If It Can Survive

This has become a VERY good week for Philly restaurants on the national stage.

On Tuesday, word came down that Phila Lorn had been named one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs of 2025 — a huge honor that has gone to only a handful of Philly’s industry professionals over the past 30-odd years. Then, later that same day, there was the announcement that both Phila and Rachel Lorn’s restaurant, Mawn, and Meetinghouse in Fishtown had been tagged as two of the Best New Restaurants in America according to the New York Times. Of course, we’ve all known for a long time exactly how good Meetinghouse and Mawn both are, but it was nice that they noticed it in New York, too.

And now, just as the week is coming to a close, we’ve learned that Provenance, Nich Bazik’s stunning, overwhelming prix-fixe experiment in Headhouse Square, has just made Bon Appétit’s list of the 20 Best New Restaurants in America for 2025, which is also an enormous deal.

I mean, think about how many new restaurants open in the entire country each year. Now think about how many of them are really, really good — smooth, welcoming, brilliant places being run by absolute masters of their craft. It’s a big number. And now, Provenance is not only being counted among that large total, but among the very best of that list. Here’s just some of what Bon App had to say about the place:

“Stopping time is Bazik’s superpower. Compelling diners to pause comes naturally, perhaps because this parade of beautiful moments was such a long time coming. Two years painstakingly transforming a 200-year-old Philadelphia row house into the restaurant equivalent of a Formula 1 car; nearly 20 more honing his skills in kitchens across the city, learning, sharpening, waiting. One could think of the food at Provenance as fundamentally French, or subtly Korean, but more than a single cuisine or tradition, it tastes of a chef’s profound patience.”

I know, right? And just in this region alone, Provenance now stands alongside places like Baan Mae and Dōgon in Washington D.C., Fet-Fisk in Pittsburgh, Baltimore’s The Wren, and Ha’s Snack Bar in New York — all places that are shaping cuisine, directing the industry and changing the way we think about what dining can be.

Back in December of last year, when Provenance was still incredibly new, I spent a lot of time talking with Nich and hanging out in his kitchen, trying to understand exactly what he was trying to do with his restaurant and what the place might be in a year or five or 10. Was it as groundbreaking as he thought it was? Was it as important as some other people seemed to think? Was it overdone? Overwrought? Was it actually genius or merely genius-adjacent?

And the answer, as it turned out, was yes. It was all of those things. Nich is a complicated guy, and his restaurant was his complicated answer to some very fundamental questions facing the industry that he fell into when his first career (rock star) and his second (academic) became less interesting to him than playing with his food. But it is also brilliant. And daunting. And smart on a level that even some of the best restaurants in the world never really achieve. It’s inclusion on a list with this kind of weight (and which puts him in this kind of company)? That’s just proof that he’s doing it right.

If you’re interested, you can check out the full list of this year’s pick from Bon Appétit right here. And in the meantime, let’s all give yet another big round of congrats to Nich and the whole team from Provenance. This is a big win for them (and for Philly), and it is very much deserved.