Chef Frankie Ramirez and partners are honoring their mothers with Amá, a seasonal Mexican restaurant under the El

Frankie Ramirez started in the restaurant business as a teenager washing dishes. He rose through the line-cook ranks, eventually heading popular kitchens including LMNO, and the now-closed Enoteca Tredici.

For Ramirez’s next move, 17 years after arriving from Mexico City, he and his wife, Verónica, backed by husband-and-wife restaurateurs Roberto Medina and Crisalida Mata, are opening Amá, in a new building at Front and Oxford Streets in the Fishtown-Kensington area. The site, under the Market-Frankford El, is two blocks from the high-energy LMNO, which he left earlier this year.

They are working toward an early 2025 opening.

At Amá, whose kitchen will be fully open — and decorated, as if part of the dining room — Ramirez will oversee an eight-foot charcoal- and wood-fired grill from M&M BBQ Co. in Texas. He plans a seasonal menu including large-format entrees such as whole grilled fish, roasted octopus, pollo a la brasa by the half and whole, head-on prawns al carbon, and carne asada. Amá’s appetizers will include tacos, tostadas, crudos, ceviches, and aguachiles, along with seasonal vegetarian options.

Customers will be able to watch workers turn out hand-pressed tortillas. “I think about the sidewalk window [showing the kitchen] at Bliss all the time,” Ramirez said in an interview, referring to chef Francesco Martorella’s long-gone restaurant at the Bellevue on Broad Street.

Bliss is where Ramirez, now 37, got his first line cook job, at its 2004 opening. He bonded with the only other Spanish-speaking employee in the kitchen — pastry chef Verónica Hernandez Sandoval — who had come with her family to the United States in 2001 from San Mateo Ozolco in Puebla. They’re now married with two children; she currently works at a kitchen in Bala Cynwyd but will join Amá to help with the front of the house.

Both Ramirezes’ mothers will contribute recipes and inspiration — Amá is short for “mamá” in Spanish.

Open for dinner only at the start, Amá will feature 120 seats, including 20 at the bar and 12 additional spots at a chef’s table beside the open kitchen.

John Weckerly and Sal Guerrero of Boxwood Architects are combining traditional and modern Mexican aesthetics: white textured plaster walls with niches, wooden beams, terracotta and copper-colored accents, and a bar with a rustic concrete countertop. Accordion doors will open onto the Front and Oxford corner to produce a patio-like experience.

The beverage program is still in the R&D phase but the plan is to offer cocktails while focusing heavily on tequila and mezcal.

Frankie Ramirez moved to Philadelphia from Mexico City at 16, initially working as a dishwasher at Stephen Starr’s Washington Square (now Talula’s Garden) at its 2004 opening. After his next stop, Bliss, Ramirez returned to Starr to work at restaurants such as Morimoto and Butcher & Singer. He was part of the opening team at Parc in 2008, rising to become sous chef. His first executive chef’s job was in 2016, overseeing the two Tredici Enoteca locations, before heading the kitchen at Refectory Grill in Villanova in 2019. In 2020, Starr approached Ramirez to become the opening chef at LMNO, where he remained for four years.

Medina grew up on a farm in Puebla and came to the States by himself in 1994 at age 17. While living with a friend in Philadelphia, he washed dishes at Spasso in Old City, working his way up to chef. That is where he and Mata — then a bartender — met. Medina and business partner Claudio Sandolo opened the Media location of Spasso in 2012, and six years later opened Agave Mexican Cuisine in Chadds Ford. In 2020, Medina and Mata opened La Catrina next to Spasso in Media.

“I think the food that Frankie cooks is pretty special, so it needs to be in a place where people are open-minded and willing to try new things,” Mata said, adding that they were giving Ramirez creative freedom on the menu.

“To me, Mexican cooking is a lifestyle, not a way to cook,” Ramirez said, explaining that his philosophy is to work with the ingredients he has around, as his mother and grandmother did — and not to rely on foods that had been imported.

“She would go and get a chicken and a couple of chiles and come out with a salsa [to serve with] the chicken,” Ramirez said of his mother. “That’s what we want to do here — something special. Local farmers. I have this line that I’ve come out with the guys: ‘Old flavors, new hands.’ That means, get new chefs and coach them to be creative and go and search for those flavors that we need.

“In order to make this restaurant work, we have to offer an experience because people had an expectation of Mexican food being, ‘Let’s go out and get margaritas, get drunk and all that.’ We’re going to go on a different road. We want to represent Mexican cuisine in a different way. No more sombreros or piñatas.”