How to Spend a Perfect 72 Hours Eating Your Way Through Philadelphia

With its patterned tiles, ambient lighting and market shelves lined in cookbooks, spices and ceramics, Suraya’s dining room invites you to sit down. But keep walking toward the back of this sprawling Lebanese restaurant, where a surprise garden waits beyond the wall. Lots of Philly restaurants have little backyards, but not like Suraya’s oasis, where your lunch of za’atar-and-cheese man’oushe and pine-hut hummus unfolds in the company of a burbling fountain, potted olive trees, and a copse of Persian ironwoods. Don’t miss the pistachio rose cruller for dessert.

Greg Vernick is one of Philly’s most considerate, conscientious chefs. While others blitz with new openings, Vernick takes his time, leaving eight years between his last spot and his latest, Emilia, in Fishtown-adjacent East Kensington. Under the direction of his longtime chef de cuisine, Meredith Medoway, the kitchen puts out fried artichokes, porchetta ribs with rhubarb mostarda and poetic pasta like squid ink-darkened tagliolini with clams and rigatoni in white ragù. It’s flavorful, no-BS, confident cooking — not unlike Philly itself.