Amanda Shulman’s Supper Club Is Our New Favorite Place to Eat in Philadelphia

While many college kids were doing keg stands and eating cereal or instant ramen for every meal, when she was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, Amanda Shulman would go to the Italian Market in Philadelphia to buy a whole pig. She would spend a weekend breaking the animal down and transforming it into five courses of pork for a dozen or so paying dinner guests. On other weekends, she would play around with a pasta machine and make a multicourse pasta dinner from scratch.

Shulman may have been majoring in journalism and political science, but all of her free time was devoted to food. There was the food blog she published, the food writing class she took, and, most importantly, the supper club she ran. “I used to post these Facebook statuses that read, ‘$35, four courses. Message me if you want to come,’ and I would put together a group of random people who didn’t know each other, and I would just practice cooking,” she says.

The supper club concept stuck with her after graduation, even as she cooked her way through professional kitchens. While working as a line cook at revered restaurants like Vetri Cucina in Philadelphia and Momofuku Ko in New York City, she continued to run supper clubs out of her tiny studio apartment on the side. “It started off as a 50-person list of friends, and it turned into emails from 600 people who I didn’t know,” she recalls. “My friend would curate a group, and eight people would come to my studio apartment and sit on my bed in between courses.” The name of Shulman’s supper club? Her Place.

After cooking at Ko, Shulman spent time as the executive sous chef at Marc Vetri’s Las Vegas restaurant before moving to Montreal to be with her then-boyfriend (now fiancé and business partner), Alex Kemp, and cooking at Joe Beef. The pandemic and a visa that was about to expire sent her back across the border, determined to finally open a permanent place of her own. She looked first at locations in New York City but was daunted by the real estate costs. She expanded her search to Philadelphia, hoping to find a more affordable situation in the city where she got her culinary start.

She came across the location that is now home to her first restaurant, the brick-and-mortar location of her supper club, Her Place. “It was the sh-ttiest, ugliest pizza shop,” says Shulman with a laugh. “It had a hood though, which was more than what a lot of places had.” With a lot of elbow grease from friends, many trips to thrift stores for plates and glasses, and even more trips to Restaurant Depot, Shulman threw open the doors to diners in 2021.

Dinner at Her Place feels as if you are stepping into Shulman’s very own dining room, where she just happens to throw two dinner parties every night. There are just 24 seats packed into a cozy 1,500 square feet. The silverware doesn’t match, nor do the plates, which all have a charming, vintage feel. The walls are packed with art, and the wine collection feels like it belongs to a generous friend with great taste. Standing at the counter that divides the kitchen and the dining area, Shulman is a commanding yet endearing presence as she regales diners with stories about the inspiration behind each of the playful dishes she serves — Shulman is as good of a storyteller as she is a chef.

To keep the restaurant fresh and highly seasonal and the dinner-party model successful, Shulman changes the menu every two weeks. On the night I was in, she explained that the mussels muffuletta was inspired by a trip she took to New Orleans, where she fell in love with the famed sandwich from Central Grocery. “It’s so pickly! There’s so many olives,” Shulman says. She transformed the sandwich into a condiment for a dish of mussels escabeche that arrives topped with a mix of thinly sliced celery, chopped roasted peppers, lots of olives, and a very acidic red wine vinaigrette and is served with a slab of tender focaccia. There was a stunning plate of beef tartare, lovingly dubbed “beef and broccoli,” where the raw beef was finely chopped by hand and tossed with classic ingredients like Dijon mustard and Worcestershire sauce, with roasted broccoli, peppery watercress, a generous amount of crispy fingerling potato chips, and a pleasant shower of blue cheese. “There’s so many different textures. It’s like a meat salad!” Shulman exclaims.

The menu also included a pasta course — something that is rare on her menu these days. After having spent years cooking at Vetri Cucina in both Philadelphia and Vegas and learning to make pasta in Italy, Shulman was ready to not touch pasta “for a long time.” Luckily for me, she’d returned to pasta for the night, hand-rolling tiny postage-stamp-size ravioli, filling them with an unbelievably silky chicken liver mousse, and glazing them with a rich caramelized-onion butter and a drizzle of sherry vinegar to cut through the fat. I couldn’t help but smile at the collective “oohs” that broke out around the room as the plates of pasta hit the tables.

Shulman is looking to invite more people to her dinner table. She now juggles Her Place with My Loup, the new fine-dining restaurant with a more traditional format that Shulman opened down the street with Kemp, who heads up the kitchen there. She is not afraid to break from tradition by keeping both restaurants open only Monday through Friday. “I’ve never had a weekend in my entire adult life [before now],” Shulman laments. She wanted to be able to attend weddings and baby showers and be present in the lives of her friends and family. To that end, Shulman is also very intentional in her hiring practices (“good attitude above everything”). “The restaurants are a nonnegotiable positive environment,” she says. It’s all part of Shulman’s uncompromising vision for what restaurants can and should look like. She is living by her own rules — it is Her Place, after all.