2 PA Eateries Among Best New Restaurants In America, New Ranking Says

PHILADELPHIA — Two Philadelphia restaurants have made Esquire’s exclusive 2024 list of the Best New Restaurants in America, which was released Tuesday.

The list of 35 restaurants includes eateries that punch above their price point, are romantic enough for date night, or just a great place for a boozy, delicious night out with friends, Esquire said.

First up is Amy's Pastellios.

Located at 2001 Memphis St. in Fishtown, Amy's is run by Amaryllis Rivera.

"The pastelillos in question are half-moons of crinkly fried dough," Esquire writes about the shop. "They might come stuffed with succulent stewed pork in a homemade guava barbecue sauce, or a flawless picadillo, or a shredded chicken stew whose moistness threatens to seep through the achiote-laced dough. (Every now and then there’s a cheesesteak pastelillo—this is, after all, Philly.)"

And then there is Bastia, also in Fishtown a short walk from Amy's.

Bastia, located in the former Penn Asylum for Indigent Widows and Single Women and now Bel & Ana hotel (1401 E Susquehanna Ave.), focuses on Mediterranean cuisine with a bent toward the Corsica region.

"It was an opportunity to do French and Italian simultaneously through a new lens," Chef Tyler Akin told Patch in September.

"The single best bite I’ve had this year was a fried squash blossom, stuffed with ricotta, spiced with Corsiscan herbes de maquis on a tranche of toast topped with uni butter which ran down my chin and onto my jeans," one Esquire writer said of Bastia. "Akin has turned to the weird island of Corsica (and its cousin, Sardinia) to craft an actually surprising Mediterranean menu. Chunks of neon green melon, compressed with verjus, are tossed with Perrystead Dairy’s Intergalactic, a soft local cheese, and a silky coppa from Siena."

California and New York each had eight mentions on the list, including the “Restaurant of the Year,” Four Kings in San Francisco, and the “Comeback of the Year,” Le Veau d’Or in New York City.

Other states with restaurants on the list include Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas, with two each, and Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Washington and the District of Columbia, with one each.