12 of Philly’s best restaurants are collaborating at The Inquirer Food Fest. Here’s what’s cooking

Philly’s a small town, and that’s true of its chef community, too.

We invited a number of the city’s top chefs to Bridesburg’s BLDG39, where The Inquirer’s Ariane Datil did some light matchmaking, pairing up Philly chefs and tasking them with whipping up something that marries two culinary perspectives in one creative, collaborative dish. Below, read about the dishes they created for The Inquirer Food Festival, on Nov. 14 at the Fillmore. (Watch their meet-cutes in Datil’s reality TV-inspired series, Love at First Bite.)

If you’re tempted to try the fruits of their labor in person, get a ticket soon: The event is nearing sellout.

“Too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth,” or so the old saying goes. At The Inquirer Food Festival, they’re actually planning to make a delicious stew.

Gilda chef Brian Mattera is teaming up with Jake Loeffler, Sam Kalkut, and Danny Griffiths — the trio behind panzerotti specialist Paffuto — to make a Portuguese-inspired (but mostly Italian) beef stew served with chorizo and crispy mushrooms over polenta.

The stew is “something warm, comforting, [and] familiar,” Griffiths said. “Grandma’s bite.”

It’s a kismet collaboration. Both restaurants are inspired by no-nonsense, East Coast grandparents. They also happen to share the same interior designer. “Our places are also designed to feel like grandma’s kitchen,” Mattera joked. “Well, a cool grandma.”

Gilda (pronounced JILL-dah) is literally named after Mattera’s grandmother. He opened the easygoing Portuguese café in Fishtown with former partner Brian Oliveira in 2023. The restaurant immediately developed a reputation for a best-in-class breakfast sandwich and flaky pastel de natas that still sell out most weekends.

Paffuto, which opened in 2023 in Bella Vista, draws inspiration from Griffith’s and Loeffler’s Italian American upbringings in North Jersey and New York. As such, the menu’s centerpiece is panzerotti, a fried treat that is basically a hybrid of a calzone and a Tostino’s pizza roll. Paffuto’s get stuffed with combos of the good stuff — like bacon, eggs, and Cooper Sharp, or sliced rib-eye, caramelized onions, and more Cooper Sharp — and they’re delightfully crisp.

The Gilda and Paffuto crews collaborated earlier this year on a knockout panzerotti stuffed with crispy suckling-pig skin. The partnership, Loeffler said, resulted in Mattera giving the Paffuto dudes a sterling piece of advice: “Read the good reviews once, the bad reviews twice, and then never again,” Loeffler recited. “Think about them, learn from them, but never dwell on them.”

When Càphê Roasters and Out West come together, it gives a whole new meaning to the term “Philly Special.”

Kensington’s modern Vietnamese café and new-school West Philly coffee shop are mashing up their cultures with a take on the hoagie at The Inquirer Food Festival. A baguette from South Philly’s Ba Le Bakery, the city’s banh mi standard bearer, will be the vehicle for a lamb-belly terrine banh mi that gets smeared with a pork free-version of Càphê Roasters signature pâté and finished with a hearty dose of aromatic Thai basil.

“I don’t think you can have a good sandwich without the right bread,” said Muhammad Abdul-Hadi, Out West’s co-owner.

The dish was a fun thought exercise for Càphê Roaster’s chef Luigi Datu, who recommends customers there add chả lụa, a steamed pork sausage from Vietnam, to the café’s classic banh mi or staple breakfast sandwich. Out West, meanwhile, is halal, so the coffee shop regularly subs in lamb for pork in its own scrapple and sausage, egg, and cheese options.

When Càphê Roasters opened on Kensington’s J Street in 2021, it was one of the first Vietnamese cafe-roasteries in the United States. A 2025 James Beard Award semifinalist for outstanding beverage program, Cáphê is a celebrity favorite for its frothy lattes and hefty sandwiches. Next up: Opening a second, even larger location in Grays Ferry by next spring.

Out West, meanwhile, burst onto the Philly coffee scene in 2025 as a second act for Down North Pizza founder Abdul-Hadi and executive chef Mike Carter. Like its predecessor, the coffee shop also provides employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals, imbuing its menu of novelty matcha lattes and comforting sandwiches (cheesesteaks included) with a do-good mission.

