Bryn Mawr's Lancaster Avenue Has Two Debuts This Fall, a Century Apart

Catch a show at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute this month and you'll walk out onto Lancaster Avenue looking for dinner, the way people have for a hundred years. For most of the last decade, that short walk toward Bryn Mawr Village has meant scanning a storefront that keeps changing its name. This fall, both halves of that walk are mid-transition at the same time, and for opposite reasons. One address is celebrating a century of never having to reinvent itself. The other is opening its fourth concept since 2017.

That pairing is the actual story of Lancaster Avenue this season. Not a single new restaurant, and not a single anniversary, but the fact that the neighborhood's oldest cultural fixture and its most restless commercial address are both about to look different within weeks of each other.

The Marquee That Never Went Dark

The Seville Theatre opened at 824 W. Lancaster Avenue on October 1, 1926, as a single-screen movie palace. It is turning 100 this fall, and the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, the nonprofit that bought the then-dilapidated building in 2005 and rebuilt it into a four-screen independent art house, is treating the milestone as a full year of programming rather than a single party. The centerpiece is a series called BMFI 100, which spends the year screening key films that actually played in that building across its history, tying each showing back to the decade it first appeared on that same screen.

Alongside the series, a former BMFI staffer named Jacob Dickens spent months building something closer to an archive than a marketing project: a complete, year-by-year catalog on Letterboxd of every film shown at the Seville Theatre and its successor since 1926, more than 12,000 titles pulled from old newspaper listings and campus publications. PhillyVoice covered the project this past July, and it's the kind of detail that only exists because someone who cared about this specific building decided the record was worth keeping.

The institute is also running a fundraising and recognition campaign it calls the Centennial Soiree, active from July 2026 through January 2027, built around sponsor tiers and a commemorative book rather than a single gala night. The practical effect for a Bryn Mawr resident is less about any one event and more about the fact that a business on this block has now outlasted nearly every other tenant on the avenue by roughly a century, and is spending its anniversary reminding the neighborhood why.

Four Restaurants, One Kitchen

Walk a few blocks down from the theater into Bryn Mawr Village and you land at 915 Lancaster Avenue, a space with a much shorter and much rockier history. Enoteca Tredici opened there in 2017 and built a genuine following as a Mediterranean-style wine bar before closing in 2021, a casualty of financial strain and the pandemic. The space reopened in 2022 as Fiore Rosso, a project tied to Philadelphia chef Marc Vetri, then rebranded in 2024 as Il Fiore. Il Fiore closed at the start of this year.

That is three concepts in under a decade in a single storefront, which is the kind of turnover that makes a longtime resident stop trying new places there until something sticks. The fourth attempt is now underway. Alex Fiorello, a 28-year-old restaurateur who already runs Alessandro's Wood Fired Italian in Wayne and Alessandro's Pizzeria in West Chester, is opening Alessandro's Enoteca in the same space, with culinary direction from Matt Arcomone, whose résumé includes stints at Osteria, Vetri, and Palladino's.

The timeline for that opening has moved more than once, which is worth saying plainly rather than repeating whatever date is currently posted. In January, early reporting suggested the restaurant could open as early as April. By late winter, Alessandro's own site was pointing to September. As of the Philadelphia Inquirer's fall dining preview published this month, the target has shifted again to mid-to-late October, timed almost exactly to the Film Institute's own centennial season two blocks away.

The menu direction has stayed consistent even as the calendar has slipped: house-made pasta, wood-fired pizza, a live-fire grill, and dry-aged proteins using the on-site aging refrigerators left behind by the previous tenant, with a handful of sushi-style dishes as a smaller departure. Fiorello has described it as a step up from his Wayne restaurant in polish, while staying priced for regular visits rather than special occasions.

"We are very excited to have a restaurant that appeals to so many of our neighbors, has a lively bar scene, and is priced such that people can visit on a regular basis," Bryn Mawr Village owner Paul Aschkenasy said of the new tenant.

That framing matters more than it might seem. The two concepts that struggled in that space, Fiore Rosso and Il Fiore, both leaned toward special-occasion dining. Fiorello's existing restaurants in Wayne and West Chester have built their following on being places people return to on an ordinary Tuesday. Whether that pattern holds in a space that has resisted three previous owners is the thing worth watching once the doors actually open.

The Rest of the Block Is Filling In Too

The 915 Lancaster address isn't the only kitchen changing hands nearby. Bryn Mawr's stretch of Lancaster Avenue has picked up several new tenants over the past several months, according to reporting from Main Line Today and the Inquirer:

• Love & Honey Fried Chicken opened its first Main Line location on the avenue, a second franchise outpost of the Northern Liberties original, locally owned and operated by a Berwyn family.
• Dim Sum Factory, part of a local chain, is expected to open a Bryn Mawr location this winter with soup dumplings, shumai, and scallion pancakes.
• Flakely, a gluten-free bakery that started out of an industrial kitchen in Manayunk, is building its first storefront on Lancaster Avenue.
• The Buttery, a Malvern-based bakery and cafe, recently opened a Bryn Mawr location and has been expanding its original operation into dinner service with Neapolitan pizza and shareable plates.

None of these is as large a story on its own as the theater's anniversary or the fourth act at 915 Lancaster. Together, they mean the stretch of avenue between the Film Institute and Bryn Mawr Village has more open storefronts serving food right now than it has in recent memory, which changes what a night out here actually looks like compared to even a year ago.

What This Means for Your Fall Calendar

If you're the kind of resident who already treats the Bryn Mawr Film Institute as a regular stop, this fall gives you a reason to pay closer attention to the schedule. The BMFI 100 series is built specifically to reward that kind of attention, since each film on the calendar is tied to a real moment in the building's own history rather than a generic classics lineup.

If you've been avoiding 915 Lancaster Avenue because you've watched three restaurants come and go there, the mid-to-late October opening of Alessandro's Enoteca is worth marking rather than dismissing. A kitchen backed by an owner with two already-successful locations, and inherited equipment like the aging refrigerators built for dry-aged proteins, is a different proposition than the two ventures that came before it, even if the space itself has earned some skepticism.

And if you haven't walked the full stretch between the theater and the village lately, the smaller openings, Love & Honey, The Buttery, the coming Dim Sum Factory and Flakely storefronts, add up to more reasons to make that walk than you may have on your mental map.

Main Line Fine Homes spends a lot of time on this stretch of Lancaster Avenue, mostly because our clients ask us what's changing before they ask what a house is worth. If you're curious what any of this means for property values on your particular block, or you just want a neighbor's read on the neighborhood, Main Line Fine Homes is always glad to talk it through.