Each year, we honor the trailblazers in Philadelphia’s local food scene with our Local Hero awards. A group of Edible Philly readers, contributors and past Local Hero award winners put forward nominees, and our editorial team chose 2020’s honorees. The tastemakers profiled in the following pages make our local food community more vibrant every year.
CHEF
Anthony Andiario
CHEF ANTHONY ANDIARIO has always been into pasta. Some of his earliest memories involve making simple fresh pasta for special occasions with his family in northeastern Pennsylvania. After graduating from Penn State, he went to culinary school in Arizona and worked his way up in some of the state’s top kitchens.
During a 15-year stint in Italy, Andiario dove deep into the world of pasta- making and local sourcing. He taught himself to make handmade pasta through practice, research, and repetition, going on to run the pasta programs for Quiessence and the nationally renowned Pizzeria Bianco. “Pasta became an obsession for me,” Andiario says.
He had to fashion some of his own tools—such as dowels and a custom cavarola board (carved by his brother, a carpenter) to create texture on “dragged pasta” like orecchiette—and track down others in Italy, like a corzetti stamp used to emboss pasta. “I did a lot of crazy things,” Andiario says. “I’d buy a box of campanelle [typically extruded, not handmade] and just study it. I’d cook it until I could unravel it and see what the initial shape was, and then I’d replicate that [by hand].”
In 2018 he opened his eponymous 38-seat restaurant in West Chester, which quickly became a dining destination and earned critical praise. Using nearly all local products, Andiario butchers his own meat; sources Pennsylvania produce and freshly milled flour; preserves, jars and dries foodstuffs in house; and even forages for local ingredients.
“A lot of restaurants claim that they’re farm-to-table or that they work with local product whenever possible—we take the stance that it’s always possible,” he says.
ANDIARIO
106 W. Gay St., West Chester
andiario.com
NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION
Share Food Program
WITH A REACH of 700,000 people monthly, Share Food Program is the Philadelphia region’s largest hunger relief organization. This nonprofit started as a co-op food buying program in 1986, “long before the idea of food deserts,” according to executive director George Matysik. In the last three decades, Share has grown by leaps and bounds.
Today, the organization distributes 35 million pounds of nutritious food annually through a longstanding network of food pantries in Philadelphia and the suburbs. “If a pantry is handing out food, chances are it’s coming from Share Food Program,” Matysik says. Share’s 500 pantries offer free, nutritious food and staples, such as fruits, vegetables, rice, frozen fish, chicken, milk and bottled water.
Share also distributes school lunch products for 795 schools in the region (reaching 305,000 kids), sells food at wholesale prices through farm stands at more than 50 public schools and provides immediate food assistance to anyone who walks through the door at its Nicetown headquarters.
How does Share make all this happen for a city where one in five residents struggles with hunger? “With a staff of just 25 people,” Matysik says, “[and] an amazing network of 10,000 volunteers [who] are essential to daily operations.” Since none of Share’s programs generate revenue for the organization, charitable contributions are also crucial to sustaining its work.
Those experiencing hunger or wishing to volunteer or make a donation should call Share or visit its website.
SHARE FOOD PROGRAM
2901 W. Hunting Park Ave., Philadelphia
sharefoodprogram.org
GROCERY STORE
V Marks The Shop
WHEN PHILLY’S ONLY ALL-VEGAN grocery store opened in late 2018, it became a go-to shopping destination for vegans and omnivores alike. For years, partners Carmella Lanni and Carlo Giardina ran a food blog (the Food Duo) together and then flirted with veganism. “One New Year’s Eve, we decided to try being vegan and figured we would try it for a week,” Giardina says. “A week turned into 10 years!” The Food Duo became an all-vegan blog, and the couple started selling groceries at vegan pop-ups in their then-home of New York City and also in Philadelphia.
Lanni and Giardina liked Philly so much that they moved here and scouted a 1,100-square-foot retail space that eventually became V Marks the Shop. Today, the South Philly store sells hundreds of vegan products.
V Marks the Shop’s best sellers are cheese, jerky and chocolate. It also sells Blackbird frozen pizza, scrapple, cookies, macarons (made with aquafaba, the leftover water from cooking chickpeas), burgers, Philly Tempeh, macaroni and “cheese,” lasagna, soy curls, Italian “cold cuts,” local kombucha and matzo ball soup from Miss Rachel’s Pantry. All of it is vegan and some satisfies other food needs, such as gluten-free and soy-free. “More than half of our customers are not vegan,” Giardina says.
According to Giardina, there are only about 25 stores like this in the country. He prides himself on selling items that people can’t find elsewhere. V Marks the Shop still holds pop-up events, many of which feature makers from underrepresented groups, including women, LGBTQ people and people of color.
