Sponsored By

Jose Garces opens Amada Radnor in the Philadelphia suburbs

This is the chef’s eight new restaurant this year

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

March 28, 2023

8 Slides
Amada-Interior-promo_image.jpeg

Philadelphia-based chef Jose Garces has opened a third location of his Spanish restaurant Amada in the suburban township of Radnor, Pa. It’s the eighth restaurant he has opened in the past year.

The new two-level restaurant covers 7,000 square feet and seats around 250 people in the bar, lounge, dining room, and two patios, plus room for 25 at the bar and a private event space for up to 45 guests.

As with the other Amada locations, the menu has a variety of tapas, including wagyu beef skewers, empanadas — such as Garces’s signature one with Manchego cheese and artichoke escabeche — and a potato omelet called a tortilla Española, plus entrées such as Paella Valenciana made with rabbit and chorizo, and Garces’s whole roasted sucking pig. Amada Radnor will also feature exclusive dishes cooked in the restaurant’s Mibrasa wood-burning ovens, including Galician style octopus with potato foam, gamtae seaweed, and smoked paprika; herb crusted tuna with boquerone aïoli; and roasted sea bream with golden quinoa and creamy anchovy. A new feature from the bar is the Gin Tonic Tableside Experience: An alcohol-laden cart that allows guests to select their own gin infused with lemon, grapefruit, lime, or orange, as well as garnishes for the drink that is prepared tableside with Fever Tree tonic.

The bar also will feature more than 100 Spanish wines.

"Amada is near and dear to my heart," Garces said in a press release announcing the new location. "It was the very first restaurant I opened when I went out on my own in 2005. It will be a great addition to the exciting and rapidly growing Main Line dining scene. We have so many Garces fans from over the years come join us in Old City [in Philadelphia], and now we are bringing the concept right to them in their own backyards."

The second Amada location is at the Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City, N.J.

Garces entered suburban Philadelphia area known as the Main Line last year with the opening of a fast-casual restaurant, Buena Onda.
In the past year Garces also opened Buena Onda locations in Rittenhouse Square, at the Wells Fargo Center, home of the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team and 76ers basketball team, and at the Concourse of the Comcast Center office building. Additionally, he opened Garces Eats at the Club Level of the Wells Fargo Center, offering a rotating selection of dishes from his other restaurants. He also opened two locations of Garces Trading Company, a café, bakery and market — one at the Kimmel Cultural Campus and one at Cira Centre office building.

All of those new restaurants are in Philadelphia, and are part of the Garces Group, which the chef sold to Ballard Brands in 2018.

“Five years ago, we created this strategic partnership with Chef Jose Garces and couldn’t be more pleased by the ways our talents and resources have aligned,” Ballard Brands & Ideation Hospitality Owner Steven Ballard said in a statement. “Within the last year, Ballard Brands and Ideation Hospitality provided the launch pad for national franchise chain, Buena Onda, in addition to opening four new locations. Together, we also brought back storied brand Garces Trading Company and opened two new locations. Now, we are opening the third location of Chef Garces’ flagship brand, Amada, on the Main Line. We’re excited to watch this beloved fine dining concept continue to expand nationally.”
The restaurant’s design, by Dash Design, borrows elements from the other two Amada locations based on Spanish Colonial Revival style. Lott Builds undertook the construction of the property, which is being leased from Brandywine Realty Trust.

About the Author

Bret Thorn

Senior Food Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Senior Food & Beverage Editor

Bret Thorn is senior food & beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality for Informa’s Restaurants and Food Group, with responsibility for spotting and reporting on food and beverage trends across the country for both publications as well as guiding overall F&B coverage. 

He is the host of a podcast, In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn, which features interviews with chefs, food & beverage authorities and other experts in foodservice operations.

From 2005 to 2008 he also wrote the Kitchen Dish column for The New York Sun, covering restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves in New York City.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after spending about five years in Thailand, where he wrote articles about business, banking and finance as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality’s staff in 2016 while retaining his position at NRN. 

A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thorn also studied traditional French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. He spent his junior year of college in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University and Beijing University. While in Beijing, he also worked for ABC News during the protests and ultimate crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thorn’s monthly column in Nation’s Restaurant News won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column.

He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council, or IFEC, in 2005.

Thorn wrote the entry on comfort food in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2nd edition, published in 2012. He also wrote a history of plated desserts for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, published in 2015.

He was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

A Colorado native originally from Denver, Thorn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bret Thorn’s areas of expertise include food and beverage trends in restaurants, French cuisine, the cuisines of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, restaurant operations and service trends. 

Bret Thorn’s Experience: 

Nation’s Restaurant News, food & beverage editor, 1999-Present
New York Sun, columnist, 2005-2008 
Asia Times, sub editor, 1995-1997
Manager magazine, senior editor and restaurant critic, 1992-1997
ABC News, runner, May-July, 1989

Education:
Tufts University, BA in history, 1990
Peking University, studied Chinese language, spring, 1989
Nanjing University, studied Chinese language and culture, fall, 1988 
Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine, Cértificat Elémentaire, 1986

Email: [email protected]

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-thorn-468b663/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bret.thorn.52
Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
Instagram: @foodwriterdiary

Subscribe to Our Newsletters
Get the latest breaking news in the industry, analysis, research, recipes, consumer trends, the latest products and more.

You May Also Like