915 Lancaster Avenue Has Burned Through Three Restaurants Since 2017. Bryn Mawr Is Betting on a Fourth.

Walk the stretch of Lancaster Avenue that cuts through Bryn Mawr Village this fall and you will pass a bakery expanding, a fried chicken counter already doing business, a dim sum concept moving in, and a gluten-free specialty shop finally getting its own address after years of baking out of a kitchen in Manayunk. Four different formats, four different operators, and by most signs, four stable additions to the corridor.

Then there is 915 Lancaster Avenue. One address. Three restaurants in nine years. All of them built around the same basic idea, a wine-forward, upscale-casual Italian concept with real backing behind it, and none of them lasted long enough to become the place people mean when they say "let's just go to our spot." A fourth operator is now taking a run at the same room. The rest of the Village, meanwhile, isn't struggling with any of this. That split is the story, and it tells you something about Bryn Mawr that a simple list of new restaurants would not.

Three Tenants, One Format, Nine Years

The address has a real history, and it is worth laying out plainly because the pattern only becomes visible once you see it in order.

Enoteca Tredici closed in 2021, a casualty of financial pressure and the pandemic years that took down a lot of independent wine bars regardless of how well they'd been received. What followed was not a fresh start so much as a series of second attempts at the same idea. Fiore Rosso arrived in 2022 with a Vetri pedigree behind it, one of the more credible restaurant names in the region. It didn't last two years before rebranding as Il Fiore in 2024, which itself closed at the start of this year.

Three operators, three concepts, one throughline: an elevated, wine-centric Italian room aimed at an evening crowd. Whatever else changed about the space, that positioning never did, and it never quite worked long enough to stick.

The Fourth Attempt Comes From Someone Who Grew Up Watching This Corridor

The tenant now taking on 915 Lancaster is 28-year-old chef-owner Alex Fiorello, who already runs Alessandro's Wood Fired Italian & Bar in Wayne, which opened in 2020 as an upscale-casual neighborhood spot with a loyal following, and Alessandro's Pizzeria in West Chester, a more casual lunch-and-slice operation. Bryn Mawr Village is his third location and, by his own description, the most ambitious. The plan calls for house-made pasta, wood-fired pizza, a live-fire grill, and dry-aged proteins using on-site aging refrigerators that came with the space, along with a handful of Japanese-influenced, sushi-style items worked into an otherwise Italian menu. Fiorello has said the concept, tentatively named Enoteca Alessandro's or Alessandro's Enoteca, is meant to sit a step above his Wayne restaurant, with more emphasis on the bar and the evening scene. He's backed by investors this time, not building it alone the way he did in Wayne.

Bryn Mawr Village's owner, Paul Aschkenasy, has been candid about what he's hoping for after watching two prior concepts come and go in the same footprint. He's said he wants a restaurant that appeals to a broad range of neighbors, keeps a lively bar going, and is priced so people can come back on a regular basis rather than saving the room for special occasions. That's a notably different ask than what Enoteca Tredici and Fiore Rosso were built to deliver. It suggests the Village itself has learned something from the last nine years, and the brief for this tenant reflects it.

Whether the doors are open by the time you're reading this is worth checking before you build a Friday night around it. The reporting on the timeline put a spring opening in play, and Fiorello's history of running two other restaurants at once means this launch has more moving parts than a simple buildout. What's clear is that the format hasn't changed as dramatically as the ownership has. It's still an Italian, wine-and-bar-driven concept in the exact room where two similar ideas already came up short. If it works, it will be because the pricing and the neighborhood-first pitch land differently than the Vetri-backed version did, not because the concept itself is new.

The Rest of the Village Isn't Fighting the Same Battle

Set that one address next to everything else opening in Bryn Mawr this year and the contrast gets sharper.

The Buttery opened its third location this year at 836 W. Lancaster Avenue, following an original Malvern shop from 2015 and a second location in Ardmore. The Bryn Mawr café runs 82 indoor seats from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, with the kitchen closing at 3 p.m. while pastries, sourdough, coffee, and grab-and-go items stay available through close. Co-owner John Rhoads has talked about the brand's approach as building spaces where people gather and feel at home, and the Bryn Mawr shop is already planning to add dinner service and a liquor license, meaning it's positioning itself to become a daytime and evening fixture rather than just a coffee stop.

Love & Honey Fried Chicken opened its Bryn Mawr outpost earlier this year as the suburban counterpart to its original Northern Liberties location, bringing buttermilk-fried chicken, tenders, sandwiches, and house sides to Lancaster Avenue. Dim Sum Factory, an established local chain, has a Bryn Mawr location in the pipeline that was slated for a winter opening when it was first announced, which puts it either already serving soup dumplings and scallion pancakes or close to it. And Flakely, the gluten-free bakery that built its name operating out of an industrial kitchen in Manayunk, is finally getting a storefront of its own on Lancaster Avenue, a real address after years of working without one.

None of these four openings share a format. A café, a fried chicken counter, a dim sum chain, and a gluten-free bakery are solving different problems for different parts of the day, and none of them are trying to be the neighborhood's evening wine bar. That's likely exactly why they're moving in without the churn that's defined 915 Lancaster since 2017. The demand for a daytime bakery or a fast-casual chicken spot in Bryn Mawr hasn't been tested and found wanting three times in a row. The demand for an upscale Italian wine bar in that specific room has.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

None of this means Bryn Mawr has a restaurant problem. It has a very specific format problem at a very specific address, and it's been solving every other format just fine. If you're building a fall routine around Lancaster Avenue, the safer bets right now are the ones already open or nearly there: the Buttery for morning coffee and pastries, Love & Honey for a fast dinner, Flakely if gluten-free has kept you driving to Manayunk for a bakery run. Dim Sum Factory is worth watching for an opening date. The fourth attempt at 915 Lancaster is the one worth watching with a little more patience, not because it's a bad concept, but because the room has a track record that even a strong operator has to work against.

That's the kind of detail you only get by paying attention to a corridor over years, not months, and it's the same kind of attention we bring to every block we work in, whether the conversation is about where to grab dinner or what a specific address is actually worth.

If you're thinking about your next move on the Main Line, or just want a team that already knows which corners are stable and which ones are still figuring themselves out, the McCann Team would love to help. Let's Build Your Next Chapter.