Food & Wine Names Philly Chef Among 2025's Best

PHILADELPHIA — The accolades for Philadelphia chef Phila Lorn keep stacking up.

Recently, Lorn's Cambodian restaurant Mawn was named on New York Times 2025 Restaurant List.

Lorn also won the "Emerging Chef" award at the 2025 James Beard Foundation Awards earlier this year. Chefs who display "exceptional talent, character, and leadership ability, and who [are] likely to make a significant impact in years to come" are given the award.

And now, Lorn has been named among Food & Wine's best new chefs for 2025.

"At his perpetually packed 'noodle house with no rules,' the chef taps into his Cambodian roots and spins them up in a freewheeling, joyful twister that incorporates the flavors of Southeast Asia, Philadelphia, and beyond," the publication wrote about Lorn. "The menu embraces the influences of the neighborhood's Italian American, Mexican, Latin American, and Southeast Asian communities, and you can see that come to life in dishes like his chicken noodle soup, which is a brilliant riff on pho and matzo ball soup, infused with Southeast Asian aromatics."

Read Food & Wine's full write-up on Lorn online here.

In another piece from Food & Wine, Lorn discussed the use of salt in dishes.

"Salt is not ever ‘just salt.’ Salt can be fish sauce, soy sauce, miso," he told the publication. "More home cooks should be aware of all that salt can be."

Read Lorn's salt tip online here.

Check out the full list of 2025's best new chefs from Food & Wine online here.