Emmett Just Landed on Esquire’s Best New Restaurants List. Here’s What it Says About Philly
The selection cements Philly's reputation as the capital of approachable, casual, unpretentious dining.
The dining room at Emmett / Photograph by Ed Newton originally published in Inside Philly’s Most Inventive New Restaurant
Over the past few months, every time someone has assembled one of those big, glossy lists of the Best Restaurants in America, Best Restaurants of the Year, Best Restaurants in the Known Universe, or of the Last Five Minutes or whatever, Philly has shown up.
This year alone, there’s been the New York Times list and Bon Appétit, James Beard finalists and “North America’s 50 Best Restaurants,” not to mention the absolute wrecking crew of Phila and Rachel Lorn and their team at Mawn, who scored a trifecta of big mentions, all within a couple months, which culminated (kinda) with this really epic speech from the stage at the James Beard Awards.
And all of that was before the Michelin Guide made their big announcement of which Philly restaurants were going to be a part of the Northeast Cities Guide for the first time ever.
Anyway, it’s been a very good season for Philly’s restaurant community. We are everybody’s darling right now — as close to the white-hot center of the culinary universe as we’re ever likely to get. And the good times aren’t even over yet, because word just came down on Monday that Esquire’s list of Best New Restaurants in America is being released and, once again, Philly has gotten a mention.
Rye tartlets filled with a Wagyu tartare / Photograph by Ed Newton originally published in Inside Philly’s Most Inventive New Restaurant
This time it’s Emmett getting the attention, chef Evan Snyder’s Levantine/Middle Eastern-inspired restaurant in Kensington that opened in the former home of Cadence on Girard Avenue just this past January. Because of the confidence in the kitchen and the coolness of the floor, this is a great pick. More, it’s a smart pick because Emmett is a dark horse contender, standing just outside the limelight shining on our better-known restaurants. Most notably though, much as I like this place (and I really like the place), it is also kind of an unlikely pick.
Why? Because most of the time when a Philly restaurant ends up on one of these lists, it’s for one of a couple different reasons. Sometimes it’s because the names behind the places are big or loud or in the zeitgeist or otherwise a part of a larger conversation that extends beyond the boundaries of Philly’s restaurant ecosystem. Sometimes the talent (or the money, or the buzz) just makes a place burn brighter than its neighbors. Sometimes it’s just wild, dumb luck.
And then there’s Emmett.
A few dishes from Emmett’s tasting menu. / Photograph by Mike Prince
Emmett is, for the most part, a quiet place. There’s an air of calm to it that exists almost like a counterweight to the wild expectations of some place like Provenance, the blaze of fish sauce and ego at Mawn, or the waiting list for a seat at Jesse Ito’s sushi bar that’s now more than 1,000 names long. And while yes, an argument can be made that it’s exactly the kind of recognition conferred by inclusion on these big, glossy lists that makes a place hot (reservations at Provenance weren’t exactly hard to come by on a weeknight before the Michelin team started handing out stars), Esquire judged Emmett by how it was operating before the national attention. Back when, on most nights — provided you were willing to show up a little early, or hang out a little bit late — you could walk right in and get a table. Much like I did, they fell in love with Emmett for what it was in the moment they discovered it. Philly is awesome, sure. Filled with talented chefs and amazing restaurants. But this place? It is special.
In the kitchen, Snyder and his team aren’t flashy, but they have an old-school kind of confidence. The menu changes regularly, but not frenetically. The sesame madeleines with ras al hanout butter and apple jam, the rye tartlets with perfect, salty and fat-slick wagyu tartare balanced by the burn of freshly shaved horseradish, rabbit borek, and duck schawarma with dates are ever-present (in one form or another), but exist like stable anchors on a menu that is otherwise in a slow kind of flux. Uni-rich tagliolini with white truffles one month, grilled prawns with ramp pistou the next, then steelhead with harissa and smoked yogurt the month after that.
Aged Duck with sunchoke terrine, foie merguez, and jus from Emmett. / Photograph by Mike Prince
There’s a brilliant tasting menu option at Emmett: Five courses, small plates, out the door in 90 minutes and you can order it for just one person. Far from the three-hour marathons and 20-course menus that usually snag the eye of itinerant writers and food editors, Emmett’s prix fixe is a thing shaped for the convenience of the diner, not the kitchen; made for ease, not ego. Made to be a Tuesday night tasting menu, as if there ever was such a thing, and that revolutionary — if only very gently so. And the bar operates the same way, carefully mirroring the kitchen’s obsessions with certain ingredients (ramps, lamb fat) and certain colors (rich, deep, liquid greens, dusty brick reds) and matching them in the glass. And the staff seem so honestly and authentically happy to see that you’d found your way into their care for an hour or two.
So my surprise at seeing Emmett’s name on Esquire‘s list has nothing to do with talent or skill or genius (Snyder and the entire crew at Emmett have talent to burn), but everything to do with how rarely such soft brilliance and quiet competency are rewarded. We tend sometimes to overlook the capable and the dependable because they can make a dinner seem easy. Confidence gets mistaken for complacency and we forget that one of Philly’s greatest strengths as a restaurant city is that some of the best meals you’ll ever have are ones that happen by accident; that are eaten at the bar, late on a school night, in jeans and a tee-shirt, at a place that no one is posting about on Instagram. We are so spoiled for excellence at this particular moment in our edible history that it takes something like this — a left-field choice on a big, important list — to remind us how deep our bench really is.
So am I happy? Absolutely. I love seeing a place like Emmett get the respect it deserves, and in this city of underdogs I’ll cheer on anyone in this industry who stands toe-to-toe with the heavy hitters in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and elsewhere. And even if this kind of recognition ultimately makes it harder to simply walk in to Emmett’s dining room on any random night and get a table, I’m fine with that because it also means that people out there beyond Kensington (and beyond Philly) are paying attention to more than just the largest, loudest voices in this city’s vibrant restaurant scene. It means they’re paying attention to the quiet voices, too.
Because sometimes they’re the ones with the most to say.
