The Lorns. Credit Alex Lau

The Roots of Phila Lorn: Family, Flavor, and South Philly Pride

10 Minute read

11 Nov 2025

Kiki Aranita

Journalist

Copy link

At Mawn and Sao, chef Phila Lorn cooks from the heart, blending Cambodian heritage, neighborhood grit, and the kind of warmth that makes South Philly feel like home.

Phila Lorn is a curious chef. That is, for a chef, he’s not especially curious. For most of his cooking career, he has worked within five miles of where he grew up in South Philly. “People from other parts of the city say they’re from Philadelphia. But we’re from South Philly, and we say we’re from South Philly,” he said. At 39, he talks about building restaurants that will last. He knows exactly what he’s making and exactly what he wants to put out into the world, and he knew this long before Mawn became a hit—even before he knew what he would call his first restaurant, when it was just an idea taking shape.

Phila has an intimate, surprising way of looking at food. He gives instead of takes. He doesn’t eat to learn; he eats to survive. The most transportive foods to him are classics like lox on bagels, the kinds that make him feel like “the family is all in the house.”

He’s not trying to replicate anyone else’s food. The ideas have been percolating and marinating in his mind for years. His dishes merge influences from his and his wife Rachel’s childhoods and from their relationship. At Sao, there’s a dish called the Mawn Cutlet that reads and tastes like his biography: a chicken cutlet that at first glance looks like chicken parm (very South Philly) because it’s blanketed in a snowfall of shaved parmesan. Beneath that layer lie salty pickled cucumbers and torn Thai basil. It’s simultaneously South Philly and Southeast Asian, a marriage of two Souths—or “Sao,” as his mother pronounces the word—just as Phila, pronounced “pea-la,” is named for his parents’ understanding of their new world. The Lorns have redrawn the lines and rechristened both “South” and “Philly.”

I first met Phila in 2022, in the most unlikely of circumstances, when a different restaurant was on his mind—something akin to a bottle shop but with food. We had both been chefs in residence at José Garces’ Volver the year before. The program functioned as an incubator for personal projects: mine was transforming my former restaurant Poi Dog into a sauce company, and Phila’s was a Cambodian concept called Puck and See. We were flown out by Garces Group’s then-parent company, Ballard Brands (Garces Group has since been acquired by SPB Hospitality, in July 2024), to the Global Food Service and Hospitality Exchange hosted by Revelry Group in Sun Valley, Idaho. My first real conversation with Phila was in the food court at O’Hare, where we met up for McDonald’s coffee and breakfast during our layover. Phila was nervous, going over his talking points on a sheet of paper.

At the Sun Valley resort, where the conference took place, we rubbed our chef-coated shoulders with billionaires. It was a gathering of CEOs from the country’s biggest brands—PepsiCo, Hormel, Sysco, and Nestlé—many of whom arrived by private jet to a valley ringed with pine trees and swooping eagles. Everyone called it the “Davos of food.”

Phila, Garces, and I spoke on a panel before a room full of CEOs, extolling the merits of the Volver chef-in-residence program. Phila told the audience about his upbringing in South Philly and how the program helped him refine his ideas for his first restaurant. Every other word that came out of his mouth on stage was unprintable by The Inquirer. “At that time, I had no money, didn’t even make the LLC, no lease, but I was telling all these billionaires that I was opening a restaurant,” Phila said.

That night, the three of us took over a cottage on the resort property and cooked riffs on dishes meant to entice investors to help Buena Onda Tacos expand as a franchise. Garces talked me through mixing a six-gallon vat of mango, pineapple, and jalapeño margaritas, which I spiked with Chili Peppah Water. He and Phila made the best birria tacos I’ve ever tasted while I frantically broke down a tuna loin with a glorified butter knife. The resort had many luxuries but none of the tools needed to pull off an impromptu fish taco restaurant.

Each morning in Sun Valley, Garces, Phila, and I took four-mile walks through the mountains, talking about our lives. Those conversations stay with me as proof that Phila sees everything through the lens of a chef.

Garces told us about his Frenchies. “Isn’t the shelf life on those like five years?” Phila asked.

“Well, you have to have pet insurance for them,” Garces admitted. “One of my dogs had to stay on an oxygen tank for hours after he had a growth on his spleen.”

Phila gasped. “That’s like a dishwasher on overtime!”

I told Phila he was the South Philly Borat. “Bo-hood-rat,” he corrected me, without missing a beat.

Phila notoriously has no filter, and that’s part of what makes Mawn and Sao so special. Their menus, dotted with cocktails like the “Jabroni Negroni” and “Wing Phat Plaza”—named for a nearby Asian enclave of banh mi shops and Asian supermarkets—reflect the brash charm of their South Philly immigrant neighborhood. Mawn and Sao are as deeply rooted in Phila and Rachel’s family heritages as they are in his irreverent personality and unshakable sense of self.

What fuels Phila isn’t ambition but belonging. His muse is South Philly itself: the streets that shaped him, the family that steadies him, and the flavors that remind him who he is.

The Chef

Phila and Rachel Lorn, the husband-and-wife team behind Mawn and Sao in South Philadelphia, blend Cambodian and Jewish influences, family history, and heartfelt hospitality into two of the city’s buzziest restaurants.

11 Nov 2025