it's what you want to know
A TV icon touched down in Paoli this week.
Shhhhhh.
Carol Burnett paid a hush-hush visit to overjoyed folks at Daylesford Crossing senior living Monday, charming one and all.
Nope, she didn’t know a soul there.
You’ll never guess what just blew in to the King of Prussia Mall.
Legitimately hip dining.
We kid you not.
Twice we visited the new Mistral – named for the stiff “mistral’ winds that clobber the coast of south France.
Twice, we were, well, blown away.
While the usual suspects – Cheesecake Factory, Grand Lux Café, California Pizza Kitchen – are corporate, aka manufactured for the masses, Mistral is:
Pregnancy or new motherhood getting to you?
Join the club.
Literally.
Just open in Wayne: Hatch: A Sanctuary for Motherhood, an upscale, membership-based Mecca for expectant and new moms.
Because motherhood has its bumps – and they can’t all be covered in maternity tops.
Also because Dr. Spock and What to Expect When You’re Expecting are SO last century.
The Hatch method: an array of programs to help you “Grow, Glow and Know.” The goals: Get physically and mentally fit and get educated. Baby and hubby will thank you.
They live among us, hiding but in plain sight.
They mow our lawns, mind our kids, cook our food, clean our homes.
They are Mexicans, living and working on the Main Line.
Some, of course, work under the table.
Others receive paychecks, have payroll taxes withheld, and file yearly U.S. tax returns.
Just like us.
But in many ways, not like us at all.
Because they are here without papers and have little reason to believe they’ll ever get them.
One such family – living in a rented, single-family home on the western Main Line – asked us to share their story.
They wanted us to put a human face on the immigration crisis.
But, of course, we cannot.
At least, not literally.
Wait ’til you see what Main Line culinary queen Meridith Coyle’s cooked up this time. The gal who brought us Meridith’s Market, Binnie & Flynn’s (Take 2), Fresh Ideas Market and Aneu Catering has come up with, yup, a fresher idea.
Call it “ANEU Approach” to eating, dining, and throwing parties. (She does.)
In expansion mode, she just bought a whole shopping center – near Del Chevrolet and the Van Cleve Pavilion in Paoli.
A scant three weeks later, she opened her re-tooled, three-pronged food biz.
Suddenly, the Main Line is soaking in suds.
Sure, we have locally-owned brewpub faves like Ardmore’s Tired Hands, McKenzie Brewhouses in Berwyn and Malvern, newbie La Cabra Brewing and, slithering soon to Bryn Mawr, Tin Lizard.
And yes, we’ve got a few, but not nearly enough, cozy gastro-pubs like The Goat’s Beard and Teresa’s Next Door in Wayne.
And of course, restaurants far and nigh (Biga, Savona et. al.) have been beefing up their beer lists.
No, the BIG news in brews is this: a brand-new law permits PA peeps to take home beer by the bottle.
Holy Heineken!
Ah, how to describe Paoli’s new Eatnic?
Sure, we could tell you it’s a farm-fresh, morning-til-night BYOB and be done with it.
But there’s more to it than that.
Much more.
Because Eatnic comes from the same fertile brain that 30 years ago spawned the world’s first Saladworks, and with it, the now ubiquitous fast-casual dining category.
And what John Scardapane did with Saladworks – more than 100 franchisees, many millions in sales (before selling in 2015) – he just might do with Eatnic.
And it all will have started here.
In little old Paoli.
Which means this modest eatery on a non-descript stretch of Route 30 is a pretty big deal,
It will be fascinating to see how the Main Line responds to Kirna Zabête, just open near La Colombe in the new Bryn Mawr Village.
Because its 3,000 square feet are unlike anything we’ve seen in these parts. (And you know we get around.)
Kirna Zabête (KEER nah Zah BETT) is an exuberant paean to high fashion.
A boutique for serious fashionistas that – with touches of warmth and whimsy – doesn’t take itself too seriously.
In a word: wow.
We’re blown away by what a bunch of brewpub newbies just pulled off in downtown Berwyn.
They took a drab old furniture store across from the train station (RIP Pearl of the East), gutted it, and turned it into rustic-chic La Cabra Brewing, suddenly the hippest spot in town.
OK. Not so suddenly.
If anyone’s story can blot out all the bad press that came out of T/E schools last year, surely LeRoi Leviston’s can.
His journey from starting Stoga quarterback to Mr. Lev, Valley Forge Middle School teacher, to Roi Lush, full-time rapper, is as improbable as it is inspiring.
The odds against LeRoi, 28, were stacked from the start.
He was born on Long Island to parents who “were very into hardcore drugs,” LeRoi tells SAVVY.
