![]() You have to pay separately for food and for drinks at the bar, where the full menu is available and where you may find yourself sitting since Murph’s rear dining room, where you pay for everything on one check, is about the size of a freight elevator.įour: If you’re set on one of the dining room’s 18 seats and you haven’t made a reservation - only taken for parties of six or more - you probably won’t have to wait three hours, only maybe two. Bellastelli cooks regular hours, every night but Tuesday, in something of an unorthodox arrangement: The chef rents the kitchen from the bar and keeps all the money from food sales. Three: Dinner at Murph’s is not a pop-up. Two: The chef, Francesco Bellastelli, is indeed Italian, from Taranto, a naval town on the heel of the boot in Puglia. One: Murph’s is indeed a bar and it is located on Girard Avenue, a couple blocks east of the Frankford intersection. ![]() Scraps of slippery gossip or breathless recounts would float in and out of my restaurant consciousness like jellyfish: “I heard you have to wait three hours for a table…” “It’s a secret pop-up in the back of a bar…” “The chef is straight from Italy…”īut it wasn’t until my brother-in-law moved to Fishtown and ate there that the macaroni mystery came fully underdone, and I found myself on a most circuitous route to reviewing truffled tagliolini at an Irish pub called Murph’s.īlack truffle is shaved tableside over tagliolini at Murph’s I subsequently forgot about the encounter, but murmurs of the best Italian restaurant in Fishtown wouldn’t leave me alone. She skulked away to continue her spaghetti quest. Flummoxed, I had no clue what she talking about. This restaurant was on Girard, she insisted. Was she thinking of Kensington Quarters, which has some lovely pastas on its menu? Or maybe Eatalia, the BYOB farther afield in the shadow of I-95? No. She approached me on Girard Avenue: Could I help her find an Italian restaurant she’d heard about nearby?įrom the El to the river, I flicked through my mental map: Pho, cheeseburgers, chicken korma… Nope, I told her, no Italian unless she counted Pizzeria Beddia. The rumor began with a Fishtown stranger. ![]()
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