Author: Kiki Aranita

Pennsylvania-made amaro — bittersweet liqueurs made by macerating herbs and spices — is a nascent booze category. But its production isn’t restricted to larger distilleries like Philadelphia Distilling, which makes the popular Vigo Amaro. Bartenders around the city are making their own in-house.

The practice of making in-house amaro is a result of a relative lack of access. In Pennsylvania, amari are often expensive and the selection comparatively small due to what the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board makes available. On the Fine Wine and Good Spirits website, there are only 41 amari listed, compared to 838 tequila and tequila-based drinks available.

Some bars, like Borromini and Le Virtù, maintain lists of 70-plus amari by sourcing them through what’s called Special Liquor Orders, or as Le Virtù’s general manager and beverage director Chris O’Brien explains, “something that is brought in from a smaller importer instead of getting it directly from the state.”

But bars with a limited winery, brewery, or distillery licenses — a vastly more affordable and increasingly popular path to a liquor license than a full restaurant license — can only serve beer, wine, and liquor that’s produced (or at least bottled) in Pennsylvania. That winnows the PLCB-stocked options from 41 to two, giving some establishments good reason to make their own amari.

The family of liqueurs known as amaro (Italian for “bitter”) are made from steeping botanicals in alcohol. They can be enjoyed before dinner (aperitivo) or after (digestivo). There are numerous types and subdivisions, like fernet. Nocino is a similar liqueur made from walnuts. Here in Philly, ambitious bartenders are making all kinds of variations.

Almanac

At Almanac in Old City, which is tucked above Ogawa’s omakase counter, large mason jars filled with witchy green-black liquid cover the shelving on one entire wall. Lead bartender Rob Scott brews his own amazake, a spirit typically made from fermenting rice with koji mold spores, and steeps mostly foraged nuts and leaves in Everclear and brandy for Almanac’s unique, house bitters.

Spinning one jar of amaro from October in his hands, studying the aromatics still steeping within, Scott recited each of them, “Fig leaf, apples of some sort, trifoliate orange, yomogi which is a cousin of mugwort, chrysanthemum, rosemary. We keep a book downstairs where we weigh and measure everything and write them down. Otherwise it’s easy to forget.”

They’re all autumnal flavors, and they steep for months in Laird’s Jersey Lightning, an un-aged apple brandy.

The jars of amaro sit next to about a dozen similar jars of nocino, made from local black walnuts. “You can taste a bit of astringency with nocino, but it goes away with time,” Scott said. “But if you make an amaro with, say, cardoons or wormwood, those will always be bitter.”

The nocino currently sitting on Almanac’s shelves were started on June 24, when their team harvested the nuts in Merchantville with Danny Childs, sliced them in half, put them all into 2-liter mason jars, and covered them with Everclear, a neutral grain spirit. They steeped until Thanksgiving, when the nocino was tempered with water and sweetened with Demerara sugar.

Scott offered a sample of what he called “hot nocino,” used for Almanac’s Manhattan. “We only put the nocino into cocktails because the other flavors in the cocktail temper its hotness. In order to get a true, sipping nocino, I would let this age for another six to eight months for it to become a more evolved drink. You can’t really over-extract [the walnuts], so we use them when they feel right.”

Almanac, 310 Market St., Second Floor, 215-238-5757, almanacphilly.com

Percy Diner and Bar

Percy Diner and Bar’s limited winery license means they can only serve Pennsylvania-made amari. So they decided to make their own.

Percy, which is part of the Forin group, serves Forin’s black currant and cherry fruit wines and their oaked ube and ube honey wines straight ($10) and blends them into cocktails.

They’ve used the honey wine as a base for their amaro, but more recently, the in-house selection is made with mostly neutral grain spirits. Lead bartender Sean Goldinger is hoping to slowly cultivate a series of house-made amari to feature in cocktails. At the moment he has made both a straightforward amaro with bitter orange peel, angelica root, fresh orange peel, star anise, hibiscus, gentian, wormwood, and sweetened with Demerara sugar, as well as an aperitivo that follows a similar recipe but is sweetened with a syrup made from clarified fresh-squeezed orange juice.

