There’s no other restaurant in Philly quite like Provenance, the Society Hill spot serving a $225 tasting menu that shows off 25-ish pristine French-Korean dishes. This is food in HD—you can taste every element of the lineup, which includes velvety uni with buttercup squash and ruby red bluefin tuna topped with foie gras and black truffle. Provenance gets loud and lively, thanks to Motown music, an open kitchen, and couples polishing off their wine pairings with fermented satsuma plums.

This Queen Village Japanese restaurant has a walk-in izakaya in front, where you can sit in a booth, drink a balanced cocktail, and eat chirashi and fried fish collars like a happy kitten. The room is dark, the bar is always bumping, and we rarely spend fewer than three hours loitering here. But if you want to feel like the princess of Philadelphia, try to book the 17-piece sushi omakase in the back. Both dining options are memorable in their own ways.

This Cambodian noodle shop could only exist in Philly. The small Bella Vista BYOB has walls covered in old rugs, mirrors that the host of Antique Roadshow would drool over, and dishes that we think about more than the Eagles winning the Super Bowl. The menu is heavily influenced by the chef/owner’s Cambodian heritage, but you’ll find soups, noodles, and skewers from all over Southeast Asia. We always get the head-on soft-shell shrimp with fish sauce caramel.

This two-story American spot in Rittenhouse has an incredible, slightly casual first-floor bar and a formal dining space upstairs with candles, leather booths, and stained glass windows. It’s an atmosphere that’s somehow both relaxing and sophisticated, and no matter where you sit you’ll have an unforgettable meal. They serve an eight-course, $165 tasting menu. Expect perfectly executed beef tartare, charred octopus, crudo with caviar, and New York Strip with cinnamon-y yams.

When we want excellent Thai food, Kalaya is the first place we think of. The Fishtown restaurant's busy industrial space includes a full bar and lounge area, booths for large groups, and 14-foot Thai palm trees reaching up to an atrium glass ceiling. From their innovative cocktails to excellent dishes like umami-rich wok-fried pork belly, flower-shaped dumplings, and sweet-spicy-sour grilled squid, it's an experience unlike anywhere else in the city.

Her Place serves a four-course, $90 tasting menu that changes every two weeks, and to get a reservation, you’ll need to be ready when they drop them on every other Sunday at 6pm. You'll eat lobster ravioli and brown butter profiteroles while harmonizing with the chefs to a Destiny’s Child song, all while they put the finishing touches on a plate of housemade pasta. Energy-wise, a meal here is more like hanging at a chef’s house than dining in a tiny Rittenhouse restaurant. It's a ton of fun.

This tiny, tasting-menu-only spot in Queen Village feels more like a great dinner party than a restaurant. At its core, Ambra is all about rustic Italian, and delivers it unlike anywhere else in the city—with tweezer precision, a dash of molecular gastronomy, and exceptional service. It’s a once-in-a-presidential-term kind of meal that you’ll want to have once a season.

Thanks to it's glimmering seafood towers, modern French mains, and caviar-topped everything, this Rittenhouse restaurant works just as well for a martini-fueled group dinner as it does for a romantic night out on the town. Like its sister restaurant, Her Place Supper Club, it’s a tough reservation to get. But a blow-out meal here is worth the hassle. They make technically impressive food and cocktails without any of the self-seriousness that usually comes with it.

Fine dining places can, after a while, all start to mesh together. But Vernick Fish isn’t just any fine-dining restaurant—it comes from the team behind Vernick Food & Drink and serves some excellent, creative dishes. Located on the ground floor of the Comcast Tower, the dining room looks like it belongs in a Versace Home catalog. They have an impressive wine list, several crudo options that deserve streets named after them, and an incredible New York strip.

River Twice thrives on details. Each menu is stamped with the date. Every dish in the $75 four-course tasting incorporates a delicate sauce or an infused oil that someone probably lost sleep over. These facts would normally point to a boring restaurant. But between the inventive food—often made with East Coast seafood and produce, Japanese and French techniques, and maybe some Texas flair—and the handful of cooks scurrying around the open kitchen, you'll be pleasantly locked into your meal.