Two Philly spots make Bon Appetit’s best new restaurants list
Two Philly spots—one plant-based and one very much not—made the cut in Bon Appetit's annual list of best new restaurants.
Two Philadelphia restaurants on very different ends of the spectrum made Bon Appetit’s best new restaurants list this year.
South Philly’s Heavy Metal Sausage and Northern Liberties’ Pietramala both got a nod in the magazine’s annual roundup. (Inquirer food editor Jamila Robinson recently departed to lead the Condé Nast publication.) The 24-restaurant list features spots in Detroit, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, Miami, Savannah, Ga., and Quincy, Mass., among other locations. New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco had two restaurants apiece.
BA contributors highlighted the transportive quality of Heavy Metal Sausage’s trattoria dinners, set in the workaday South Philly butcher shop: “You might forget where you are for a moment — before remembering that you’re pressed up against a humming deli case populated with homemade capicola, hunks of rustic pâté, and rows of the finest fresh and cured sausages being made in Philadelphia right now.”
Pietramala, in contrast, won praise for its treatment of produce. “No bite will leave you wanting, no swipe of sauce will fail to elate. This is post-“vegan”; it’s beyond “plant-based”; it’s smart and fun and craveable in equal measure.”
As always, the accolades will come as no surprise to Inquirer readers. Critic Craig LaBan named Pietramala one of the city’s best vegan restaurants earlier this year (a more crowded field than you might imagine), and his 2022 review of Heavy Metal’s trattoria dinners foreshadowed its James Beard Award nomination earlier this year.