Fort Washington Restaurants in Upper Dublin: What’s New

Drive down Pennsylvania Avenue past the Fort Washington SEPTA station and you'll pass a bright patio wrapped in 100-inch TVs, in a building that spent years as a Friendly's. Keep going to South Bethlehem Pike, past Germantown Academy, and you'll find a white-tablecloth dining room where a Mexican restaurant did business for thirteen years. Eat dinner at both this year and you've been served by the same company twice without ever noticing.

That company is Fine Line Dining, the restaurant group behind Jasper's Backyard in Conshohocken. In roughly eighteen months, they converted a fast-food shell into The Fort Kitchen & Bar on the Upper Dublin Township side of Fort Washington, then, a half-mile down Bethlehem Pike, took over a vacated tenant's space just across the line in Whitemarsh Township to build Academy Grill. Together, the projects put one operator in two commercial buildings on the same stretch of road.

The Former Friendly's Building, Reimagined

The Fort Kitchen & Bar opened on November 22, 2024, at 325 Pennsylvania Avenue, in a building that had been sitting as a former Friendly's before Fine Line gutted and rebuilt it. The menu leans modern American: smash burgers in single, double, and triple stacks, flatbreads, a fried chicken sandwich, and a warm grain bowl built around farro and roasted butternut squash. Executive Chef Marie Lavizzo-Mourey runs the kitchen. The renovation added a patio deep enough for game-day crowds and a wall of screens that make the bar area feel more like a neighborhood sports lounge than the family restaurant the building used to house.

A few things worth knowing if you haven't been:

• The building sits directly across from the Fort Washington Regional Rail station, so it draws a commuter crowd for happy hour as much as a dinner crowd.
• The menu carries vegan and gluten-free options alongside the burgers.
• After 5 p.m., the kitchen adds entrees like rigatoni Bolognese and eggplant ravioli, both built on pastas sourced from Sorrentino's in Ambler.

When Cantina Feliz Left, The Same Group Followed

Cantina Feliz opened in Fort Washington in early 2011 and built a loyal following, earning 3 Bells from Philadelphia Inquirer critic Craig Laban along the way. In 2024, the restaurant relocated about ten minutes away to downtown Ambler, leaving its original building at 424 South Bethlehem Pike, just over the line in Whitemarsh Township, empty.

Fine Line Dining took over the vacant space and built Academy Grill, an Italian-inspired, white-tablecloth concept that opened earlier this year. The kitchen is led by chef Jeff Power, who spent years at Ambler's Dettera before Fine Line closed that restaurant this past spring with plans to eventually reopen it as a Mediterranean concept. Power's cooking traces back even further than Dettera. One dish on Academy Grill's menu, a chicken roulade built around a chicken mousseline studded with sun-dried tomato, uses a technique Power first learned more than two decades ago at Le Bec-Fin in Center City, according to a recent Philadelphia Inquirer feature on the dish.

So the same chef who anchored Ambler's fine-dining scene for years is now cooking a half-mile from where the town's longtime Mexican favorite used to sit, under the same ownership group that also runs the casual burger spot down the road.

Two Renovation Projects, One Restaurant Group, One Half-Mile

What Two Renovated Buildings Tell You

Here's the pattern that matters if you live in Fort Washington. Two commercial buildings that had gone dark—a former fast-food restaurant and a departed longtime tenant—were filled by Fine Line Dining, which already ran Jasper's Backyard in Conshohocken before opening two restaurants in the Fort Washington area.

The Dettera closure shows how the area's restaurant scene can change without losing its local talent. When Fine Line shut down its Ambler flagship this spring, the talent didn't leave the area, it moved a few miles down the road into Academy Grill's kitchen. The corridor keeps recycling its own operators rather than turning over to whoever happens to answer a for-lease sign.

For Fort Washington residents, the practical upshot is that dinner options got more specific rather than more generic. You can go from casual sports-bar fare at The Fort to a filet with harissa-tomato butter at Academy Grill without leaving the Fort Washington area. A generic "best restaurants near Upper Dublin" list may not capture this local history: which group operates the two restaurants and what occupied the buildings before.

If you already call Fort Washington home and you're curious what this kind of reinvestment tends to mean for property values on your specific block, Nicole Miller-DeSantis knows this corridor building by building. Schedule a free consultation anytime you want to talk it through.