Located on opposite ends of the city, the two cafes have mutual respect for each other. Datu admires Out West because the coffee shop “feels pretty Philly” while Abdul-Hadi was quick to start calling Datu “cousin Luigi.”

“Kitchens are like family,” Abdul-Hadi said while bumping shoulders with Datu.

Where else besides The Inquirer Food Festival can you get a single bite that blends flavors from Puerto Rico, Indonesia, and India?

That’s what you can expect from Amy’s Pastellilos’ Amy Rivera-Nassar and Rice & Sambal’s Diana Widjojo, who are collaborating on what they described as a “deconstructed pastelillo,” aka thimble-sized servings of slow-cooked ropa vieja and rice served inside hollow spheres of fried Indian panipuri. It all gets topped with lemongrass and Widjojo’s sambal aioli.

“It’s more interesting than mayo-ketchup,” Widjojo said playfully, comparing her signature chile-spiced sauce to the classic Latin American condiment combo that Rivera-Nassar offers with pretty much her entire menu. (Rivera-Nasar immediately told her to cool it with the trash talk.)

Dip dispute aside, it’s all love between Nassar and Widjojo in the kitchen. The pair have long admired each other’s tenacity and joyful cooking as members of Sisterly Love Collective, a mentorship community for women entrepreneurs in hospitality. Widjojo, for her part, is an Amy’s Pastellilos’ regular.

Rivera-Nasar’s stews (often offered as specials), remind Widjojo of growing up in Queens, New York, where Puerto Rican and Southeast Asian communities commingle. They taste like “having my friends around,” Widjojo said.

Rivera-Nasar beamed. The chef converted her neighborhood pop-ups into a brick-and-mortar in Kensington in 2024, cementing locals’ love of the traditional Puerto Rican turnovers.

Widjojo, meanwhile, got her start at Hardena, the James Beard-nominated Indonesian restaurant that she ran with her mom and sister in South Philly. She struck out on her own in 2025 with Rice & Sambal, a cozy East Passyunk BYOB where her skills shine best in the Liwetan platter, a stunning arrangement of 24 Indonesian staples.

“We kept going back and forth on what our cultures look like together,” Widjojo said. The result, Rivera-Nasar bragged, is “memories in a pot” and a whole lot of crunch.

What happens when one of Philadelphia’s most accomplished Sichuan chefs pairs up with a young gun who prefers to keep things “middle-class fancy?” Shockingly, a twist on Irish street food.

Scampi’s Liz Grothe will partner with Emei’s owner and chef, Dan Tsao and Yongcheng Zhao, at The Inquirer Food Festival. They’ll repurpose the Chinatown restaurant’s bestselling Chongquing chicken as the base for a spice bag — the compulsively snackable Chinese Irish combo of spicy fried chicken and curry on fries. Zhao will bring the heat and Grothe will bring the potato and curry (which will be pumpkin-based, for fall).

For Grothe, cooking alongside Zhao is akin to meeting an idol. She can rattle off a list of favorites from Emei’s extensive menu: mapo tofu, the white fish and green peppercorn pot, and (gluten-free) dan dan noodles. When she was a sous chef at Fiorella, Grothe used to order from Emei every Saturday to cap off a long work week.

“I feel like I’m a kid again trying to soak up everything I can,” she said while firing up the burners next to Zhao. He’s “one of the masters of Chinese cuisine.”

Zhao has been a fixture at EMei since its 2011 opening in Chinatown, where it has endured as one of the neighborhood’s best restaurants, according to critic Craig LaBan, thanks to its uncompromisingly authentic menu, adaptability, and Zhao’s more than half-century of experience working with Sichuan spice.

Grothe is just starting her come-up. The Filipino chef from Oklahoma transferred the energy she brought to Couch Cafe — the successful pop-up supper club she ran from her living room — to Scampi, a Queen Village BYOB that is Midwestern at heart, despite a tasting menu that heavily features seafood and regional Italian pastas. Just over a year and a half after its 2024 opening, LaBan hailed dinner there as a “singular DIY dining experience.”

