Despite Philadelphia’s non-Mediterranean climate, fig trees thrive here in unexpected abundance. In late summer, local grocers celebrate the South Philly fig—thin-skinned, delicate, and sweet—plucked from neighbors’ backyards and increasingly from suburban orchards.

I planted a fig tree in my Philadelphia backyard about a decade ago after picking ripe figs off trees in Tel Aviv neighborhoods one summer. I had never tasted figs like that before—globes of jam growing on trees. Devouring them under those same trees, tossing the stems to the ground, formed a core food memory for me. A couple of years after the first planting, I added another tree, thinking the first needed a companion to bear fruit. For seven long summers, I shook my fists at my barren trees, wondering why they refused to fruit. Instead, they produced only branches that sagged with luscious, abundant, and—so I thought—utterly useless leaves.

Eight years later, I value the leaves as much as the fruit itself—and I’m not alone. They taste and smell downright tropical, a dead ringer for fresh, young coconuts scented with Tahitian vanilla. For years, I shuttled sacks of freshly picked leaves up the street to Poi Dog, my former restaurant, where we served food rooted in my childhood in Hawai’i. Can you imagine the sheer luck I felt when I realized that I could dupe Hawaiian flavors in the Mid-Atlantic? Brewed into tea, fig leaves matched our use of actual coconut everywhere else on the menu. (It was as economical as it was delicious—the leaves were free, and we were charging $4 per cup.) Lining bamboo steamer baskets, fig leaves infused our daifuku mochi with the aroma of coconut, eliminating the need for parchment paper. When I steamed rice in a rice cooker, I threw in a couple of leaves, achieving results akin to coconut rice.

I sank fig leaves into jars of vodka and vinegar, clipped them at their peak freshness and froze them for winter use. I layered them into dehydrators that perfumed the air of my restaurant, so we could package them into tea blends. And suddenly, in the last year, as I dined around in my post-cheffing career as a food writer, I realized I was not alone.

The Year of the Fig Leaf

2024 should have been known as the year fig leaves dominated fine dining menus in Philadelphia and beyond—and 2025 shows no signs of that trend abating. At the recently opened Levantine-leaning Emmett, I lifted fig leaf vinegar-painted pear slices to reveal lamb neck dolmas, which had been slowly barbecued while being brushed constantly with that same housemade fig leaf vinegar. At the also brand-new Corsican-inspired restaurant Bastia in Philadelphia, beverage director Benjamin Kirk infuses both rum and non-alcoholic spirits with fig leaves in a cryovac machine set at 60°C. “The fig leaves add a vanilla-coconut flavor to our sherry and rum cobbler,” says Kirk. At Little Water, a seafood-focused restaurant that might secretly be Philadelphia’s best new cocktail bar, Carolyn Schneider tinkers with fig leaf shrubs, steeping the leaves in sugar and vinegar. At Provenance, Philadelphia’s most ambitious, 23-course tasting menu temple to fine dining, chef Nich Bazik doles out fig leaf oil alongside pristine, raw slices of Baja kanpachi.

Fig leaves are versatile, moving from beverage menus to savory courses to dessert courses. At a recent dinner hosted by chef Tim Dearing, I encountered one of the loveliest ice creams I’ve had in recent memory: fig leaf ice cream made with black koji and honey-infused milk, topped with puffed rice, vin de miel gel, and blush rose petals. Dearing steeped fig leaves he had foraged in the milk. “I brought the milk up to a simmer, turned off the heat, and threw the fig leaves in for an hour. It tastes like fresh coconut. I also make an oil with the leaves, using 20 fig leaves, 2 cups of neutral oil, blending them in a high-speed blender, which heats up the oil with its mechanism, and I use that to dress fish crudos.”

Chefs Embracing the Trend

I asked all these chefs and a few more where they sourced their fig leaves, and most responded, “I know a guy.” Sometimes that guy was a girl—me, as I’ve bestowed heaps of fig leaves upon anyone I know who might put them to good use, whether at Washington, D.C.’s The Dabney or to Danny Childs for his Slow Drinks program.

Former Michelin inspector Mahira Rivers has written for food service company Baldor’s industry trends report about how fig leaves have become pervasive in kitchens across the country. “We’ve noticed an unusual piece of produce popping up on menus coast to coast: fig leaf. From verdant fig leaf–infused oils to sweetened creams, it’s the latest cult flavor among chefs and pastry chefs alike.” Rivers notes that the leaves are themselves “inedible” after they impart those hauntingly tropical flavors to oils and creams, which is sort of true. But I watched my husband laminate homemade pita bread with younger, tender fig leaves, grill the bread, and I devoured the fragrant results—so I can attest that, under certain circumstances, fig leaves can be entirely edible.

That late-summer aroma of fig leaves—sweet vanilla, cut green grass, young coconut—found its way into my kitchen with my husband’s recipe for Fig Leaf Basque Cheesecake.