The aperitivo is wonderfully citrusy and significantly less bitter than the amaro. Goldinger also makes a house riff on Benedictine, a French herbal liqueur typically consisting of a couple dozen secret ingredients, with Stateside vodka and Dad’s Hat whiskey, Fell to Earth sweet vermouth, and Peychaud’s bitters. It’s infused with cinnamon, cloves, fresh thyme, lemon and orange peel, vanilla, cardamom, wormwood, fresh ginger, star anise, and angelica root, sweetened with both Demerara sugar and honey.

Percy Diner and Bar, 1700 N. Front St., 215-975-0020, percyphl.com

Le Virtù

While the majority of Le Virtù’s robust menu of amari and other liqueurs is sourced from Italy and Eastern European countries, the East Passyunk restaurant also offers some house-made options. Three house-made digestivi stand out: acqua santa (an agrumi, Italian for “citrus fruits”), genziana (a traditional Abruzzese gentian digestivo), and caffè, a coffee liqueur. These aren’t amari, as they use far less ingredients, but they serve the same purpose — helping you to digest the pasta dinner you’ve just indulged in.

For $15, you can get a generous pour of one of these digestivi. They’re all made by owner Francis Cratil Cretarola’s brother Fred, who’s been making amari since 2013, when he attended a wedding in Abruzzo, in the town of Pacentro and “became drinking buddies with a guy who taught him,” according to Francis. “Amari are much more complex, with 10 to 12 different ingredients, but these are the things Abruzzese are making in their homes,” he said.

Acqua santa is a light golden yellow. Le Virtu’s beverage director, Chris O’Brien, referred to it as a “high-octane limoncello.” It’s made with lemon, grapefruit, orange, and lime. With less sugar than limoncello, it’s much more nuanced in its citrus flavors.

For the caffè, Fred takes fresh espresso grounds and infuses them in Everclear for 30 to 40 days, turning them each week to make sure they’re evenly distributed, Francis explained.

The genziana is clear, amber-hued, and bracingly bitter, but still very balanced. It opens with a bright citrusy burst and is made bitter with gentian root, a common ingredient in amari. The root, brought to the U.S. by Francis’ friends who live near the Maiella mountains, steeps in Trebbiano or Pecorino wine from Abruzzo. Fred adds some lemon peel and coffee beans to it, along with Everclear.

Le Virtù, 1927 E. Passyunk Ave., 215-271-5626, levirtu.com

Fell to Earth

You may recognize Tim Kweeder’s name from his viral concoction, Dumpster Juice, a line of vermouths born at Bloomsday, but his making of liqueurs has come a long way. He’s the producer, bottler, salesperson, and delivery person for Fell to Earth, Philly’s first vermoutherie. It’s technically both a winery and a distillery: “The state made us get both licenses,” said Kweeder.

Fell to Earth’s liqueurs can be found at about 40 different Philly bars. Kweeder sources fresh ingredients for his fernet, like nepitella and chamomile, from Green Meadow Farms. He sweetens them with blackstrap molasses from Bucks County, then blends them with a neutral grain spirit and lets them sit for a week before blending the tinctures.

The base of his amaro starts with spruce tips from Green Meadow. “There’s a two-week window where you can forage for them, between late March and April. I throw them all into a big vat with neutral grain spirit … That becomes a base for amaro, and I build on top of that, blending in other tinctures,” he said.

“Though most of our ingredients are from the Mid-Atlantic, we have a tiny ‘spice cabinet’ of traditional amaro ingredients that don’t grow here, like gentian, cinchona (a bark that yields quinine), etc. which we use like chefs would use seasonings. We get these locally from Penn Herb Co.”

If you can’t decide whether you’re looking for a nocino or an amaro, you may find your solution in Fell to Earth’s Nocinaro — a hybrid of the two made from green walnuts, walnut leaf, black walnut syrup, trifoliate orange, wormwood, blackstrap molasses, and a gentle seasoning of cinchona bark and gentian root.

Available for delivery in Philadelphia (four-bottle minimum), shipping outside the city available via Vinoshipper; felltoearth.com

The gourmet burger is a familiar trope that has been reinvented for years. Burgers lure you in, they comfort you when you need something familiar, splashed with a little sparkle of indulgence, whether that’s foie gras, a rainfall of truffles, or an extra special patty made of wagyu or dry-aged beef.

