How This Philly Bar Became One of the Best in America
And it all happened in less than a year.
Rob Scott, beverage director at Almanac / Photography by Michael Persico
Philly’s cocktail scene is evolving thanks to a new generation of bartenders shaking things up. To celebrate the great minds pushing the limits of what can go in a glass, we’re declaring this Cocktail Week. Check back daily for stories from our print feature on the game changers revolutionizing the scene in the November issue of Philly Mag.
Wild Ginger in Sicklerville is like a lot of Asian restaurants in South Jersey in that it serves sesame chicken and pad Thai while presenting as a sushi place. Rob Scott loved it. Because it was around the corner from his childhood home, because it opened when he was a teenager and the spider rolls and gyoza carried a whiff of sophistication, but mostly because of the bowl of Japanese muskmelon candies. “The little green jawns,” says Scott of the small — but seminal — gesture of hospitality. “I know you’re only supposed to take one, but usually I would take three.”
Teen loves die hard. Almanac, the intimate Japanese-influenced lounge in Old City where Scott is the beverage director, is one of the top five Pennsylvania buyers of Midori, the melon-flavored elixir whose trashy past in ’80s cocktails like the Melon Ball he would like you to reconsider: “I’m like the Philadelphia Midori guy.”
I’m sitting at the end of Almanac’s five-seat black-quartz bar opposite the Philadelphia Midori guy, snacking on pickled kombu celery from Ogawa, the downstairs omakase counter that serves neither sesame chicken nor pad Thai. Down goes a coaster bearing Almanac’s Deco typeface. Out comes a chilled Kimura Glass coupe from a refrigerated drawer so sleek and frosty, it looks like it should store Jurassic Park embryos. Scott combines the elements of the Kasugai Sour, one of two Midori cocktails on the menu he developed with Danny Childs, the James Beard Award–winning author and bar consultant. Barley shochu, yuzu, lime, lactic Calpico, and Midori become a frothy chartreuse cascade that fills the glass to its fluted rim. It glows from within, like a bioluminescent lagoon creature. I lift my phone to capture it and bump the edge of the coupe. The top third of the drink sloshes onto the counter, with the dehydrated lime wheel floating on top seesawing like an inner tube in a wave pool.
Jars of seasonal preserves at Almanac
Omotenashi, the Japanese style of intuitive hospitality, underpins the Almanac experience. Part of it is physical: the warm or chilled oshibori towel that greets guests when they arrive, for example, or the liquid amuse-bouche of a small mug of tea that follows. The other, deeper part is emotional. Before I can even register embarrassment, my spill is wiped clean, two fresh coasters simultaneously appear, and the Kasugai Sour is steady and shining again. “We want to incite joy,” Scott says, “and a little bit of awe.”
After the sour, a thrilling tightrope walk of energetic acid and toasted-grain gravitas, and two more extraordinary cocktails, I get the check. It comes not with the muskmelon suckers of Scott’s Wild Ginger childhood, but — how did they know? — my own favorite Japanese candy, a precious strawberry Kit Kat. I devour it before reaching the bottom of the stairs.
Published as “The Alchemy of a Cocktail” in the November 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