V MARKS THE SHOP
1515 McKean St., Philadelphia
vmarkstheshop.com
FARM
Sunny Harvest Collective
A DECADE AGO, five Lancaster-based Amish farmers decided to band together to sell their crops through a CSA in an effort to pool resources and create efficiencies. Sunny Harvest grew quickly through word of mouth, and today, the growers collective is a wholesale-only business that includes 27 farms.
Sunny Harvest’s signature crops are broccoli and cauliflower, but it also grows a wide variety of other produce, including asparagus, zucchini, radishes, tomatoes, strawberries, cabbage, kale, red raspberries, blackberries, bell peppers, hot peppers, basil, Brussels sprouts, onions, sweet corn, watermelons, cantaloupes, green beans, lettuces, cucumbers, decorative gourds, pumpkins, summer squash, winter squash and flowers.
Philadelphia is the beneficiary of much of the collective’s fruits and vegetables. Sunny Harvest is a key farming partner of Philly Food Works, and locals can also find their products at Wegmans, Weavers Way Co-op, Riverwards Produce, the Swarthmore CO-OP, the Common Market and in meals at fast casual restaurants Sweetgreen and Dig (two of their biggest clients).
It’s a win-win: The collective has resulted in not only affordable, fresh food coming to the Philly area three days a week, but also in the opening of new farms and employment for dozens of Lancaster-area residents.
“At the end of the day, this is really what we want to be doing, because you’re living on the farm with a full-time job,” says John Glick of Tenderleaf Meadows, who lives on his farm with his wife and eight children. “The farmers all seem pretty content with how it’s gone.”
Find SUNNY HARVEST produce at PhillyFoodWorks.com
BEVERAGE ARTISAN
Danny Childs of Farm & Fisherman
COULD A HIGH-VOLUME restaurant in the suburbs have one of the best bar programs in the Philly area? With Farm & Fisherman bar manager Danny Childs’ approach to beverages, the answer is a resounding yes.
Over the last five years, this barman with an ethnobotanical research background went beyond the usual local beers, natural wine and creative cocktails. Childs ferments syrups and vinegar for shrubs and mixers. He even brews kombucha in house. He also crafts his own bitter herbal liqueurs (amaro), preserves fresh ingredients and forages for edible garnishes.
“Our drinks tell the story of this region,” Childs says. He uses local sassafras to make old-fashioned root beer, ramps for cocktail onions, paw paws in a popular pisco sour and cranberries from abandoned Pine Barrens bogs in a gin drink made with homemade pine, juniper, cedar and birch bark amaro. His cocktail cherries? A local family lets him pick them from their tree.
This bar isn’t just about booze: “We have [housemade] sodas, a seasonal shrub soda, a kombucha or two and a non-alcoholic cocktail,” Childs says. His most popular zero-proof drink riffs on the scotch-based Penicillin cocktail, but instead employs a Chinese smoked black tea to create a complex drink.
The menu changes frequently based on what’s available, including elderflower, hardy oranges, honeysuckle, crab apples and staghorn sumac berries from a garden behind the restaurant. “I love to tell people what our region offers by giving them something really delicious,” Childs says.
THE FARM AND FISHERMAN TAVERN
1442 Marlton Pike E., Cherry Hill, NJ
and 575 Horsham Rd., Horsham, PA
fandftavern.com
FOOD ARTISAN
Pasta Lab
HAVING WORKED IN CATERING for more than a decade, Chris Wright and Gina Rubinetti are into food. The couple has always shared their passion by cooking for friends, but recently they decided to take things a step further.
They bought a grain mill and started baking sourdough and making pasta from flour they milled at home. “Grain started taking over our apartment,” Wright recalls. “We hadn’t really tasted pasta made with freshly milled flour before, and it was eye opening.”
In 2018 they launched the Pasta Lab, and they now sell a couple hundred pounds of fresh pasta each week at farmers’ markets (including Headhouse and Clark Park). Using freshly milled flour from Small Valley Milling in Halifax, Pa., Rubinetti and Wright create handformed pasta (such as garganelli, lasagna and tagliatelle), extruded pasta (including rigatoni and bucatini) and filled pasta (like ravioli, the customer favorite, stuffed with rotating fillings). Rubinetti and Wright recommend boiling their pasta for just 2 to 4 minutes in heavily salted water and finishing it with a light sauce in a skillet.
Why is freshly milled flour so important? “Most grain is processed in a way that the most delicious and nutritious parts (wheat germ and bran) are stripped away to make it shelf stable,” Wright says. “Ours has an amazing aroma, color and flavor.”
The Pasta Lab’s grain is milled just a few days before each farmers’ market, resulting in “a flavor that’s surprisingly sweet and a little nutty with a pleasant bitterness from the bran,” according to Wright. “It’s more robust than plain white flour [pasta].”
Next up: “Wholesale to specialty retailers in Philadelphia to make it more widely available.”
PASTA LAB
thepastalab.com
