Can an English Pub Thrive on the Philadelphia Mainline?

The little villages (English pub word for small towns ) that dot the main street (Route 30) of the Philadelphia Mainline are lttered with fancy and not so fancy restaurants and bars. The student dives have been here for generations and Lah-de-dah new places open and close constantly.

Opening a new bar or restaurant on the Philadelphia Mainline is serious business and it usually takes a couple years to get everything properly set up. The backer's "people" meet endlessly with the township's "people". Millions are spent on demagraphics, designs, zoning, advertising and stealing a celebrity chef. Then there is a grand opening followed about three years later by a quiet closing.

The owners of a new place on the main street of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, a small town in the heart of the Philadelphia Mainline, took a novel approach and did away with most of the above. They opened a new place with none of the usual fanfare. (Maybe, they thought an English pub was not the same thing as a bar / restaurant.) Their place was always a bar and had existing zoning and a liquor license. They painted the front, added flower boxes, posted a menu in the window, called itself the "Bryn Mawr Pub" and opened for business.

Frankly, I didn't think the name would go over. It sounded too much like the name of an English pub. The custom on the Philadelphia Mainline is to adopt a fancy unpronouncable foreign name. People call to inquire about a nonexistent reservation just so they can hear what the personanswering the phone calls the place. Who ever heard of an Englishman calling his pub to get the hang of what it was called? Obviously, this whole concept of an English pub was alien to the culture of the Philadelphia Mainline.

There were some mighty unusual things happening at this pseudo English pub. I passed the place last summer on a Tuesday night and people were flooding into the place. On a TUESDAY! Nobody goes anywhere on Tuesday night around here. Some places on the Philadelphia Mainline don't even stay open at night in the summer and this place was packing them in on a Tuesday.