Coming Soon: Little Cafe That Puts Big Emphasis on Flavor

The Tasting Room is aptly named.

According to partner Joe Petrucci—who, along with wife and JPM Catering and Events founder Jennifer McCafferty, is bringing the intimate 20-seat café to Ardmore in September—the eatery represents the couple’s best effort to solve an enviable problem: what do you do when your food is so good, you just need prospective customers to taste it?

Apparently, you let them taste it.

The café's hook is that diners will get an opportunity to buy slightly more than bite-sized morsels of each of the menu items that McCafferty—a 1996 graduate of Lower Merion High School—prepares. The food, the couple insists, sells itself.

“Our strategy is get our food in as many mouths as possible, and hopefully those people will continue to come back,” Petrucci said by phone on Monday.

The former freelance writer describes the menu in question as “seasonal new American with Mediterranean influences”—basically, a handful of staple dishes, accentuated by a revolving door of additional items that change with the leaves—and emphasizes that it’s all made from scratch.

“We’re focused on quality ingredients, whether they be local or organic. That’s a big part of what we do,” Petrucci said.

The Café ‘Flips the Model’

What they do will be recognizable to fans of JPM Catering—the catering and event planning business McCafferty started in 2009 after she was laid off by a non-profit. Petrucci even describes The Tasting Room as an offshoot of JPM, its “retail concept.”

Petrucci, who says the couple initially “didn’t even want to open a restaurant,” watched the growth of JPM and decided, along with his wife, that they’d be wise to give customers an opportunity to try their increasingly popular food without “committing to the whole event.”

“What we came up with,” he said, “is a kind of inversion of how a restaurant will start doing catering out the back door.”

While the catering business will now operate out of The Tasting Room’s kitchen it is, excuse the pun, still the couple’s bread and butter.

Squeezing Into a High-Profile Location

Situated at 8 E. Lancaster Ave. in Ardmore, Petrucci said the 140-square-foot café will bring an intimate feeling to a block that’s one of the busiest on the Main Line.

“It’s a high profile location that we’re thrilled we’re able to get. We’re making a big investment in this space and in Ardmore,” he said.

The goal isn’t to have a packed house every day, Petrucci said, but to maintain a relaxed environment perfect for grabbing a quick lunch, chatting with friends, or snacking while you polish off some work on the café’s Wi-Fi.

Dinner will be served too, though Petrucci said he and his wife are still deciding whether to make the space a BYOB.

Standing Out in Crowded Market

There’s no shortage of restaurants and cafés on the Main Line, a fact the co-owner of one of the newest is acutely aware of. But while Petrucci says he expects The Tasting Room to separate itself from the field, he isn’t worried about competition. A rising tide, he says, lifts all ships.

“We all know there are more dining options than ever, and they’re some good ones too. [But] the more people who come to Ardmore to eat drink and shop will only mean good things for us,” he said.

In other words: he likes their chances.

“You’re going to be getting high quality food in a really vibrant space for a competitive price. If we do those things well, if we continue to produce food at a high quality…I think we will stand out.”