Meetinghouse

Meetinghouse looks like every other corner bar in the neighborhood, and that's the point. Guinness on tap, regulars working through their week over fries, a room built for nothing more ambitious than a good night out. Then the food arrives and the math stops making sense.

The turkey club and the roast beef on a kaiser roll are serious sandwiches, the kind that belong in conversations about the city's best rather than the best bar food. A baby gem salad shows up built with more care than the room around it suggests it should be. None of it reads as a chef trying to prove something. It reads as someone who refuses to serve a lazy plate just because the crowd came for the Long Island Iced Teas.

That gap between setting and execution is the whole case. Philadelphia Magazine has taken notice locally, and the food carried the place onto the New York Times' national restaurant list and Bon Appétit's Best New Restaurants list — recognition earned by a bar that could have coasted on drinks alone and chose not to. Go for the atmosphere. Stay because the kitchen never got the memo that it didn't have to try this hard.