But never has there been such an avalanche of simple, carefully-made burgers served by fine dining establishments in curiously tiny quantities. In terms of construction, they’re more aligned with being a recession indicator food, even if their prices are not recession-friendly. This is no longer the era of PYT’s crazy burgers of yesteryear. And sometimes, they are served in spite of a chef’s chagrin.

Meetinghouse’s simple, straightforward burger with its little pickle “hat,” is served only on Thursdays.

River Twice’s double-pattied Mother Rucker burger was once bestowed upon diners in the middle of their tasting menus. They’re now available only on Monday nights.

Pietramala’s vegan burger, made from vegetables, Mycopolitan mushrooms, and repurposed ingredients left over from their other menu items, and which takes three days of preparation, instigates lines around their block when they’re served one Sunday every month.

The limited edition burger thrives in our post-pandemic search for comfort and the notion that everything is a steakhouse now (a nationwide trend that hasn’t quite reached Philly, but it’s coming for us. It’s only a matter of time).

A harbinger of the dominance of the steakhouse can be seen in a single space in nearby Washington, a city with which we share a similar progression in our dining scene: Johnny Spero’s Reverie, a tasting menu-based, fine dining approach to seafood has closed. A steakhouse, Ox and Olive, will be opening in its Georgetown space.

The restaurants and cocktail bars beckon you with proclamations: Come in for our burger! Only 12 per night! Come in for our burger! But line up around the block!

The limited edition burger is a trend that crops up periodically in New York, like it did in 2014, to the reluctance of chefs who noted that burgers are simply not profit drivers, and that they would bring the potential of a $45 check down to $25. Today’s limited edition burgers are unlikely to do the same in terms of numbers. Even Pine Street Grill’s almost no-frills burger costs $26.

The phenomenon of the limited edition burger marks a uniquely 2025-era blend of a comforting, recession-indicator food (at the end of the day, it’s ground meat in a hunk of bread) with the scarcity principle frequently wielded by marketers and businesses. Limited editions trigger FOMO. Get one of these burgers and it’s like getting an Hermes Birkin bag, or the latest Supreme drop. They’re rare, you have to go through some sort of gauntlet to attain one, you feel lucky when you do.

Slicing into creamy, tender, white flesh and browned, crispy skin, you might not immediately think of a baked potato as an indulgence. But as 2025 ends, this is where we are.

Often thought of as pedestrian, baked potatoes have also proven themselves to be the perfect canvas for, well, anything. Baked potatoes — or jacket potatoes, if you want to be a bit British about it — are trending, relegated to a “side” no longer. The new baked potato is the star of the show.

The baked potato has only gained trend status fairly recently. We started off the year in what I personally dubbed the era of the latke. Every seafood bar had a latke piled with tuna tartare, bearing dollops of cream and caviar. You can’t throw a rock (or a potato) in Philly without hitting some sort of fancy shellfish or tartare perched delicately upon a potato latke. The trend was relentless nationwide and inescapable here, from My Loup’s pastrami beef tartare served on latkes to Middle Child Clubhouse’s okonomiyaki latkes and Little Water’s peekytoe crab balanced on “hash browns” … also known as latkes.

We have perhaps passed peak latke and moved onto another potato preparation. Baked-potato news has been populating my social media feeds, proffering both locally available spuds and unattainable ones.

There’s chef Ange Branca’s Mod Spuds, which puts a Malaysian-Philadelphian spin on English jacket potatoes. She offers toppings well beyond the usual spoonful of sour cream and scattering of shredded cheese — from a Philly cheesesteak loaded potato to one topped with Branca’s legendary beef rendang.

On TikTok, baked potatoes were buoyed by Nara Smith, who made a “jacket potato tutorial” for her 12.3 million followers. Her preparation of a baked potato, with narration in her husky, low voice while wearing couture, has spawned countless imitation videos. The U.K.-based business SpudBros has become a global brand with multiple locations, millions of followers, and food trucks thanks to viral success on TikTok.

Baked potatoes are also popping up on menus at restaurants and bars in ways one has never seen before, whether it’s Pietramala’s Japanese sweet potato with Buffalo sauce and cashew sour cream, or at the newly reopened Wine Dive (now on Sansom Street).

Wine Dive’s baked potato is an Idaho spud roughly the size of my Chihuahua, with crispy, deep brown skin and white flesh that emits plumes of steam when you slice into it through the mountain of sour cream, curls of cheddar, torn bits of bacon, and scallions.

