Chefs of Philly's future

When chefs Jose Garces and Marc Vetri cross town aboard a private trolley next month, between tapas at Amada and pasta at Osteria, it will be more than a rolling intermezzo in the celebration dinner to promote their debut cookbooks.

It will be a victory lap for two star chefs who have emerged as the leaders of Philadelphia's next generation of cooks - a generation poised to enter a new golden age of the chef-driven restaurant.

The dining landscape they navigate today, though, is starkly different from the go-go days of expense-account dining when Georges Perrier led the last big wave with Le Bec-Fin and Brasserie Perrier. That was decades ago, when he and his competitors - Jean-Marie Lacroix, Susanna Foo - ruled a posh French-centric scene from Walnut Street and the Four Seasons Hotel.

The formality of that white-tablecloth fine dining, unraveling nationwide, has lost footing in Philadelphia to earthier, more casual venues like BYOBs, small-plate kitchens, and gastropubs. Most of the remaining high-end dining dollars, meanwhile, are gobbled up by Stephen Starr - a successor of sorts to Neil Stein as the city's leading restaurant impresario - with his ever-expanding juggernaut of stylized, concept-driven eateries.

And yet, Garces, Vetri and a growing number of new chef-owners are having a transformative impact. In the same way that Perrier, Lacroix, Foo, Fritz Blank of Deux Cheminees, and Bruce Cooper of Jake's trained a generation of young cooks, these chefs are now molding the younger talents that will define Philadelphia's restaurant scene for years to come.

Garces and Vetri (and their acolytes) are creating menus that are less reliant on the butter-rich French refinements of the past, channeling other authentic international ideas through locally sourced ingredients, sometimes with futuristic techniques. Elevated rustic cooking, whether a Spanish tortilla or a Yemenite soup, is just as likely to be served on rough-hewn wood tables as on crisp white linens.

"I have great admiration for Jose Garces and Marc Vetri," says Perrier, who rarely bestows compliments on fellow chefs.

Garces, 36, has been an entrepreneurial dynamo since launching his Spanish hit Amada after leaving Starr, who brought him to Philadelphia to run Alma de Cuba and open El Vez. Garces has since built one of the strongest stables of sous-chefs in the city as he added the Basque-inspired Tinto and the nuevo Mexican Distrito.