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A Super trick for scoring a res | Let’s Eat

Craig reviews Bastia in Fishtown, Kiki sizes up the Beard semifinalists, and I’ve found a restaurant to watch.

Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer

You want to land that hard-to-get reservation? Kiki Aranita has an idea.

Also in this edition:

  1. Buzzy Bastia: In the cold of winter, Craig LaBan sizes up the warmth of chef Tyler Akin’s ode to Corsica and Sardinia.

  2. The Beards beat: What are Philly’s odds in this year’s “Oscars of the food world”?

  3. Outstanding new spots for pizza and Vietnamese food: Read on!

Mike Klein

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Not everyone will be glued to the TV next Sunday evening. That’s when you should try for a tough-to-land table.

Chef Evan Snyder quit his job and set out to open his own restaurant. Two years later, Emmett has opened on Girard Avenue. Wait till you try the duck.

Craig LaBan reviews Bastia, chef Tyler Akin’s Mediterranean restaurant in Fishtown’s Hotel Anna & Bel. See the skate cheeks above? He found “their crablike sweetness accented by creamy polenta and the savory spark of a chile crisp made from house-dried Jimmy Nardello peppers.”

Philly was shut out of the James Beard Awards in 2024, sending foodies to the streets, rending their garments in grief. With another Beard season upon us, let’s consider 2016, the last time that Philly was shut out. It so happened that the following year, Michael Solomonov won Outstanding Chef; Stephen Starr won Outstanding Restaurateur; Greg Vernick won Outstanding Chef, Mid-Atlantic; and Sam Calagione won Outstanding Wine, Spirits, or Beer Professional.

🧑🏽‍🍳 Here’s a look at the 15 Beard semifinalists from the region, including Greg Vernick — this time up for a national chef award.

Kiki Aranita judges the judges and analyzes the odds of this year’s Philly Beard field.

👶An even bigger win for Beard semifinalist Amanda Shulman and husband Alex Kemp (Her Place Supper Club/My Loup): Their daughter, Evie, was born Jan. 25. (On a Saturday, their day off.) “Best thing we ever cooked,” Shulman wrote on Instagram.

Andiario in West Chester is one of the region’s great restaurants. Kiki Aranita found out what makes it distinctive: its larder, where chef-owner Anthony Andiario cures, ferments, and ages ingredients that await a date on the plate.

Scoops

Requiem Bar & Bier is a brewpub on the way to Port Richmond. Put down your glass, though, because Kevin Geidosch and Josh Fryauff just signed the lease at the old Trenton China Co. (2852-2870 Memphis St.) and applied for a brewery license, so this one is a ways out. The two met years ago at Bonn Place in Bethlehem, where Geidosch tended bar and Fryauff brewed. Geidosch told me that they want to sell hot dogs from around the world and make English beers cool again.

Chef Jose Garces is adapting two of his casual-restaurant concepts, Rosa Blanca and Okatshe, for locations in Allentown’s Downtown West district. Rosa Blanca, a Cuban cafe and rum bar, will open in the first quarter of 2025 on the ground floor of the Nines apartment building at 950 Hamilton St., and Garces expects to open Okatshe, his Japanese izakaya, in the second quarter at an undisclosed location downtown.

Baby’s Kusina, the Filipino market and restaurant in Brewerytown that’s been on the opening-soon radar for a year and a half, has finally set an opening date.

Restaurant report

Angie’s Vietnamese Cuisine. Lynh Pham’s mobile catering business, Angie’s Vietnamese Cuisine, has moved up from the Culinary Collective in Bridesburg to a more public-facing space in Eastern Montco: Haven Local’s former counter inside CreekSide Market & Tap in Elkins Park, where there’s plenty of seating next to Cheshire Brewing Co. (Pham is keeping the food trailer for events.)

“When I started Angie’s, I wanted to make Vietnamese cuisine approachable and accessible,” Pham said the other day. “People will tell me, ‘I’ve never had Vietnamese cuisine before,’ or they’ll say, ‘I only eat this one thing.’ I feel like you only eat the one thing because you don’t know what the other thing is.” When she first offered a braised pork belly dish, for example, “so many people thought pork belly meant pork stomach.” Angie is named after a friend, Angely Cintron, who died in 2018.

Pham’s bowl menu, which she will vary at least initially, is based on the protein-base-toppings formula, such as gochujang pork, lemongrass chicken, shrimp meatballs, five-spice bacon, or tofu, served as banh mi, bao bun, xà lách (salad), or com dia (broken rice). Pham posts the menus on Instagram.