Zhao and Tsao are already fans of Grothe’s determination. “There’s a lot we can learn from the younger generation,” Tsao said.

Doro Bet is known for berbere and turmeric-spiced fried chicken. Pine Street Grill is known for brown butter Buffalo wings. But don’t expect them to serve either at The Inquirer Food Festival.

Instead, Alex Kemp, of Pine Street, and Mebruka Kane, of Doro Bet, will collaborate on a classic Canadian smoked trout dip paired with crisp strips of injera, the spongy Ethiopian flatbread that tastes like pumpernickel when fried.

Both elements are labors of love: Kemp’s trout must smoke for 24 hours before getting the dip treatment, while the injera’s sourdough dough ferments for four days before baking atop a mitad, a skillet-sized griddle designed just for injera. The berbere, Kane said, ties it all together, seasoning both the chips and the dip. (She uses her mom’s recipe, whose secret ingredient is a touch of fenugreek for nuttiness.)

“Trout dip is a little boring [to me] because I grew up eating it,” said Kemp, who is from Quebec. Kane’s additions “are the most interesting. Growing up in Canada, I never saw anything like [her] technique.”

Kane and her sister, Hayat, have quietly built an Ethiopian empire on Baltimore Avenue: First with their traditional coffee shop Alif Brew, and later, with Doro Bet, a gluten-free and halal fried chicken joint. The secret to their chicken — which has gotten big ups from USA Today, the New York Times, and The Inquirer — is using spices imported from Adis Abba.

Kemp is also one part of a heavy-hitting Philadelphia family business. Together with his wife, chef Amanda Shulman, the chef co-owns Pine Street Grill, My Loup, and Her Place Supper Club (which was among the first restaurants to earn a coveted Michelin star last year). Kemp takes the reins at My Loup, the James Beard-nominated French bistro where the “Esca-roll” — a giant, garlicky escargot roll with cinnamon bun-esque structure — has become the signature hit.

Pine Street Grill, which opened in Fitler Square in 2025, is where Kemp gets to kick back. It’s a neighborhood restaurant with highlights that include fat eggplant parmesan, matzo ball soup, a burger, and those Buffalo wings.

Kemp and Kane move about the kitchen as if they’ve known each other for ages, casually swapping spices and stories about what it’s like to scale family businesses. “We might get a cooking show after this,” Kemp joked.

When a fine-dining legend partners with one of the city’s most exciting young chefs, it’s all about eating your vegetables.

At The Inquirer Food Festival, Vedge and Ocho Supper Club will team up on an autumnal dish: jerk squash smoked over pimento wood, topped with a green jerk sauce and crumble made from the squash skin and seeds.

Husband-and-wife chefs Rich and Kate Jacoby sit at the vanguard of Philadelphia’s vegan dining scene. Their long-closed Bella Vista restaurant Horizons was Philly’s first true experiment in vegetable-focused fine dining. Its sequel, Vedge, has endured for 16 years on Locust Street, with a menu of all-vegan greatest hits, ranging from silky rutabaga fondue to spicy dan dan noodles flecked with oyster mushrooms, that still feel timeless. Now the restaurant is honing its approach to sustainability, turning its food scraps into compost that eventually fertilizes the soil at Linvilla Orchards, the popular Delaware County farm and apple orchard.

While the Jacobys are focused on fine-tuning their business, Ocho Supper Club chef RJ Smith is still looking for a permanent home for his. Smith, 21, grew his supper club from just a few seats in his Drexel University dorm room to the Rittenhouse Hotel, where his elaborate tasting menus scored an indefinite residency.

With Ocho, Smith draws on Afro-Carribean recipes and fine-dining techniques honed in the kitchen at hotspots such as Provence and Royal Izakaya. He creates dishes that pulse with flavor and originality, like jerk duck and king crab served in a yellow curry laced with roasted garlic.

Originally from the Bay Area, Smith has been working in Michelin star kitchens since he was 16. He graduated from Drexel in June. “Everyone told me I was crazy for wanting to go to culinary school,” he told The Inquirer in January. “But I always felt there was something more than just being behind the line.”