This is not a vehicle for masterful tikka masalas or rendang. This is a thoroughly American baked potato. On Wednesdays, Wine Dive has bottomless, all-you-can-eat baked potatoes for $15.

It is as ridiculous as it sounds. Eat 10 baked potatoes and you get your photo on the wall and the promise of some very cool merch. No one has made it to 10. So far, the record has been seven potatoes.

It’s possible that the proliferation of baked potatoes is, like cabbage, a recession indicator. But like the latke, it may very well have fine-dining legs. Just let me know if you manage to eat 10 in one go.

Enormous effort is being exerted at Almanac, the dark cocktail bar tucked above Ogawa Sushi and Kappo in Old City. The diminutive bar’s shelves are lined with local amari and nocini, made of foraged botanicals steeping in alcohol.

They‘re fermenting their own chrysanthemum kombucha and riffs on amazake, a spirit made from fermenting rice with koji, or Aspergillus oryzae, Japan’s most famous mold, but which Almanac’s bartenders has applied to other ingredients like ube, sweet potatoes, and corn. It’s a great example of why Almanac is one of the bars pushing Philly’s cocktail scene to new heights.

Zero-waste cocktails are trending, whether that means bartenders are utilizing whole ingredients or “waste” generated by the kitchens their bars are attached to. Bartenders across the country are, like Almanac’s Rob Scott and Beau Quick, rethinking what has long been considered waste. Pickle brine, wagyu fat, and citrus rinds are being given chances to shine as cocktail ingredients in the nearby District of Columbia. And it’s likely only a matter of time, during Philadelphia’s cocktail renaissance, that more bartenders think of what other ingredients they can rescue and transform.

Almanac’s Ride on Shooting Star ($21), conceived by Quick, seems deceptively simple and far more straightforward than, say, the Sadotini, a cocktail that requires whisking ceremonial-grade matcha to order. The drink is listed on the menu as: reposado tequila, mugi shochu (distilled from barley), amontillado, corn cob, hojicha milk tea, spice tincture, and corn husk ash.

It’s a cocktail that I found utterly mesmerizing and unlike anything I’ve had before. It’s hauntingly lovely with a light sweetness evocative of peak summer corn. Its effervescence lingers with big, juicy bubbles. It’s also a tiny bit smoky, with a hit of corn curd ash. When diving into how Almanac renders it into existence, I was shocked to find it’s as smart as it is nuanced, perhaps a harbinger of a wider trend toward zero-waste cocktailing coming to Philly.

What’s not immediately visible from the list of its ingredients is that Ride on Shooting Star is an ode to corn, with elements coming from every part of a corn cob except its kernels. The kernels are used by Scott for one of his amazakes. Left with the cobs, Scott and Quick make a corn cob stock, turn it into a cordial with some sugar and “acidulation, which just means adding some citric and malic acids to it,” said Scott. To the cordial they add Arette Reposado tequila, Barbadillo Amontillado sherry, Watanabe Mannen Boshi Genshu mugi shochu, and then “make it into a milk punch. But the acid from the cordial can cause the milk to curdle.”

The process uses hojicha tea powder, ground as fine as matcha, and milk powder. “We combine the two ingredients, then rehydrate them to create a hojicha milk tea,” said Scott.

The mixture sits for a day to let its flavors develop while the milk tea powder causes it to curdle, then it is strained.

“We take the milk tea curds and dehydrate them. Once dry, we blend them with corn husk ash and salt and sprinkle it on top of the corn air as both those components are in the air to further reinforce that flavor and aromatic component,” said Scott.

Before service, “the corn cob cordial we make for the drink has corn husk ash, salt, methylcellulose, and xanthan gum added,” said Scott. “And then we use a fish tank aerator in the cordial, which then bubbles up like cool air.”

The result is a clear, gently yellow-hued cocktail, served in a Collins glass, with large bubbles that linger for an improbably long time and are dusted with corn curd ash, like furikake sitting upon rice kernels.

The cocktail uses several layers of ingredients that could have, at any point, been discarded. The primary ingredient, after all, is corn, whose first use was amazake. But its cob is given a second use. The curds rendered from the milk punch are given a third life.

