New York's Pig & Khao, a pork-heavy Thai-Filipino restaurant by a 'Top Chef' alum, will replace Martha in Kensington

Pig & Khao, a pork-centric restaurant with Thai and Filipino influences from New York’s Lower East Side, will open a branch at the former site of Martha in Kensington, which closed over the weekend after 10 years.

The food — such as sizzling sisig, isaan steak, and khao soi noodles — drinks, and high-energy atmosphere are expected to carry over to Martha Street, where Pig & Khao expects to open by next summer.

A Philadelphia Pig & Khao location has been in the works for eight or nine years, said Ben Byruch, a native of Cheltenham, who runs Pig & Khao with his wife, Top Chef alumna Leah Cohen, who grew up in the New York suburbs.

Cohen said she fell in love with Philadelphia when she and Byruch started dating in 2012, shortly after she opened the restaurant and he signed on as sous chef for what he thought would be six months. They have since opened a bar-restaurant called Piggyback and have a second Pig & Khao location teed up to open in December on New York’s Upper West Side.

“If I were to ever open another restaurant in a different state, I would want it to be in Philly, not just because Ben has a connection, but because it’s such a great food city,” Cohen said.

At the time, Byruch said, Philadelphia felt smaller. Now, with development spreading beyond Center City, “the city is so much bigger than it ever was. We never found the right fit before.” This new scale is attractive to people from other places, which explains the out-of-town groups flocking to Philadelphia.

Cohen and Byruch had been scouring Fishtown before finding the space on Martha Street, across from the new Picnic. “I don’t know that we were necessarily looking for Kensington, but we fell in love with the Martha space,” Byruch said. (Martha and its property are owned by a partnership, which is leasing the space. Jacob Cooper of MSC handled the transaction.)

Byruch, 42, a culinary graduate of the Art Institute of Philadelphia, worked at such Philadelphia restaurants as Pod, Union Trust steakhouse, and Trust. In 2008, he opened a South Street restaurant called Sonam that served global small plates such as roast pork egg rolls and a cheesesteak terrine; it got a decent review from Craig LaBan. (Byruch, then 25, also was included in the Philadelphia Daily News’ “Sexy Singles” feature.)

Cohen, 43, is the daughter of dentists Bill Cohen, raised in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and Nancy Oro-Cohen, who grew up in the Philippines. After attending the Culinary Institute of America, she worked at Park Avenue Café and Eleven Madison Park, as well as Ristorante La Madia in Sicily. In 2008, she competed on Season 5 of Top Chef (mild scandal — she was caught canoodling with eventual winner Hosea Rosenberg).

Childhood visits to the Philippines did not initially inform Cohen’s cooking. “I never really thought, when I was going to culinary school or started my culinary profession, that I could cook food like I do today,” she said. “I thought anyone who is successful has to do French or Italian — what people are used to. After I went on Top Chef, I just wanted to be out of the spotlight. It was something that I was not used to — people recognizing me on the street and having people write articles about me.”

The upside: “I think Top Chef taught me I really had no food voice and I really wanted to find it,” she said.

Cohen headed to Southeast Asia for a year to get away and cook. She came back wanting to open a Thai restaurant because she loves the cuisine, “but then I quickly realized that all the ingredients in Southeast Asia are crossover and there was a great opportunity to bring everything I learned on my trip” to a restaurant.

In 2012, she opened Pig & Khao (khao soi being a Thai curry). “I didn’t necessarily want it to be any specific Asian cuisine because I really wanted to not pigeonhole myself to just doing Thai or just Filipino,” she said. The restaurant got two stars from the New York Times.

During the pandemic, Cohen and Byruch took on outside investors — a hospitality group called Apres Cru, which also supports chefs Marc Forgione, Jeff Bell, and Ludo Lefebvre. “They provide a lot of operational structure and great tools that have helped us grow,” Byruch said.

The Philadelphia location will be “a continued evolution of Pig & Khao,” said Byruch, who oversees the front of the house, restaurant design, and operations. He said the design will be reminiscent of the original restaurant.

“In terms of look and feel, you never pull the same trick twice,” he said.