Dining Room

While newer hotel restaurants generally emphasize quality of cuisine, the Haymarket dining room in the Mount Laurel Hilton sticks to the tried and true. Unfortunately, the old ways no longer seem so good. The unexciting decor in this brightly lighted restaurant seems little changed over the years, while the cuisine is a throwback to the days when steak houses were in vogue. With bookshelf-lined walls, the cavernous dining room has something of a library atmosphere, although it would have more appeal if the lighting were more romantic.

It's not quite ready to be called the Restaurant Row of Queen Village, but with the opening of the New Wave Cafe's dining room, Third and Catharine Streets now has two restaurant attractions. For those not familiar with the area, New Wave is directly across from Dmitri's, the very small Mediterranean BYOB where long lines of patrons endure the no-reservations policy to savor the now-legendary fresh fish dishes. It was, the story goes, this policy that helped give birth to New Wave's serious dining room.

It's nice when a restaurant improves but oh, so sad when the reverse occurs. Unfortunately, that is what has happened to the elegant cuisine and dining room at the former Tall Pines Inn in Sewell. Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski took over the restaurant and surrounding golf course nearly two years ago, renamed it the Eagles' Nest Golf and Country Club and downgraded the restaurant to an informal dining room with little character and modest food. Now called Mulligan's, the restaurant seems as much a sportsman's hangout as a public dining room.

The name of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel's most formal restaurant is simplicity itself: The Dining Room. The generously-proportioned room, with its crystal chandeliers and discreet piano music, is quite proper and restrained. The service is correct and unobtrusive. By now, you may be thinking: Uh-oh, here it comes. Boring food. On the contrary. Alsatian-born chef Philippe Reininger is turning out dazzlingly beautiful, original dishes that tickle the imagination as well as the palate.

In one breath, Susanna Foo explains that she is leaving these elegant digs on Walnut Street, closing her eponymous landmark of a dining room - the wellspring of her groundbreaking style of French-Chinese fusion - because she needs to "simplify. " She is vigorous still, at 65. But she was stressed from splitting herself - sometimes it almost seemed literally - between the Center City kitchen and her sleeker, newer (since 2006) Radnor restaurant, which will remain open. There's another reason to stay closer to her Main Line home: Her husband's health is not what it once was; a worrisome unsteadiness has crept into his gait.

Bryn Kaufman has gone from selling microcomputers from the dining room in his father's house to running a $35 million reseller of computer hardware, software and other equipment in the last 13 years. Kaufman moved his company, CMPExpress.com Inc., in October from Broomall to a second-floor office in the Hilltop Professional Building in Brookhaven. The young entrepreneur talks about tripling his 40-person workforce during the next year and getting ready for an initial public offering.

There are no windows in the luxurious dining room of the newly christened Westin hotel Grill Room. Its walls are so padded with posh green upholstery and dark wood accents that it feels like eating inside a Victorian sofa. Alone. That's right. There are virtually no customers in this dining room. And it is Friday night. What a strange sensation to sit in a space so lavish, decked with fine linens and crystal, an orchid on every table, the antique breakfronts filled with china, and watch all these gracious padded armchairs remain empty.

Longtime visitors remember Wida's, a mainstay built in the 1920s that in more recent years billed itself as "an old-fashioned seashore hotel like grandmother used to frequent. " Well, grandma, Wida's is gone. But unlike the island's cedar-shingled bungalows that were torn down and replaced with vinyl-sided seamonsters, Wida's has undergone a face-lift, an update, and a name change. Say hello to Daddy O. Martin Grims, the restaurateur who owns the Moshulu and several Main Line bistros, has turned the old Brant Beach structure into a 22-room boutique hotel and dining room aimed at the hip, urbane patron.

When Andreotti's Viennese Cafe opened in Cherry Hill in 1983, Marianne Andreotti would deliver her restaurant's seven-cheese spread to people sitting outside in their cars, waiting for a table. "We were so afraid they were going to leave," said Andreotti, whose father, Mark, started the restaurant on Route 70, then primarily a pastry shop with lunch seating. The patrons stayed, and the Andreottis expanded, over the years adding a dining room, piano, bar, and dance floor. The space evolved, but the traditions remained, including free hors d'oeuvres and desserts and music and dancing on Saturday nights.

When Michael Vogel was studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, he would spend a lot of his free time building things in the school's furniture-grade wood shop. Ten years as an investment banker, first in New York and then in Philadelphia, did not dull the Elkins Park native's interest in woodworking. "I tried to get access to woodshops regularly, but always found closed doors," Vogel said. The shops he approached would cite wear and tear on the machines, or insurance concerns, or that Vogel would be getting in the way as reasons to shut him out. The alternative was signing up for classes at a woodworking school, thus having regular access to a shop, but his schedule would not allow him to commit to, for example, certain set hours every Monday night.