“Last week, I went to Philadelphia, but it was closed,” is the sardonic line by comedian W.C. Fields that my husband, chef Ari Miller, has frequently referenced through the years. He has brought it up when sitting down with me for a 6 p.m. dinner (eating early is a habit I picked up sometime during the pandemic, when I left the restaurant industry), or designing his own menus. But most recently, used when debuting his own late-night menu at Post Haste, to even his own surprise.

New late-night menus have been proliferating again in Philly. (Also, let’s define “late” as after 10 p.m.)

What’s on these menus? There are burgers, fried chicken sandwiches, loaded fries, and hot dogs, but designed and dressed up by chefs using the same premium ingredients that go onto their dinner menus.

Upstairs from Ogawa’s elegant, brightly lit omakase counter, you can let down your hair and ascend into Almanac’s semi-anonymous dark. Come January, the cocktail bar will extend its surprisingly voluminous late-night menu, featuring yuzu and miso glazed wings, an ethereally crispy karaage chicken sandwich, Wagyu hot dog, and barbecued eel donabe, among other refined Japanese comfort foods, until 12:30 a.m.

“Almanac’s food menu is crafted using the same high-quality ingredients chef Carlos Wills sources for Ogawa’s omakase counter, reimagined with a fun, casual twist. Designed for grazing and sharing, the dishes are snack-sized—perfect for enjoying alongside a drink,” said owner Vy To.

Rittenhouse’s dancerobot, a collaboration between chefs Jesse Ito and Justin Bacharach, just debuted a late-night menu last week, served Fridays and Saturdays from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m., with hot dog-stuffed buns, and spicy fried chicken, and some quick-serve baos off the regular dinner menu.

The just-opened Pine Street Grill is serving its usually $22 burger for $20 between 9:30 and 10:30 p.m., paired with a 20-oz. beer.

At Messina Social Club, Eddie Konrad makes a roast pork sandwich ($12) that’s only available late night. It’s served on a Martin’s Big Marty seeded roll and served 10 p.m. until 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. Make it a Messina Happy Meal, where you get a shot, a can of Coors Banquet beer or wine, and the sandwich for $18.

The pork is dry-cured overnight with salt and brown sugar, roasted low between 275 and 300 degrees for six to eight hours, then pulled apart with tongs.

It’s then chopped up and “its drippings are emulsified with Italian seasoning, salt, pepper, and MSG,” said Konrad. “This mixture coats the pork, then we adjust the seasoning and top it with a tablespoon of chopped giardiniera, horseradish, and roasted garlic aioli.”

The assembly then takes eight minutes, a crucial number, according to Konrad. “It has to be turned out by the front-of-house staff, and it has to be perfect. They’re busy.”

There have always been a few late-night options, of course. But many in post-pandemic years have dwindled. Nationwide data by reservation platform OpenTable, compiled at the end of November, also reflect the continued growth of early dinner trends and the waning of eating out late.

When I polled chefs and other restaurant workers for where they went post-dinner shift, everyone inevitably named gas stations, restaurants in Chinatown that have since shuttered, and Taqueria La Prima (a fine option but proffered by five different stumped chefs).

Among the restaurant industry crowd, workers have long descended upon Fountain Porter for its excellent cheeseburger, which tastes like someone’s dad grilled it in the backyard, served until 2 a.m. Through closing and reopenings, Sonny’s Cocktail Joint, open until 1 a.m. or midnight, depending on the day of the week, also courts a post-dinner shift crowd, with cracker-thin pies and buffalo chicken dip.

So why the turn to late night? At Post Haste, anyway, it just makes sense.

“The bar is already open those hours, until midnight Wednesday through Saturday. It made sense to have food available while the bar is serving drinks. Last call for food is now 11:45 p.m.,” said Miller. Post Haste’s late-night menu is served Wednesday through Saturday, but its regular dinner menu is pay-as-you-can on Sunday, an option designed with “our industry colleagues in mind. Industry people work all days of the week.”

The accompanying late-night drink specials are bait for industry folks, fueled by Negronis and fernet.

“We wanted to have an option for people to get off their shifts at those hours to get some decent food as opposed to a short-order sandwich,” said Miller.

The late-night menu is simpler than their dinner menu, which features a long list of delicate, handwrought pastas. “It’s crafted so that one person in the kitchen can execute it. We took the fussy dishes off.” It may be 11 p.m., but hey W.C. Fields, Philadelphia is still open.