Two Philly hotspots make Bon Appetit’s 2024 best new restaurants list
The list features 20 of the country’s best new hotspots in Nashville, New York, Minneapolis, Columbus, and other locations. Portland, Ore., and Philadelphia had two restaurants apiece.
Philadelphia’s dining scene is adding another notch to its belt of accolades with two local restaurants listed on Bon Appetit’s latest list of best new restaurants.
Meetinghouse in Kensington and My Loup in Rittenhouse received nods from the magazine’s annual roundup of restaurants that are “embracing collaboration” to create menus “infused with personality and a real sense of place,” wrote Elazar Sontag, Bon Appetite’s restaurant editor, in the introduction of the list. (The Inquirer’s former food editor, Jamila Robinson, leads the Condé Nast publication.)
The list features 20 of the country’s best new hotspots in Nashville, New York, Minneapolis, Columbus, and other locations. Portland, Ore., and Philadelphia had two restaurants apiece.
Bon Appetite contributing editor Amiel Stanek described Meetinghouse as the “ideal neighborhood joint,” highlighting chef Drew DiTomo’s “unassumingly excellent pub fare approached with fine dining fastidiousness.”
Dishes like the hot roast beef sandwich and the lavish green salad were named, along with curated cocktails and the five beers on tap. The Kensington beer bar is “clear-eyed, hospitable, doing so little to draw attention to itself that it is positively irresistible,” Stanek noted.
Stanek’s praise for My Loup touched on chef Alex Kemp’s “bighearted and maximalist, proud but unpretentious, by turns serious and fun as all hell” cooking, from the seafood platter to the green garlic escargot roll.
Kemp co-owning the Rittenhouse restaurant with his wife, Amanda Shulman, the incredibly successful chef at Her Place Supper Club, adds a “heady romanticism” to their My Loup collaboration, Stanek wrote. “My Loup brings together creative minds, culinary sensibilities, places far away on a map but deeply linked in spirit — and becomes far more than the sum of its parts.”
For Inquirer readers, these two nods make sense to restaurant critic Craig LaBan, who has previously highlighted both restaurants. LaBan noted Meetinghouse’s “commitment to simplicity,” taking the “mundane to the memorable” and later named its green salad as one of his best dishes in 2023. My Loup, a reigning favorite for LaBan, has also scored a nod on the New York Times’ Best list.