You need only scratch the surface to discover that Philly’s top culinary talent runs in a pretty close-knit pack. Garces and Vetri are, like, total besties and that whole gang that teams up for those quarterly collaboration dinners — Michael Solomonov, Peter Woolsey, David Katz, Jennifer Carroll, John Taus and Pierre Calmels among them — serves as a perfect example of just how tight the local chef contingency really is. But after taking a look at Daily News writer Beth D’Addono’s food tree piece today, an exhaustive gastronomic genealogy that traces the roots of some of the city’s biggest names, it’s evident that the folks behind our favorite restaurants are more incestuous than the characters in a John Irving novel. Thank heavens they aren’t reproducing. We don’t want our next generation of chefs and restaurateurs to be a group of six-fingered mutants. [Daily News]
