Craig LaBan

1 week ago | inquirer.com | Craig LaBan

A few minutes late, as usual, we hustled to make our reservation and turned the corner only to find this stretch of Frankford Avenue uncharacteristically quiet. The thought entered my mind as we approached Fiore’s front door just as my wife said it out loud: “Is it even open?”Or is Fiore just the best-kept dinner secret in town? I grasped the door handle hopefully and pulled. The lights were on, but turned down low.

2 weeks ago | inquirer.com | Craig LaBan

Those are not burnt potatoes. What you’re looking at, cradling a tender beef cheek, is the childhood memory of some incinerated potatoes. They are delicious — and not charred at all. These croquettes of fluffy mashed potatoes are sealed inside a delicate tempura crust turned jet black with cuttlefish ink, a trompe l’oeil recreation of the snack Ginger chef Temir Satybaldiev used to eat with his pals back in Kyrgyzstan after a summer dip in the Talas River.

2 weeks ago | inquirer.com | Craig LaBan

Is it a Parmesan- and anchovy-laced Caesar salad the size of a garden? Or is it the cutlet that ate Bryn Mawr? It all depends, I suppose, on the perspective of the person at Carina Sorella who orders the Caesar salad and adds chicken for an extra $10. The gentleman dining at the banquette beside me at this suburban sibling to Fitler Square’s Trattoria Carina was clearly taken by surprise.

3 weeks ago | inquirer.com | Craig LaBan

Evan Snyder grew up in Newtown loving his Israeli grandmother’s stuffed cabbage, an Ashkenazi-style comfort classic rolled around beef and rice in sweet and sour tomato sauce. The cabbage rolls he’s cooking at Emmett have come a long way from that childhood memory in style, context, and luxury ambition.

3 weeks ago | inquirer.com | Craig LaBan

These are boom times for fans of Vietnamese food in Philadelphia, where the past year has seen several worthy new entries, from cozy Pho Skyline in the Italian Market (for great pho, of course) to the contemporary vibes of Banh off Rittenhouse Square (try the crispy banh khot and bún chả hà nội grilled pork with rice noodles) and Drip Vietnamese Coffee in Chinatown, plus a new fusion brunch spot at Hannah K’s, the cheerful Point Breeze spin-off of Huyen Thai Dinh’s hit, the Breakfast Den.