At Irwin’s, chef Michael Vincent Ferreri launches a four-seat chef’s counter

Few dining experiences are as intimate as the chef’s counter, and Philadelphia now has a few of them. They include Zahav, River Twice, Heavy Metal Sausage Co., a.kitchen, Vernick Fish, Oloroso, and Ambra, plus Cicala, which has a table set up in the kitchen; Fiorella, where you dine at the cooking line; and the dozen omakase restaurants out there.

Chef Michael Vincent Ferreri is getting into the spirit with a four-seat counter between the bar and kitchen at Irwin’s, his modern Sicilian restaurant on the eighth floor of the Bok Building in South Philadelphia. Ferreri is calling it Salvatore’s Counter, after his late father, who taught him to cook and whose chef’s jacket hangs on the wall in front of the counter seats.

Ferreri said the 10-course menus (plus “surprises”) — served at 6 p.m. every other Sunday starting Nov. 5 — will never repeat. The tab is $180 per person, with an optional $120 beverage pairing from wine director Michael Lancaster and bar manager Kristian Fidrych.

The seats for the rest of 2023 will be sold on Resy starting 11 a.m. Oct. 18. The 2024 dates will be released on the first of the month for the following month at 11 a.m. (e.g. January 2024 dates will be released Dec. 1.)

Ferreri plans to go weekly in 2024.

Ferreri worked at Tinto, Zeppoli, and Zahav before he joined the late, great Res Ipsa, a snug BYOB in Center City that in 2017 was named among Bon Appetit’s 50 Best New Restaurants. In March 2019, Ferreri cooked at the James Beard House. Everything came crashing down during the pandemic, and it closed.

During a conversation with Bok owner Lindsey Scannapieco, Ferreri agreed to take over Irwin’s, which had opened in 2018 as a Middle Eastern-inspired restaurant. In April 2021, Ferreri inherited the former nursing classroom whose walls were still tagged with graffiti. Shortly after, Esquire named Irwin’s among its list of best new restaurants, followed by Bon Appetit. (Irwin’s, by the way, is named after long-ago school district architect Irwin Catherine.)

“Few chefs in town are as artful in their treatment of produce,” The Inquirer’s Craig LaBan wrote in his August 2021 review. He also praised Ferreri’s pastas, which he said “should not be missed. The handmade varieties are notable for their chewy textures, especially the squiggly spirals of trofie or the dimpled gnocchi sardi rounds in chile-flecked tomato-eggplant ragù.”