Not your nonna’s meatballs: Three tasting menu splurges redefining Italian dining in Philly, at a price

“So, you’re coming to dinner this week with chef Michael,” said a woman on the phone, “and we’d like to dig deep into some food memories.”

This was a first for me. A “concierge” was calling from Salvatore’s Counter — the modern Sicilian tasting menu experience inside Irwin’s at the Bok building, where chef Michael Vincent Ferreri prepares a dozen courses for just four people each Sunday. Aside from the usual questions about allergies, she wanted to know some of our dearest food memories, to inspire a dish at our forthcoming meal.

Italian food memories? I’ve got plenty, from trips to Italy to decades of pasta adventures across Philadelphia, a town with some of the deepest Italian food roots in America. You can still savor a classic supper of meatballs and veal Parm at a mid-century time capsule like Villa di Roma, or the legendary spaghetti and crabs at century-old Palizzi Social Club. Or you can indulge in the high art of noodle craft at Vetri Cucina, the Spruce Street townhouse where Marc Vetri fostered a generation of talented chefs and reset the landscape 25 years ago with casoncelli and ethereal spinach gnocchi that turned to Bergamo for inspiration, rather than South Philly’s red gravy. That focus on Italian regionalism, rather than Italian American nostalgia, continued to bloom through restaurants built around tributes to Abruzzo (Le Virtù), Rome (L’Anima), and Sicily (Zeppoli).(Still worth it? Stay tuned for a coming review about my recent Vetri meal, where the seasonal Forchetta menu goes for $215, plus wine.)

There are pricier experiences now in this moment of dramatic menu inflation, like the $300 omakase seats at Royal Sushi (not counting tip, tax, or sake). But there’s an ambitious new generation of chefs pushing the Italian-themed tasting genre forward in some very personal directions, a couple of whom emerged from the extended Vetri orbit. That includes Ferreri, who trained under Vetri acolytes at Zeppoli and Zahav, and whose 10-course food and drink menus at Salvatore’s costs $300 (including $120 for wine pairings, plus tip and tax). Chris D’Ambro, whose first eye-opening kitchen job 20 years ago was peeling artichokes and chopping parsley as a Vetri apprentice (”there was not even, like, basil in the kitchen!”), is also charging about $300 per person for the food and wine of the nine-course dinner party-style tastings he’s hosting at Ambra in Queen Village (and payment is required in cash). The $150 six-course food menu at James Nardone’s year-old Elma in Fishtown almost feels like a relative bargain with its BYOB perk until you realize, as we did the hard way, that this upstart’s minimalist new space has occasional drawbacks.

Their approaches vary, but each is in some way a hybrid of the earlier movements, melding a fluency in regional styles with sly winks to Italian American nostalgia, an embrace of local sourcing, and a license to get creative with luxury ingredients. All that caviar, tartare, toro, and truffles are there to justify the prices but also, perhaps, show confidence that preexisting boundaries can be pushed in this dining scene’s robust rebound. Each one is devilishly hard to book, proving Philly hungers for a next-level Italian splurge.

A great tasting menu should be more than the sum of its plates, with a vision that offers a culinary narrative coherent enough that one dish cannot necessarily make or break the spell. Of course, tasting menus aren’t for everyone. Not only can they be long and expensive, but diners relinquish control of what’s for dinner; unadventurous eaters need not apply. But for many, the element of surprise is part of the fun. These three are listed in order of their success in delivering that immersive thrill.

There are few sunset dinner views finer than the one from Salvatore’s Counter. Not only does South Philly look poetic at dusk from the eighth floor terrace of Irwin’s at the Bok building, but the four counter seats set aside near the kitchen for a unique 10-course tasting each Sunday are now among the most precious reservations one can land.

There’s a special energy to a restaurant inside a restaurant. A lively crowd of 100-plus diners pulses through the converted high school classroom that is Irwin’s, devouring their à la carte roast chickens, fennel salads, and spaghetti alle vongole with Sicilian wines. But behind the counter, along the room’s eastern wall of windows, there is a sense of calm as chef-owner Michael Vincent Ferreri remains purposefully focused on us — grilling huge scallops inside their shells with black trumpet butter over smoking fennel fronds, gilding eggplant coins with schmaltzy agrodolce and shavings of frozen foie gras, and telling stories while he primps rarely seen microgreens into an exquisite salad.

