Wine Bar

Darlene Boline Moseng, who did catering and private chef-ing, is into her third week of A La Maison (53 W. Lancaster Ave., Ardmore, 484-412-8009), a rustic French BYOB in the Main Line storefront that was Jewel of India. Moseng, a graduate of the Restaurant School, is keeping it traditional on a blackboard menu - coq au vin, short ribs, steak frites (dinner entrees: $21 to $28). She's backed in the kitchen by Maurice deRamus (Zen in Northern Liberties, Kujaku on the Parkway), and Marabella's alumna Lori Sexton is running the front of the house.

Pearl , a pan-Asian restau-bar three years in the works, has opened in a former Little Pete's at 1904 Chestnut St. The project from David, Scott and Sean Stein of Old City's Red Sky, with lawyer/club promoter Brett Perloff, is a two-story affair designed by DAS Architects (Rae, Rat's, Le Bec-Fin). First floor includes a white dining room and bar. There are a dark lounge, DJ booth, plus private room overlooking Chestnut Street on the second floor; four large "pearls," or seating areas, allow for bottle service for groups.

A. Serrill Headley, 68, formerly of Nottingham, Chester County, an adventuress who contributed to Philadelphia's restaurant renaissance when she opened Khyber Pass Pub in the 1970s, died of heart failure Jan. 17 at Augusta Medical Center in Waynesboro, Va. In the early 1970s, Ms. Headley purchased a neighborhood bar on Second Street near Chestnut. She left the regulars sitting at their stools arguing politics, while she transformed the surroundings with Pakistani wedding tents and created a menu that included Indian dishes and 180 brands of domestic and imported beer.

Chef Roberta Adamo, one of many Philadelphia-based proponents of cooking with fresh, seasonal foods from local sources, will lead "Shop, Cook and Dine" classes on Nov. 7, 14, 21 and 28 at Penne Restaurant and Wine Bar in the Hilton Inn at Penn, 3600 Sansom Street. The sessions ($30 each) are set to begin at 10:30 a.m. with a trip to a neighborhood farm market. There, Adamo will guide students in selecting ingredients for, and planning, the day's class menu. On returning to her pasta lab, the chef will give step-by-step instructions for preparing the meal.

As youngsters working behind the scenes at the Dilworthtown Inn, Anthony Mastroianni and Stephen Delaney often talked of the dream restaurant they might someday open together. A wine bar, perhaps, with a dedication to good food. Something on their home turf of the far-western suburbs. It took more than a decade to come to fruition, not to mention a few jobs in between and a cross-country move for the chef, but their planned collaboration has finally become a reality at Cosimo in Malvern.

What seemed worse for the young woman was not her alleged drugging and rape by Jeffrey Marsalis, but her decision to get an abortion after becoming pregnant as a result of the alleged assault. The woman, then a 26-year-old pharmaceutical rep living in Bethlehem, Pa., wanted to be a good Catholic, and nearly every time the abortion was mentioned, she welled-up in tears on the stand yesterday. "I was embarrassed and ashamed," she said as she sat in a wheelchair with her left leg propped up from a recent surgery.

Michael McCaulley is a successful Philadelphia sommelier, which means he makes more than $70,000 annually working three jobs and almost 70 hours a week under conditions that, at times, would seem risible anywhere else in the nation. "From a restaurant standpoint, it's archaic how we buy wine," McCaulley says of operating in a state where the sole seller is the beloved Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. He's beverage director at Tria, the popular Rittenhouse Square wine bar; sommelier at Northern Italian steak restaurant Davio's; and co-owner of Tria Fermentation School, which opened this week and offers classes and wine tastings.

Look to Del. to learn how to fix State Stores I read with great interest your article on the "improvements" in the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board in recent years ("Toasting the bottom line: State Stores, now offering better wines, more hours and more sites, took in nearly $1.5 billion in the last year," June 30.) I agree that the recent changes have made some aspects of wine purchasing in Pennsylvania a little more digestible than in years past. However, overall the changes are far inferior to the quality, pricing and service that I receive from stores in Delaware.

If you don't believe there is a new and improved West Chester, just visit Teca, short for Paninoteca, an authentic Italian caf? and panini bar that opened last month. A clue to how the menu works here is revealed in the restaurant's name. Teca is a combination paninoteca (for Italian-style sandwiches), enoteca (a wine bar) and discoteca (where the stylish night people gather to hear pop music in the late hours). Located on the shop-lined Gay Street, the place seems no bigger than a shoe box. But even that is true to its Italian roots.

Want to learn about wine really quickly? Everybody will tell you that the learning is in the tasting: If you want to know about wine, you have to taste it. The deeper secret is that if you want to learn quickly, you have to taste pairs, trios or whole groups of wines together. (In the wine world, a group of wines tasted together is called a "flight. ") When you taste wines side by side, you notice the differences between them, the small features that separate one from another. Your wine savvy goes up enormously any time you do comparison tasting, but you'll make the best progress if the wines are closely related to each other.