Fort Washington's Two Newest Restaurants Share An Owner. That's Not A Coincidence.

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. Neither project happened because Fort Washington suddenly became a hot address. Both happened because one operator looked at two commercial buildings on the same stretch of road and decided they were worth fixing rather than skipping.

The Friendly's Nobody Missed, Until Somebody Renovated It

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.

Rather than let a well-located property sit vacant or hand it to an unrelated tenant, Fine Line Dining took it over 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

That third row belongs to a different company, but the pattern rhymes.

Maple Glen Got Its Own Version Of The Same Bet

Wissahickon Brewing Company started in East Falls in 2017 and expanded twice in 2025, first to Olde Kensington, then to a third location in Maple Glen. The building at 870 Welsh Road had spent years as Brick & Barrel Taphouse, a popular gastropub that closed for good in 2024 after landlord disputes compounded by lingering damage from the tornado that hit the area in 2021. Rather than build new, the Gill family, who own Wissahickon, leased the space, kept its existing wood-fired pizza oven, and added 32 taps pouring their own beer, cider, and house-made kombucha.

Co-owner Tim Gill Jr. lives nearby in Maple Glen and had long thought the building would make a good location. The taproom opened in mid-November 2025.

"There's not a lot of bars and restaurants in the area."

That's the case he made for jumping on a space most operators would have written off after a landlord dispute and storm damage. Worth noting for anyone mapping this out: the building sits just over the township line in Horsham's half of Maple Glen, though most Upper Dublin residents treat the whole crossroads as one downtown regardless of which side of the line they're standing on.

What Three Renovated Buildings Actually Tell You

Here's the pattern that matters if you live in this corner of Montgomery County. In the space of about two years, three commercial buildings that had gone dark, a shuttered fast-food chain, a departed longtime tenant, a storm-damaged taphouse, got filled not by a wave of unfamiliar chains but by operators who already had a track record nearby. Fine Line Dining already ran Jasper's Backyard in Conshohocken before betting on Fort Washington twice. Wissahickon Brewing already had two Philadelphia locations before betting on Maple Glen. None of these were first-time restaurateurs testing an unproven market. They were established names redeploying capital into buildings other landlords couldn't fill on their own.

The Dettera closure is the exception that proves the point rather than undercuts it. 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 residents, the practical upshot is that dinner options here 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 Fort Washington, and you can find a proper 32-tap beer hall in Maple Glen where Brick & Barrel sat closed for more than a year after a landlord dispute and lingering tornado damage. That's not the story a generic "best restaurants near Upper Dublin" list tells you, because that story requires knowing who owned what before, and what happened to the people who used to run it.

If you already call Fort Washington or Maple Glen 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.