At Salvatore’s, named for Ferreri’s late father — whose chef’s coat hangs on the wall overhead — he crafts bespoke menus each Sunday around special ingredients and conversations with guests for a dozen or so courses using his grandmother’s antique silver set and plates, each dish matched with spot-on beverage pairings by Michael Lancaster. And Ferreri didn’t miss a beat, focusing on no more than a couple of good ideas per plate, then rendering them through a contemporary lens framed by the distinctive ingredients, pasta styles, and street food traditions of Sicily. We began with caviar — almost obligatory on today’s tasting menus — but Ferreri’s golden ossetra came atop a tangy cloud of hard-to-find imported sheep’s milk ricotta. (An alternate vegetarian topping of toasted Sicilian pistachios glazed with honey, olive oil, and black pepper was magnetic in its own right.) With a sip of white Negroni infused with toasted almonds, we were off to a dreamy start.

Ferreri remains Philly’s salad savant with “Signs of Spring,” a delicate montage of the earliest green shoots from Green Meadow Farm — pea-flavored chickweed, tender mâche, claytonia (arugula’s soft-spoken cousin) — tangled with crunchy pickled crosnes in a vinaigrette made from an Italian herbal liqueur, then ingeniously topped with white chocolate shaved like Parmesan. Beef tartare minced with grilled leeks took a remarkable turn over a sweet-tart eggplant puree of the Ferreri family’s caponata made famous at Irwin’s (and Res Ipsa before that). Perfect tortellini stuffed with wild boar and foie gras basked in a deep amber consommé redolent of fennel and orange. Glasses of dry German scheurebe, powerful Greek goumenissa, the cult favorite of Frank Cornelissen’s susucaro rosato, and an Occidental pinot noir buoyed every bite.

Ferreri’s parlor trick of interpreting some diners’ memories for a course paid off, too, both in the suspense of anticipation and the satisfaction of seeing glimmers of our own histories reimagined by the chef with creativity and grace. Suppli croquettes (a pasta version of arancini) came filled with bucatini and lemony roast chicken in béchamel as a nod to one guest’s nostalgia for chicken nuggets and mac and cheese, paired with opulent Champagne Dehours Grande Reserve. My own memory of Palermo’s swordfish street vendors appeared as a rustic seafood pasta, with hand-rolled pasta straws called fileja topped with diced pesce spada in a citrusy garlic oil that blushed with a spice box of North African aromatics.

Ferreri’s masterpiece, though, was the meaty tail of a four-pound red snapper. It was salt-cured with cloves, smoked like ham, then pan-roasted to a crisp with rendered guanciale. Served atop sauteed broccoli spigarello that had been deglazed with Marsala wine, it was the meatiest fish I’ve ever eaten.

There were so many other bites I still relish, from the shavings of an aged Spanish cow’s milk cheese over buttered cinnamon toast to the panna cotta infused with amaro and Sicilian herbs glazed in moscatel caramel. Ferreri bid us all farewell with gifts for the next day, too, a sugary brioche bun and a tiny flask of a house artichoke-infused digestivo I’m still sipping.

It was an extraordinarily intimate and personal meal. I can only hope now that Ferreri figures out how to make it accessible to more than four people a week.

Salvatore’s Counter, Irwin’s, Bok building, 800 Mifflin St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19148, 215-693-6206; irwinsupstairs.com. The 10- to 12-course tasting menu costs $180, with optional $120 beverage pairing, plus tip and tax.

Ambra is an all-in commitment for a gastronomic adventure that winds through a three-and-a-half hour saga of inventive plates and fascinating wines. But it comes with a few caveats: The kitchen won’t accommodate most dietary restrictions, communal dining is the rule, and you’re also expected to pony up with cash, which, depending upon whether you sit at the kitchen counter or at the large table in the dining room, runs $280 or $300 per person, all inclusive, not counting the advance reservation fees.

Why cash only? Chef Chris D’Ambro declined to explain on the record, despite the fact that people pay with credit nightly at Southwark, the neighboring restaurant and bar whose kitchen Ambra shares, which D’Ambro co-owns with his wife, Marina de Oliveira. The mind can wander to all sorts of explanations. Such weirdness is part of the reason I’ve avoided revisiting Ambra since its post-pandemic reemergence as a longer, more ambitious tasting. But D’Ambro is an undeniably talented chef who’s garnered some national notice, so it was time for a revisit.

The six other diners at my table — always a wild card — turned out to be swell company, including a diplomat and her husband, a U.S. Mint employee, who’d traveled from D.C. for a Philly food weekend. And Ambra did not disappoint with its warm dinner party hospitality, welcoming us into the intimate, exposed-brick-and-wood-plank dining room with a citrusy cocktail of Bonal and Byrrh to accompany some playful hors d’oeuvres: crisp arancini with pheasant ragù; warm gougères bursting with cacio e pepe cream; miniature Italian hoagies stuffed with house-cured culatello and bresaola.

The intricacy of those inventive small bites would be multiplied exponentially in the seven courses to follow, each one paired with a notable beverage. Wine director Jamie Harrison Rubin’s extensive drink introductions were perhaps a bit long-winded considering how many there were, but the pairings were superb, especially a ripe Turley cinsault from the Bechthold Vineyard for the kale ravioli stuffed with silky cannelini beans (”pasta e fagioli”) topped with mangalitsa sausage that was one of Ambra’s most memorable dishes.

D’Ambro’s appearances to introduce his plates were more brief, although so much was going on within each colorful composition — occasionally to their disadvantage — some extra annotation might be useful. What I recall most from his finest creations is often a sensory detail other than flavor, like the jade iridescence of an acqua pazza sauce infused with toasted orange leaves and tarragon, poured tableside between the black bass crudo, pickled turnips, and caviar. Or the applewood smoke that wafted up through a perforated crock holding local Briny Piney oysters baked into a Rockefeller with spigarello, so flavorful it overshadowed the course’s second part, a subtle sourdough spaghetti with poached oysters.

Some dishes were too labored for their own good, like the potato-wrapped swordfish roulade over lentils studded with swordfish bacon (cured in swordfish ‘nduja), whose swordfish essence was lost inside a deep cloud of creamy celery root foam. A Blue Moon Acres risotto with chestnut-duck ragù was too good to be just a couple spoonfuls of rice (despite the truffles shaved overtop), my tablemates agreed. But it was also shown up by the risotto bowl’s garnish, a dollhouse-size mini-panino with duck mortadella and Red Cat cheese I now crave as a grown-up sandwich.

These aren’t matters of quality so much as editing a wealth of appealing ideas into a clear and focused vision. More is rarely better. But D’Ambro and his somm put it all together — rigorous technique, aesthetic beauty, and balanced flavors — in the two final courses. A gorgeous loin of Texas red deer paired with a checkerboard terrine of black trumpet mushrooms and orange sweet potato, a crimson dot of smoked cranberry and an intense jus of venison and morels for a game course that harmonized with an Umbrian sagrantino from Paolo Bea. A nutty solera from Espodol lent a fortified wine boost to a stunning citrus tart striped with pistachio beside a frozen pink cube of Campari gelato and a semicircle of toasted meringue kisses.

It was my favorite dessert of the year so far, and found us lingering even longer than our allotted time, exchanging numbers with new dining companions and, oh yes, digging deep into my pockets for a fistful of Benjamins. It wasn’t a perfect meal, by a long shot. But I really enjoyed it. And for those with the time, resources, and appetites to try new things, Ambra’s tasting is a worthy meal to experience, at least once.

Ambra, 705 S. Fourth St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19147, 267-858-9232; ambraphilly.com; The seven- to nine-course food menu with wine pairings, tip and tax included, costs $280 in cash for a dining room seat (plus a $25 advance reservation fee) or $300 (plus a $50 advance reservation fee) at the chef’s counter. The menu without drink pairings costs $220.

Philadelphians have a long history of appreciating wildly ambitious cooking in the bare-bones setting of a tiny BYOB. And Elma, which chef James Nardone opened a year ago in Fishtown, is one of the latest hot prospects. The Suraya alum, who’d also built an audience for pasta pop-ups, had converted a former SliCE pizza shop into the simplest of stages, his open kitchen facing a cozy dining space with linen-draped tables to seat 12 and a scripted pink neon “elma” sign in the window illuminating the room’s lightly decorated exposed brick and white walls.

The seasonally changing six-course menu is the draw. And the beef tartare was a nice starter, albeit standard for the tasting menu circuit. The buttery coin of brioche toast topped with minced filet channeled surf and turf luxury with a layer of caviar whose saline beads bathed the raw prime beef like a gentle ossetra wave. Fresh-grated horseradish and pecorino aoili piqued with pepperoncini vinegar brought a little zing, the kind of subtle Italian references that recur often and distinguish Nardone’s cooking at Elma.

But it was the latke — a crisp bar of hand-shredded potatoes bound with Boursin, draped with orange plumes of uni over a puddle of molten cheese — that made me officially glad I’d returned to Elma for another visit. A fiery mince of pickled long hots tucked sneakily between that cool urchin and hot potato cake was the unexpected Italian deli spark that made this latke sing.

My previous dinner at Elma had been a scorcher in the wrong ways — a sweltering July night that coincided with a broken air conditioner, exacerbated by a mechanical failure that pumped hot air from the open kitchen back into the dining room. We were drenched in sweat as we slogged through an unseasonably heavy series of dishes: pork rillettes; fennel sausage ragù; braised beef. I was miffed Nardone had neither warned that night’s diners in advance nor discounted the experience for those who endured it for $150.

“I was just crossing my fingers that maybe it would rain or a breeze would come through,” Nardone, now with fully repaired HVAC, said recently. He had struggled early on to find the right format for his business. Weekend brunch service built around doughnuts and fresh cutlet sandwiches, which I enjoyed, was a short-lived financial mistake.

Focusing solely on the dinners with two seatings a night turns out to be the optimal format for such a small room. And six months later, Nardone’s kitchen was humming in sync with a meal that showed a distinctively delicious point of view. You will not see the homey tripe with polenta cakes, meatballs, or cod stew he grew up with in the South Jersey kitchen of his Abruzzo-born nonna, Elma Nardone, for whom the restaurant is named. A global pantry of ingredients and current techniques inform the culinary vision of this former punk rock guitarist, who coolly delivers plates from the kitchen himself in his scruffy beard and trademark black ball cap.

But there’s always a thread that ties it back to Italy, like the tagliolini pasta glossed in koji butter and topped with marbled pink tiles of toro sashimi garnished with shaved bottarga (and more caviar, of course). Or his Calabrese twist on shrimp and grits, nestling head-on prawns over coarse-ground local Castle Valley Mill polenta and a crunchy giardiniera of pickled micro-cauliflower in a gravy spiced with ‘nduja, stock, and shrimp. A classic pairing of clams and pork hit a trendy stride with Ibérico pork, cooked rare beneath a tumble of Manila clams moistened with brothy gigante beans.

By the end, Nardone’s crew had delivered dishes that were both focused and memorable, easing up only when it came to dessert, a semolina cake with sour cherry sauce, white chocolate pearls, and a pouf of orange cream that was solid, but ultimately unexciting. The dessert stumble is typical of so many tiny Philly startups without the resources to hire a pastry specialist. Of course, at this price, you should expect something stellar from start to finish. It’s a sign Elma is still working through some growing pains that would be less of an issue if its menu was one or two courses shorter and less of an elite financial commitment. But I also appreciate the real progress I’ve seen here: Elma is heading in the right direction.

Elma, 431 E. Girard Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 19125, elmaphilly.com. The six-course menu costs $150, including a $25 reservation fee, plus tip and tax.

Having gone on a journey through these three ambitious places, I’m struck by how far Italian cuisine has evolved in Philadelphia over the past quarter-century. Do you need to spend $300 for a fantastic Italian meal? Absolutely not. We have stellar options in a wide range of styles and price points. But these immersive dinner experiences show that cooking Italian in Philadelphia has also become more than just a set playbook of standard dishes, rather, a vibrant point of view with which to approach ingredients with craft and creativity, to relate deeply personal stories, explore notions of regional origin, and where a keen awareness of local traditions can also help connect past and present. Few genres speak with such resonance to a broad audience in the Mid-Atlantic region. And as this next generation steps up to make it their own, Philly’s Italian tradition keeps evolving.