How to have a Perfect Philly Day according to Yun Fuentes, the James Beard Award-nominated chef behind Bolo

The acclaimed chef spends a rare Thursday off grocery shopping in the Italian Market, buying comics, and trying to beat crowds for his favorite pastelillos.

If chef Yun Fuentes focuses hard enough, Philly is dotted with reminders of his childhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The cobblestones near Amada — Jose Garces’ Old City restaurant where Fuentes first worked as a chef — remind him of the streets he walked back home, where Fuentes was surrounded by landmarks from Puerto Rico’s history. Strolling the Italian Market stirs memories of shopping with his grandmother at open-air stalls in Rio Piedras.

Even the front windows of Fuentes’ restaurant Bolo, at 2025 Sansom St., transport him back to the marquesina, or covered patio, of his grandmother’s hair salon. They open to reveal a small outdoor bar where you can order cocktails and snacks not unlike the ones his grandfather used to pass around while clients and their husbands waited outside.

“I felt like I was at Mama Ada’s and Bolo’s house,” Fuentes, 47, told The Inquirer. “That was the draw.”

Fuentes opened Bolo in 2023 after working as executive chef of Stephen Starr’s now-shuttered Alma De Cuba and as the culinary director of South Street bar and music venue MilkBoy. The Latin American restaurant has catapulted Fuentes to the upper echelon of Philly restaurateurs, earning him two James Beard nominations and a spot on the foundation’s TasteTwenty list for up-and-coming chefs. This week, Bolo made The Inquirer’s list of Philly’s 76 most essential restaurants for the second year in a row.

Bolo melds Latin American classics with distinctly East Coast ingredients, like mofongo served with butter-poached pieces of an entire Maine lobster or sorullitos, cornmeal fritters stuffed with a Gouda-like cheese sourced from Doe Run Farm in Chester County. The menu, Fuentes said, is inspired by a question his then-9-year-old daughter Lula once asked: Am I Puerto Rican or Philadelphian?

“I told Lula that she was 100% of both,” Fuentes said. “That answer really solidified the idea of Bolo to me. … It doesn’t matter where we travel, what we take with us is our heritage.”

Fuentes is proud to lay roots in Philadelphia. He lives in Queen Village — the neighborhood where his wife lived when they first started dating 12 years ago — and loves to stroll down South Street, reminiscing about how he’d always end up there on trips to visit his father in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

How would Fuentes spend a perfect (and rare) Philly Thursday when he is off from work? By grocery shopping and trying to beat the crowds at a popular pastelillo spot.