The Filipino Cafe Bringing Comfort and Charm to Philly

Dishes from Baby’s Kusina + Market / Photography by Paolo Jay Agbay

The guy working behind the counter at Baby’s ducks into the kitchen to grab a plate, spins on his heel, and jogs it back out to the dining room. He yells, “Darlene!” — voice loud enough to cut through the conversation on the floor and the hip-hop on the stereo. When he gets no response, he runs it up the stairs, to the narrow ring of mezzanine seats hanging over the small dining room, and yells again until he finds who ordered the plate of pinakbet.

Then he comes downstairs, through the dining room, and back to the kitchen, and does it all over again.

Opened by Raquel Villanueva Dang and Tam Dang after years of pop-ups, collabs, and construction delays, Baby’s is a lot of things. It is a modern Filipino cafe, coffee shop, takeout spot, and market that also does sit-down dinners four nights a week and brunch on the weekends. Come early, and it’s all fried egg breakfast sandwiches with longganisa sausage and the smell of Filipino coffee beans locally roasted by Càphê Roasters. At lunch, there’s a rush — marble-topped tables filled with neighbors and friends eating pink strawberry bibingka from the pastry case with a stiff smear of jelly on top, or killer panko-crusted fried chicken thighs dressed in chili oil and pickled cabbage smashed between two halves of a soft, gently sweet, house-made pandesal roll.

An assortment of pastries at Baby’s

Those sandwiches should be enough to make the place famous — to drag in chicken sandwich enthusiasts from beyond Girard Avenue, looking for that kick of crunch and spice on a roll that’s like something between a Martin’s potato roll and Japanese milk bread — but you could pick almost anything off of Baby’s tight menu and say the same thing. The pork and rice tocilog, with its sharp tamari-pineapple marinade and fried egg over rice. The smooth, smoky, almost sweet cubes of Japanese pumpkin and soft sautéed eggplant dusted with savory mushroom bagoong (rather than the traditional fermented fish or shrimp) that keep Baby’s pinakbet vegan and lend the dish a depth of flavor that is utterly remarkable. The only thing I’ve ever ordered here that didn’t work was a plate of cold noodles in a Filipino green goddess dressing with edamame, calamansi, and yellow tomatoes. It was lovely — pale green against the plate, offset with thin slices of watermelon radish — but it tasted like eating Play-Doh. And even after I squeezed the little citrus fruits over it and mashed up the sweet tomato, it just tasted like Play-Doh with orange juice and tomatoes.

Baby’s dining room and mezzanine

Then dinner — quieter, maybe, but no less busy. There’s something about the space, some trick of the chipped bricks and plaster, the high ceilings and wood rails around the mezzanine, that makes it feel like magic. Like it’s cool without even trying. New without being intimidating. Elegant without putting on airs.

Dinner started as counter service, just like lunch. Now it’s table service, with a menu that’s part jumped-up versions of the lunch board and part its own thing. There’s a small-plate version of the genius pinakbet, the longganisa from the breakfast sandwich now stuffed into dumplings. The bistek is pure comfort: thin-sliced brisket, seared with a tamari and lemon reduction, then served over rice with a perfectly runny soft-boiled egg. And the milkfish sells out often, served whole in a cast-iron pan, tail sticking up like a flag, meat turned into a hash with chili peppers and diced red onion, the whole mess meant to be splashed with mango vinegar and mixed with coconut rice and devoured until nothing is left but the tail and the head.

Pinakbet

And no, Baby’s isn’t smooth. It isn’t perfect. Waits can be long, the timing can be clunky, and not every dish hits the way I think the kitchen intends. But honestly, none of that subtracts from its charm. Perfection here would feel contrived. The rough edges are what make it all feel real. To see Raquel in the dining room complimenting a regular on her new haircut, the guy working the counter catch an errant glass of iced coffee just before it falls, or the cooks in the kitchen working under hard white lights and sweating like the rush will never end is to see a restaurant in the process of becoming. Baby’s is just a small place, trying something new, constantly evolving, and still trying to find the limits of its own excellence in real time. I feel lucky to get to see that — to experience it trying to find how best to serve its neighborhood and its community, and to taste the sparks of brilliance it finds along the way.

3 Stars — Come from anywhere in Philly

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 “Perfectly Imperfect” in the October 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.