The Amy’s Pastelillos pop-up arrives this Friday, October 9, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, part of a special Friday Nights for Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month. The museum is open from 5 to 8:30 p.m. with Pay What You Wish admission. Amy’s Pastelillos announced the food stop, and the museum’s own listing says only that drinks and snacks are available for purchase.
What the Amy’s Pastelillos Pop-Up Is Serving
According to the shop, the menu runs on five pastelillos at $5 each: shredded chicken, beef picadillo, guava BBQ pork, mushroom and cheese, and a vegan soy chorizo and potato. An arroz con pollo bowl is $6, yuca en escabeche is $4, and tres leches is $5, traditional or ube.
A pastelillo is a fried, filled turnover, and Amy’s describes it on its About page as one of Puerto Rico’s frituras. Four dollars for yuca and five for a pastelillo is a fair price for a night when the door price is whatever you decide it is. A pastelillo, the arroz con pollo bowl and the yuca come to $15 before dessert, which makes the Amy’s Pastelillos pop-up a workable dinner.
How the Amy’s Pastelillos Pop-Up Got to the Museum
Amaryllis “Amy” Rivera Nassar started the business in 2018 as a pop-up and built it as a tribute to her mother. It grew into a brick-and-mortar takeout shop on Memphis Street in Fishtown, which opened in March 2024, and the company also does catering and wholesale. Fishtown already knows how to draw a crowd around food and music, as the Evil Genius anniversary festival showed.
So this is a return trip. The Amy’s Pastelillos pop-up is how the business began, only now it sets up under a museum roof, on a night built around the city’s Hispanic and Latinx communities.
The Rest of the Night Around the Amy’s Pastelillos Pop-Up
Friday Nights at the museum usually run on DJ sets on the first, third and fourth Fridays of the month, so this second-Friday edition is a one-off built around the heritage month. Members get in free, as always. Everyone else pays what they wish.
The museum’s event page fills in the programming. A global music collective called People of Earth plays three sets in the Great Stair Hall, at 5:30, 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., with Latin and tropical sounds. Artist Linda Fernandez runs a pop-up studio on the Great Stair Hall Balcony until 8 p.m., where visitors design a personal symbol and tile-inspired patterns.
Two 15-minute gallery talks at 6:30 p.m. in Spanish and 7:30 p.m. in English highlight Hispanic and Latinx artists in A Nation of Artists, the American art exhibition that runs through July 5, 2027. Each talk is capped at 20 people, first come, first served. Community tabling runs from 6 to 8 p.m. on the Forum Balcony, and the event page links to tickets.
A Nation of Artists fills the Main Building’s American art galleries with more than 1,000 works spanning three centuries, according to the museum. It is free with museum admission, which on this night is whatever you decide to pay. That gives the Spanish and English talks an easy audience: anyone already in line for a pastelillo.
Food at a museum is an old idea, and it works best when the food has a point of view. The National Liberty Museum tailgate made the same bet on a different menu. The Amy’s Pastelillos pop-up carries a family story and a neighborhood behind it.
Picture a crisp, golden pastelillo split open to guava BBQ pork, a square of ube tres leches saved for last, and a band playing down the hall. The Amy’s Pastelillos pop-up puts that dinner inside a museum, between the music and the paintings, at a price that leaves room for seconds. Come hungry, and let the galleries wait until the plate is clean.
About Post Author
Discover more from dosage MAGAZINE
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
