Philly’s Next Big Export Is Itself

Pizzeria Beddia/ Photograph by Ian Shiver

Philly’s restaurant scene has never been hotter than it is right now. It has never been more marketable than it is right now. Between the awards and international acclaim, the Michelin stars, and the epic wait lists at restaurants who already find themselves crowded with customers flying in from other time zones (and other continents), this city is having a loud, crowded, extended moment in the culinary spotlight. So it was really only a matter of time before someone figured out how to capitalize on that kind of cool by exporting it to places that aren’t Philly.

I’m not talking about New York or Chicago or Las Vegas. While those places are, of course, demonstrably not Philly, they’re also still part of the United States. They’re like neighbors to Philly in the food world — reachable, recognizable, probably crowded with a fair number of transplants who fondly remember street-corner soft pretzels, opening day at Rita’s, and midnight Wawa runs, and would have powerful, personal feelings about seeing a name from back home (like Vetri or Solomonov or Schulson) attached to a restaurant down the block.

No, I’m talking about taking Philly international. About taking something that is uniquely and wholly ours and bringing it somewhere that the local tongue doesn’t even have a word for Whiz.

It has happened occasionally in the recent past. Stephen Starr opened a restaurant in Paris in 2016, called Chez La Vielle. But that was really more about taking Starr international than it was about showing Philly to the world. Ben Miller (formerly of South Philly Barbacoa) opened a taco shop in Warsaw last year. Marc Vetri opened a red-gravy Italian restaurant at the Ace Hotel in Kyoto called Mr. Maurice’s Italian, named after a Center City restaurant his grandfather owned in the 1950s. He does wood-fired pizzas there, along with his father’s meatballs and lots of pastas. And by now, we all know the story of Nihonbashi Philly, the bar and cheesesteak shop in Tokyo that operates like an Eagles-green shrine to all things Philly. Kosuke and Tomomi Chujo have dedicated their lives (and a frankly stunning amount of airline miles) to perfecting an out-of-market version of Philly’s iconic sandwich, and they’ve gotten good enough at it that a pop-up last year in Fishtown drew more than a thousand people. But Kosuke and Tomomi are Japanese. They didn’t grow up here, neck-deep in the sectarian debates over whose neighborhood shop was better than whose.

And now word has come down that Philly’s own pizza Jedi, Joe Beddia, has inked a deal with U.K.-based Four Legs founder, Ed McIlroy, to open a collaborative restaurant in London. It will be called Bar Etna. It will be opening in April (allegedly) in Newington Green in North London. And it will feature, among other things, Beddia’s very Philly take on pizza.

Pizzeria Beddia / Photograph by Jason Varney

“Widely credited for redefining modern American pizza,” is what it says in the release announcing Beddia’s transatlantic jump. And honestly, that’s not at all untrue. For those of you who were there at the beginning, the original Pizzeria Beddia was one of those pure, lightning-in-a-bottle moments, impossible to engineer. It was a disaster and a delight in roughly equal measure — this tiny storefront operation in Fishtown which was legally not allowed to let people sit down. There were no logos. No menus. No phone. You wanted a pie, you had to show up in person and wait in lines that could easily be an hour long even if you arrived the minute the front door was unlocked. But they were worth it. Those pizzas — with their fermented dough, long rise, crackling crusts, canned Jersey tomatoes, and local cheeses — were a punk rock middle finger to the Neapolitan purists that ruled the pizza conversation more than a decade ago. And in the kitchen, Joe Beddia made every single one of those pizzas himself.

Everything else came after: The glossy magazine write-ups, the shiny, newer, larger space with its expanded menu and actual seating, the cookbook deal, the Bib Gourmand from the Michelin Guide. Pizzeria Beddia got big, but it did so on the back of one guy’s obsession with making pizzas the way no one else was really making pizzas back then, and putting them into the hands of a waiting public in any way he could.

And now, he’s going to be bringing that same attitude (and those same born-in-Philly pies) to London. Which, let’s be honest here, is quite the goddamn Cinderella story. From a standup joint on Girard Avenue to London in a dozen years? That’s fucking remarkable. And what’s even more remarkable is that Beddia now becomes one of the very few big-name local chefs to do such a thing. He’s among the early pioneers, boldly bringing Philly overseas with an eye toward showing the world what this city can really do, and opening an actual restaurant meant to showcase that.

Dinner at Pizzeria Beddia / Photograph by Ian Shiver

Do I think this is going to be good for Joe Beddia? Oh, I absolutely do. Dude is going to print money with this spot, no doubt. Even if the menu gets thinned out a little with some promised Italian American filler (meatballs, caponata, eggplant parm), Bar Etna is being pitched as a real “East Coast-style pizza bar,” and he’s gonna blow minds and change lives with those Fishtown pies.

But what’s truly shocking to me is that there aren’t even more restaurateurs looking to cash in on Philly’s food world celebrity. Not a thousand Nihonbashi Philly clones, or terrible soft pretzel knock-offs being sold outside airports in Rome and Bangkok, but can you imagine Philly doing what Philly does best on a global stage? Nich Bazik doing a 20-course prix fixe in Copenhagen. Nok Suntaranon bringing Kalaya vibes to Mexico City. Omar Tate and Cybille St. Aude-Tate bringing Honeysuckle to Madrid. Hoagies and water ice on the streets of Seoul.

It’s coming, I think. Maybe not in the way I described, but there’s too much potential in our scene for it not to be attracting the attentions of overseas partners with spaces that need filling and money to burn. Chefs like Marc Vetri, Ben Miller, and Joe Beddia might be the first to take the leap, but they definitely won’t be the last.

And I can’t wait to see what the world makes of someone like Phila Lorn on the day he opens his first restaurant in Paris.