Amis
412 South 13th Street
Philadelphia, PA
19147
I had been dying to go to Amis for quite some time. Last
year for my birthday my aunt had given me a gift card to dine there. I decided
to use it to take my girlfriend out to dinner for her birthday, so we headed up
there at the end of October. When we walked in, I noticed that they were
filming some TV show in the front of the restaurant. I looked for Marc Vetri,
hoping to catch a glimpse of him, but he wasn’t there and I didn’t recognize
anyone they were filming, so we pressed on and were seated near the back. It
was horribly cramped, which I really didn’t like, but I came to overlook that.
As soon as we were seated, I let my girlfriend decide on our
menu for the evening. Thinking that we had the gift card to use, it was open
season and we ordered quite a few things. She decided on the eggplant caponata,
the mixed salumi plate, the swordfish meatballs, the fresh cut fettuccini with
pork ragu, the grilled tuna tagliata with fennel and citrus, and the salted butter
semifreddo sundae with maple syrup and pears. We ordered a couple beers and
sipped them as I tried to figure out what they were filming in the restaurant.
The eggplant caponata and the salumi plate came out first.
The salumi plate came with three different meats on it. It had a house made
pepper salami with a cranberry compote, a sage and pork pate topped with
pumpkin preserves, and a house made mortadella topped with hazelnut honey. The
eggplant caponata was stellar. The bread was perfectly toasted, and dropping a
big spoonful of caponata on top made it even more delicious. The salumi plate
was out of this world. I never thought I would like the sweet fruit taste
combined with the meats on the tray, but I was blown away. The flavor provided
by the meats was phenomenal. The star of it all was the pork pate. The sage
flavor really shown through, and the pork flavor was robust and delicious.
The swordfish meatballs came up as we were finishing up the
salumi and we dug in immediately. My girlfriend thought that they were too
fishy, but I was completely impressed. Wonderfully moist in the center, and
perfectly browned on the outside, a meatball made of swordfish was never even a
thought in my mind. After tasting it, I don’t know how I could not have. The
flavors were incredible and the creamy polenta underneath of it was just a
heavenly shower of flavor.
The portion sizes were pretty small, so when splitting them
with my girlfriend, they came out to be the perfect amount. Our pasta and tuna
came out next and the flow of taste amazingness continued. The pasta was super
fresh, clearly made very recently, and the pork ragu was absolute bliss. It
wasn’t a traditional ragu with sauce, but simply it was reduced pork with tons
of flavor and very nice seasoning. It was topped with a touch of parmigiana
cheese for another dimension of flavor.
The tuna dish was just as fantastic as the pasta. It was my
first experience with fennel ever, and I truly enjoyed the flavor it provided.
It was the perfect flavor profile to go with the deliciously simply tuna. The
tuna was thinly sliced, but was perfectly seared. The tiny segments of citrus
dispersed on top of the fennel were delicious little explosions of juice and
sourness.
To put the topping on the proverbial pie that was our meal,
we ordered something I had read and heard tons of good things about. That
delicious salted butter semifreddo sundae with maple syrup and pears made its
way to our table, along with a scoop of vanilla semifreddo with a birthday
candle in it for my girlfriend. The sundae literally tasted like butter. It was
so cool, and so delicious, but it simply just felt so wrong to be eating. The
pears and maple syrup contrasted the salty taste from the butter ice cream. It
was very delicious, but definitely not the healthiest of all options, but man
was it phenomenal.
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