When Andreotti's Viennese Cafe opened in Cherry Hill in 1983, Marianne Andreotti would deliver her restaurant's seven-cheese spread to people sitting outside in their cars, waiting for a table. "We were so afraid they were going to leave," said Andreotti, whose father, Mark, started the restaurant on Route 70, then primarily a pastry shop with lunch seating. The patrons stayed, and the Andreottis expanded, over the years adding a dining room, piano, bar, and dance floor. The space evolved, but the traditions remained, including free hors d'oeuvres and desserts and music and dancing on Saturday nights.

When Sandy and Chris Ross were in Portland, Ore., they lived in a house built for those who buy large suburban dwellings. "Our house was a McMansion, designed for most people who want a front and rear entrance, a dining room, and a recreation room," says Chris Ross, a software engineer. But the Rosses are not most people. When they moved to Bryn Mawr, they wanted a house built to accommodate their family's special needs, limited finances, and environmental awareness. "We didn't have a great amount of money to spend, so we shopped for a site we could afford," says Sandy Ross, a computer-company lawyer.

New on the edge of the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood is Fitler Dining Room (2201 Spruce St., 215-732-3331), a bistro from Dan Clark and Ed Hackett (Pub & Kitchen, the Diving Horse in Avalon). It fills the corner spot that previously was Meme. The 32-seater's clean look evokes a 1920s-'30s salon with its fabric-covered banquettes and bentwood chairs. Two beer taps are set in the dining room - small-batch crafts - plus 12 to 20 bottled beers. Artisan wines (about 40 bottles and 10 by the glass)

Some interior designers tout paint as the best way to change the look of a room. For Lisa Roberts, "It's lighting. . . . It's more bang for the buck. " With the holidays approaching, a new chandelier could be a fun and affordable way to make over a dining room, said Roberts, a Minneapolis designer who organized a chandelier fashion show at the home and garden show in that city earlier this year. Michelle Jennings Wiebe, president of Studio M Interior Design in Tampa, Fla., agreed, saying a dining room should be about more than the table and chairs.

LOOKING for some visual nourishment with your casino-restaurant meal? Check out the views from these dining rooms: Dos Caminos Casino: Harrah's Resort Atlantic City. Cuisine: Upscale Mexican. View: The only eatery in town that faces west offers the marshes of Absecon Inlet, a pristine horizon and spectacular sunsets. Contact: 609-441-5747, doscaminos.com. Chart House Casino: Golden Nugget Atlantic City. Cuisine: American with an emphasis on seafood.

Since 2000, 50,306 additional people between the ages of 20 and 34 moved into the city of Philadelphia, according to the 2010 Census. Meet two of them: David and Jackie Zavitz. This young couple, who met in Washington, where they were both living at the time, chose to move to Philadelphia when they married in 2003. "We wanted to put down roots," says Jackie, 34, a search professional with Korn/Ferry International. Philadelphia is "very accessible. I love city living. It's been a joy that way. " They bought, and renovated, their first home in Queen Village, and in 2007 hoped to buy a bigger place in the neighborhood but prices were too high.

Kay Sykora had lived in Manayunk and Roxborough since 1973, raising her children there and renovating several houses. Over 39 years, she helped found the Manayunk Development Corp., where she spent 16 years as executive director. She loved the area's history and charm. Frank Meis spent four decades in a classic Colonial in Lafayette Hill, raising a family there with his then-wife. When he and Sykora decided to marry in 2008, they looked for a place that was "theirs. " She was smitten with the hill towns, and he warmed to the idea of city living, but with one caveat: He wanted a driveway.

The first time Ashley Berke and John McGinniss saw the house in Fishtown that they now own, they bolted. "It was horrible — depressing!" as Berke recalls the three-story house, whose original section dates to the 1840s. Months went by as the couple searched for a home in the Philadelphia neighborhood, one they loved for its diversity, history and old dwellings, until — a year after that first visit — there was a call from a Realtor suggesting that the property might be worth a second look.

When Michael Vogel was studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, he would spend a lot of his free time building things in the school's furniture-grade wood shop. Ten years as an investment banker, first in New York and then in Philadelphia, did not dull the Elkins Park native's interest in woodworking. "I tried to get access to woodshops regularly, but always found closed doors," Vogel said. The shops he approached would cite wear and tear on the machines, or insurance concerns, or that Vogel would be getting in the way as reasons to shut him out. The alternative was signing up for classes at a woodworking school, thus having regular access to a shop, but his schedule would not allow him to commit to, for example, certain set hours every Monday night.

THE GEORGES PERRIER era at Le Bec-Fin will end Saturday night. Amid the hushed white-tablecloth grandeur of the dining room of the Walnut Street institution, beneath enormous crystal chandeliers, Perrier addressed several dozen staff members before dinner service yesterday to introduce Le Bec-Fin's new owner, Nicolas Fanucci. "I never thought this day would happen," Perrier said, his voice breaking, his eyes welling with tears. "I'm 70 years old [actually, 68]. I just can't do this anymore.