Chef Ari Miller
Chef Ari Miller
2023

Founder of restaurant Musi, Miller created a higher standard in the Philadelphia food world for using local, hyper-seasonal produce, cheeses, and meats. There are few restaurants that take the avoidance and innovative reinvention of would-be food waste to the level that Chef Ari Miller does, who also in this short time, has been named Best Chef by Philadelphia Magazine. Miller’s menus exhibited a constant and utterly delicious repurposing of rinds, tops, tips and often tossed-away bits — with a side of  exquisite pastas. He draws upon flavors honed after a decade spent in Israel, but with restraint. Musi also created a collaborative space, drawing together cheesemakers, butchers, and foragers together with Pennsylvania’s very small beer and linens producers. Musi hosted pop ups, such as the Frizwit, which brought in a local brewery and produced the very best cheesesteak in Philadelphia (made with responsibly sourced Primal Supply beef and Abundantly Good cheese of an upcycled milk program). As Hillary Dixler Canavan put it, while naming Musi one of Eater’s 16 Best New Restaurants: “Musi prioritizes the things that diners ought to demand — a menu informed by local product and a kitchen connected to the region’s best purveyors — but the restaurant doesn’t beat you over the head with it.

 

Now based in NYC, Miller is a private Chef cooking for investment groups, high net worth individuals, and celebrities.