Restaurants in Lancaster

Dried pasta from a box never tastes as good as fresh ravioli gently rolled, cut, and stuffed by someone's grandma. Since the grandma next door hasn't relented to your persistent requests, today's Groupon to Avalon Restaurant gets you $40 worth of romantic, homemade pastas, creative antipasti, and succulent fish and meat served with a magical sauce of trend and tradition for $20. Though your Groupon is not valid for Saturdays or holidays (we're all going to be at the Arbor Day gorilla parade anyway), you can enjoy Italian dining from 5:30 p.m.–10 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and Sunday from 5 p.m.–9 p.m. Grab your old-fashioned sweetie and fashionable friends for a succulent feast in this cozy West Chester retreat. Follow @Groupon_Says on Twitter.

Beer lovers can taste more than 20 beers, including Clipper City’s Heavy Seas, Guinness 250, Harp, Smithwick's, Magic Hat, and Dogfish Head. Slide more than 10 varieties of raw, steamed, roasted, or rockafellered shipped in for your consumption and pair them with fermented brews. Because humans cannot support a belly full of beer on oysters alone, create a steady drinking base of pit beef and frites.

Discovered in 1953, pizza is the only food to have been eaten on the moon, blessed by a pope, and endorsed by Olympic marathoner Gezahegne Abera—the "triple crown" of food honors. With today's Groupon, $10 gets you $20 worth of food and drink at Tommy’s Original Pizza, the pie-slinging eatery with locations in West Chester and Edgemont.

Within a 272-year-old fieldstone building, the aroma of pan-seared seafood and glazed meat drifts through dining rooms as patrons clink together glasses of fine wines. The location didn't always have such a refined air; throughout its history it served as a rest area for travelers and a prestigious school for boys. It wasn't until 1947, when Ivan Drechsler purchased the location, that it was restored and established as a country inn.

Today, executive chef and owner Brian Boston, who was recently named 2011 Chef of the Year by the Restaurant Association of Maryland, crafts upscale American dishes in the Inn's bustling kitchen. Plates of artisan cheeses and steaming bowls of fresh Maryland crab soup travel to the dining room, warming up stomachs for later courses more efficiently than a series of lunges beside one's table. Entrees such as the 12-ounce grilled rib-eye steak and wild-mushroom-stuffed phyllo star in the inventive, upscale menu next to sides of grilled summer vegetables.

Nearly 200 handpicked red and white wines age gracefully in an underground wine cellar, which rests beneath colonial-style dining rooms illumined by tabletop candles and crackling flames from a rustic stone fireplace. The Milton Inn Restaurant requests that male guests don jackets, a prerequisite that arose after the short-lived “shirtless cummerbund” fad of the late 1980s. Diners that commute via four-wheeled steed can deposit their vehicles in the eatery's free parking lot.

Conrad's Crabs puts the locally caught moneycrabs where its customers' ravenous mouths are as they live up to their "We catch our own" slogan. Waterman Tony Conrad brings in as much seafood as Poseidon allows, from crabs to fresh whole fish (both market price). A fusion of a seafood market and a carryout restaurant, Conrad's has a full menu of locavores' delights. Seafood can be purchased raw or steamed to order, with the fresh-caught fish and crustaceans going for market price daily. Long-standing selections include Conrad's Steamer Combo (six each of jumbo shrimp, oysters, and clams with a pound of mussels, $22.50) and entrees such as fried hard crab ($13.50), six fried oysters ($13.50), and a pint of Maryland crab soup ($5).

TJ's gourmet a la carte menu features fresh-made fare, with everything prudently prepared to order. