Amy's Pastelillos

Fishtown's Corner of the Island

Memphis Street in Fishtown runs through one of Philadelphia's most densely eating-and-drinking neighbourhoods, a stretch where the city's appetite for independent, chef-driven cooking has produced a concentration of serious restaurants per block that rivals much larger American cities. It is the kind of street where a small operation with a focused menu can develop genuine local traction before anyone outside the ZIP code pays attention. Amy's Pastelillos followed that arc, building a following in Fishtown before Esquire named it among the stronger new restaurants in the United States for 2024.

Puerto Rican cooking occupies a particular position in Philadelphia's food history. The city has one of the largest Puerto Rican communities on the East Coast, concentrated historically in neighbourhoods like Fairhill and Hunting Park, and that community has kept cooking traditions alive in ways that outsiders rarely document. The current moment in American dining has brought Caribbean and Latin American cooking into the editorial conversation, but the leading versions of that recognition tend to land on places that were never chasing it. Amy's Pastelillos reads as that kind of place: the Esquire nod arrived because the food was already there, not the other way around.

The Pastelillo in Context

The pastelillo, sometimes called an empanadilla in Puerto Rico, depending on who's making it and where on the island their family is from, is a fried or baked pastry with a short, flaky crust and a filled centre. The form is deceptively simple, which is why execution separates the versions that are worth travelling for from the versions that are merely available. Dough texture, filling ratio, and the quality of fat used in frying are the variables that matter; there is nowhere to hide in a format this direct. Philadelphia has had Puerto Rican restaurants across its history, but a focused operation built around the pastelillo as its primary vehicle is a more specific proposition than a general Caribbean menu, and that specificity is part of what drew national attention.

For comparison, South Philly Barbacoa on Washington Avenue built its reputation around a similarly focused proposition, one dish, done with precision, drawing from a deep regional tradition. The model works when the kitchen has command of the form. Amy's Pastelillos operates in that same register, where the editorial case for the food rests on the quality of a single format rather than breadth of menu.

Where It Sits in the Philadelphia Scene

Philadelphia's restaurant community in 2024 showed a clear pattern: the places receiving national recognition were not clustering exclusively around tasting-menu fine dining. Fork and Friday Saturday Sunday represent the city's more polished New American tier, and My Loup carries the French-inspired fine dining flag. But the city's more interesting critical story in recent years has been the recognition landing on places outside that formal tier, operations like Mawn, which brought Cambodian cooking into the national conversation, and Amy's Pastelillos, which did the same for Puerto Rican pastry.

This reflects a broader shift in how Esquire, Eater, and similar publications have approached best-new-restaurant coverage: away from format-first fine dining and toward places where the cooking has cultural specificity and technical confidence, regardless of price point or room size. two signals that matter more than a single good press visit.

For context on what Esquire's best-new-restaurants list signals within the industry: it tends to track places where critics sense the cooking is doing something the market hasn't caught up with yet. The same list over recent years has recognized restaurants that went on to build the kind of multi-year reputations that appear on longer award cycles. That doesn't guarantee trajectory, but it is a substantive credential. In a city where the restaurant scene has been building steadily across cuisines and price points, landing at number 27 nationally in that framework is a data point worth noting.

The Neighbourhood Logic

Fishtown's dining identity has shifted considerably over the past decade. It was industrial, then it became bar-heavy, and then a wave of serious independent restaurants moved in along the corridors connecting it to Northern Liberties and Kensington. The neighbourhood now has enough density that a focused small operation can survive on repeat local traffic while also drawing visitors who are moving between spots on the same street. For a pastelillo shop, that foot traffic pattern matters: these are foods that work as a quick stop as much as a sit-down meal, and a neighbourhood with high pedestrian dining activity is a more hospitable environment than a destination-only location would be.

Memphis Street specifically sits at the edge of what locals know as the core of Fishtown's food strip, close enough to the concentration to benefit from it, far enough to have its own identity rather than feeling like one of many options competing on the same block. That positioning, adjacent but distinct, tends to suit focused, independent operations better than being dropped directly into the highest-traffic part of a dining corridor.

Planning a Visit

The restaurant is located at 2001 Memphis St, Philadelphia, PA 19125. The address places it in Fishtown, which is accessible from Center City by rideshare in under fifteen minutes or via the Market-Frankford Line with a short walk. If you are building a Philadelphia itinerary around the city's independent restaurant scene,

Visitors coming to Philadelphia specifically for its food scene will find the restaurant sits in a peer group with South Philly Barbacoa as one of the city's most discussed focused-format independent operations. For those planning wider American food travel, the Puerto Rican format connects thematically to Sol Food in San Rafael, which built a comparable following around Caribbean cooking on the West Coast. The more formal tier of American dining is well covered by Philadelphia's own fine-dining roster and by out-of-city references including Le Bernardin in New York, Alinea in Chicago, Lazy Bear in San Francisco, Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg, The French Laundry in Napa, Atomix in New York City, and Emeril's in New Orleans, but the case for the restaurant rests on different terms entirely, and that is the point.