{"id":314857,"date":"2026-10-26T22:30:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T22:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/314857\/"},"modified":"2026-10-26T22:30:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T22:30:08","slug":"the-chefs-defining-phillys-new-italian-american-cuisine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/314857\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chefs Defining Philly\u2019s New Italian American Cuisine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNews<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

From family recipes to global influences, a new generation of Philadelphia chefs is reshaping Italian cuisine \u2014 one unexpected, deeply personal dish at a time.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

Spaghetti with guanciale, peas, and Calabrian chili from Elma.<\/p>\n

Welcome to Philly\u2019s Italian Renaissance. This week, we are diving deep into the evolution of our city\u2019s Italian American food scene \u2014 from Marc Vetri, the godfather of this movement, to the chefs blending old-world traditions with their personal whims to create an entirely new cuisine. Check back daily for stories from Philly Mag\u2019s November cover story.<\/p>\n

James Nardone serves deep-fried polenta fritters with scarlet crab and horseradish at Elma<\/a>, his tiny Fishtown BYO. It\u2019s one of the most popular dishes on the menu \u2014 something the guests all really love. \u201cIt\u2019s basically a savory funnel cake with crab sauce,\u201d he tells me. \u201cThere\u2019s not even much that\u2019s very Italian about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The eggplant caponata recipe used by the kitchen at Irwin\u2019s<\/a> is a hundred years old. It came from chef Michael Vincent Ferreri\u2019s great-grandmother. And the tomato and watermelon crudo on the summer menu was inspired by a trip Ferreri took to Spain, Istanbul, and Cairo. Searching for inspiration, he found out-of-bounds flavors that (through trade, immigration, warfare, and the world just being a far smaller place than sometimes advertised) shaped the course of Sicilian cuisine.<\/p>\n

He brought those flavors home to Philly with him. Now they\u2019re on the menu at his Italian restaurant. And when I ask him about Turkish ingredients, Spanish technique, family recipes, and what those things mean in a place like Philly with its million plates of spaghetti and generations-deep Italian food traditions, he says, \u201cI tell people that here [at Irwin\u2019s] we adhere to a centuries-old tradition of cooking from 10 to 5. But right at 5 p.m., we start plating like a modern restaurant.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Ambra<\/a> this past spring, chef Chris D\u2019Ambro served a pasta dish topped with a ramp kimchi. For the summer menu, he did a tuna crudo with corn and fig leaf panna cotta with lime and pickled coriander and chilis from his garden that came off as reminiscent of Thai, but also a terrine of capon, veal cheeks, and chanterelles topped with a mustard oil that his aunt had to smuggle out of Italy for him because you can\u2019t buy it anywhere on this side of the world. \u201cWhat we do is specific and singular to this little shoebox of a place,\u201d D\u2019Ambro explains. \u201cIt\u2019s just \u2026 natural.\u201d<\/p>\n

All this to say, Philadelphia\u2019s Italian scene is evolving. It isn\u2019t so much the checkered-tablecloth, spaghetti-and-meatballs Italian practiced with such art across generations (and across the entire country). What you see here is a whole different cuisine emerging, built on the traditions of Italy\u2019s diverse regions but filtered through the lens of chefs riffing on the genre. Philadelphia revisionism with an iconoclastic, punk rock soul. A new Italian American canon being driven by an entire cohort of chefs \u2014 steeped in the red-sauce traditions of the region, rich with family history and intimate, well-researched, firsthand knowledge earned through travel and experience \u2014 fundamentally reshaping what Italian American food looks like and tastes like in a city that, for decades, thought it already knew.<\/p>\n

At A Mano<\/a>, Townsend Wentz cooks from every region of Italy, follows the seasons up and down the coast, uses Spanish ingredients and French technique, puts Greek feta in the panzanella and Basque peppers in the antipasti. Regionality is unimpor\u00adtant to him. \u201cBecause Philly is freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer,\u201d he explains. \u201cTo try to champion any one region would be a mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n

And when I talk to Nardone, he tells me about his parents, his grandparents \u2014 Abruzzese on his mom\u2019s side, Calabrese on his dad\u2019s. He tells me about family meals, crowded tables, how everything his grandmothers did in the kitchen was intuitive, practiced across generations; how nothing was measured in grams or kilos, but by what would fit in the empty Locatelli container on the counter. The flavors he learned at those tables? That is what he\u2019s chasing at Elma today. And he doesn\u2019t care how he gets there.<\/p>\n

\u201cOther chefs are going to give me shit about this,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I don\u2019t use homemade chicken stock anymore. I use College Inn. Because that\u2019s what my family uses. That\u2019s what so many Italian families use. And it isn\u2019t laziness; it\u2019s trying to get that flavor. Nothing else tastes quite the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am talking to D\u2019Ambro about the balance, the tension between traditional and modern Italian and what that means here, today. His menus are Italian American because they\u2019re biographical, personal, full of food memories and inside jokes filtered through an expert understanding of the centuries-deep traditions of the old country and generations of Italian American experiences. But those additions of French techniques and Thai flavors make it more authentically biographical, because those are all part of D\u2019Ambro\u2019s memories too. But all of that would be hard to fit in a menu description. So he says modern Italian because people understand that. Because then, at least, they understand what it\u2019s not, which gives D\u2019Ambro an awful lot of space to decide for himself what it actually is.<\/p>\n

And if there is any one, single common factor in what defines this emerging idea of Philadelphia\u2019s Italian American culinary moment, it\u2019s that right there: space. In these kitchens (and a dozen others like them), chefs are writing menus that don\u2019t simply reject the old or the staid or the narrow but embrace potential. That see (and celebrate) the places where history and biography cross and champion the friction between tradition and experimentation, regionalism and diaspora.<\/p>\n

In turning away from the rigidity of expectation, they make room for something new to grow and evolve. A New Italian American cuisine, delicate and just beginning. But the promise of that kind of possibility might be all that\u2019s needed to keep Philly\u2019s Italian food scene fresh and vital for the next generation of chefs and diners.<\/p>\n

Published as \u201cPhilly\u2019s New Italian American\u201d in the November 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News From family recipes to global influences, a new generation of Philadelphia chefs is reshaping Italian cuisine \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70],"class_list":["post-314857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}