August 15–22, 1996

food

Cottage Industry

A new restaurant in Mount Airy shows plenty of potential.

By Janet Ruth Falon

It's a brave step to open a restaurant with greater-than-fast-food aspirations in Mount Airy.

First of all, Mount Airy is just down Germantown Avenue from Chestnut Hill, which is already a thriving dining-out neighborhood. And it's maybe a 10-minute drive from Manayunk, with its vibrant, eclectic, rivals-Center-City restaurant scene.

Also, lots of Mount Airians are members of the Weaver's Way food co-op — actually, every single person I know who lives in that neighborhood belongs — and thus have access to fresh, unusual, whole foods, so why eat out at all?

The answer, the owners of Cresheim Cottage Cafe must hope, is their restaurant, which opened just last month. At the very least, and at the very beginning of the restaurant's life, they can bank on the fierce loyalty of Mount Airy's fans. But after that, the restaurant will have to shine — especially given the area competition — if it wants to last.

Staying power is already built into the restaurant's walls. Cresheim Cottage Cafe is located in a building that's been on this site since about 1748 — the site was once part of a 100-acre land tract secured by German settlers from William Penn. The back of the menu includes a short history of the cottage itself which, the owners explain, was already standing when the 1777 Battle of Germantown was fought outside its doors.

In its present incarnation, Cresheim Cottage Cafe combines cozy with up-to-date, such as the peaceable co-existence of recessed lighting and wall sconces (more into food than design, I always want to call them scones). But the prominent computers, with their colorful flashing screens, in the welcome area are most jarring, until you realize in a get-with-it way that this is a modern restaurant, in many ways, that's simply wearing the appearance of old.

So the Cresheim Cottage Cafe has history and an assumed cheering section from the neighborhood, but the essential question is, how's the food?

From my dinner there last week, my answer is: It's very Mount Airy. It's well-intentioned. It's thoughtful. It's earnest. It's experimental. And perhaps most important, it integrates and combines ingredients that might never sit on the same plate in many other Philadelphia restaurants.

But is it spectacular? No, at least not yet, and the service is slower than I might like, perhaps while the waitstaff is getting the hang of zipping from room to room, and between floors, balancing trays of entrees. But Cresheim Cottage Cafe is certainly worth trying, and returning to, to see what happens as the newness wears off and it settles into the neighborhood.

My husband and I were there with Sharon and Pete, two Mount Airian friends who, I felt, were predisposed to liking the place, and they did — although not without minor qualifications and, you might say, grains of salt, which increased the credibility of their comments.

We shared four starters, all of which passed muster, if not superlatively. The herbed grilled pita served with grilled vegetables, oven-dried tomatoes and goat cheese ($5.25) tasted much more like the vegetables than any seasonings which, in fact, seemed the theme of all the food: the flavors of the food items themselves, either alone or in combination, were much stronger than whatever they'd been flavored with. I like this; it feels very home-cooking.

We also passed around the warm mixed cheese salad ($5.75), consisting of several phyllo triangles filled with ricotta and herbs, all atop a selection of curly field greens; and stuffed grilled eggplant ($5.25), the slightly tough eggplant rolls filled with delightful mashed artichokes; and the roasted eggplant and red pepper soup ($3) — you know you're eating with good friends when four of you can share a bowl of soup — which was wonderfully thick and stewlike.

We went our separate ways for entrees. I had the torta rustica ($12), which wasn't quite as extraordinary as it was described in the menu: grilled vegetables between sheets of fresh spinach, tomato pasta and assorted cheeses topped with a savory pie crust. What I liked best about it, though, is that the dish tasted surprisingly sweet, as if the chefs had figured out how to prepare the ingredients in a way that released some inherent sweetness.

My husband and Sharon both opted for the vegetable plate ($10.75), which consisted of several piles of side dishes, including wild rice with mint, yellow squash, broccoli, tomatoes, all served with a black bean croquette. How could there be a restaurant in Mount Airy that didn't cater, at least a bit, to vegetarians?

The names of some of the desserts reinforced my sense that homemade-ness is valued at Cresheim Cottage Cafe: There's "really good chocolate cake with creamy chocolate frosting" ($3.50), which didn't quite reach "really good" for me; and "cookies with milk, coffee or tea (just like mom makes!)" ($3.75), which also weren't amazing but were definitely better than the cookies my mother never makes.

My husband opted for a non-homey dessert, banana-praline streusel served with Devonshire cream ($4), which didn't live up to its drooling potential.

But that's the key word, "potential." If ever a restaurant had it, and ever its logical customers wanted it realized, that's Cresheim Cottage Cafe.

Cresheim Cottage Cafe, 7402 Germantown Ave., Mount Airy, 248-4365.