Shown above is a shrimp meatball banh mi ($18); two orders of pork com dia are shown below. Dine-in customers last weekend could order the do-it-yourself summer rolls ($14), which was a platter of your choice of protein, cucumber and carrot strips, herbs, and cooked rice vermicelli noodles, served with rice-paper wrappers and a water bath to soften them.

Stews and pho are on the way. Lines can be daunting as they get into their service routine. Last weekend, customers were treated to a stand-up comedy performance by Pham’s 10-year-old son, Danny, who handled orders on an iPad while perched atop an overturned bucket (see photo above).

Angie’s Vietnamese Cuisine, inside Creekside Market & Tap, 7909 High School Rd., Elkins Park. Hours are in flux, but are 10 a.m.-2:30 p.m. with a dinnertime reopen at 5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; weekend brunch starts at 10 a.m. and runs till 2:30 p.m.; dinner picks up at 5 p.m.

Sonnys Cocktail Joint. Cocktails at a cocktail joint, yes. But ethereal pizza, too.

Chris Fetfatzes and Heather Annechiarico have brought back their South Street West bar nearly three years after it was shuttered — along with their Wine Dive and a soon-to-open subterranean cocktail bar called Rabbit — by a fire in an apartment above it.

Sonnys is pretty much as they left it: pool table, banquettes, and bar seating, though it’s lost the apostrophe in the name and the chef — Gass & Main’s Dane DeMarco when it opened in 2021 — is now Steve Seibel.

Seibel’s last kitchen stop was Hawthornes, the couple’s South Philly cafe, which closed earlier this month to make way for The Lodge by Two Robbers, a new spot coming this spring from Vikram and Vivek Nayar of Two Robbers Spirits.

But before that — and here’s where the pizza comes in — Seibel was turning out marvelous pizzas at Hook & Master, Jose Garces' little-heralded, short-lived pizza-and-seafood spot in Kensington.

At Sonnys, Seibel offers four Chicago-style tavern pizzas with thin, cracker-like crusts (a 3:1 cornmeal-to-flour mix). Even the pepperoni (dubbed the Prince of South Street) is a stand-out: cup-and-char pepperoni, a sauce of 50/50 San Marzano and Jersey tomatoes, whole milk mozz, Grana Padano, and squirts of EVOO and hot honey.

There’s a rich Seasonal Greens pizza ($14), whose confit garlic cream, honey-whipped ricotta, mozzarella, and Grana Padano gets zingy balance from Swiss chard and lemon vinaigrette. Dips (Buffalo chicken with kettle chips and crab Rangoon with wonton chips), chicken fried shrimp, bang-bang chicken, and — oh, vegetables — a grilled Caesar salad and garden salad round out the food menu.

Eight classic cocktails share the list with a few newfangled concoctions, like the Drop Dead Fred (which adds Thai basil, lemon, and drops of chili oil to gin) and a clarified Long Island Island ice tea with milk punch and iridescent bursting blue boba (shown below), plus nine beers and several wines on tap, and an enviable whiskey selection.

Sonnys Cocktail Joint, 1508 South St. Hours: 5 p.m.-1 a.m. Wednesday-Sunday.

Briefly noted

Eagles tailgaters are into pig roasts, and before the NFC championship game at least one cook took the brand name “Boar’s Head” quite literally.

Kismet Bagels plans to open a second luncheonette, following up its Narberth location with a spot in Collingswood.

Winnie’s Manayunk appears to have closed permanently, capping a tumultuous week at the Main Street destination.

It’s Wagyu Week. That means over-the-top restaurant specials — and samples.

An Ultimo Coffee location has closed because of plumbing problems.

❓Pop quiz

Girl Scout dad here with a cookie question: Which of the cookies varieties are certified kosher and halal?

A) Thin Mints

B) Peanut Butter Patties

C) Trefoils

D) all of them

Find out if you know the answer.

Ask Mike anything

What’s happening with Jamaican D’s? — Brian G.

The popular Caribbean eatery on Chelten Avenue on the Germantown-Mount Airy line, idle for nearly six months, should reopen in a month or so, owner David Dawes told me. The city Department of Licenses & Inspections said the restaurant needed to get its food license up to date and to repair its electrical wiring.

📮 Have a question about food in Philly? E-mail your questions to me at mklein@inquirer.com for a chance to be featured in my newsletter.

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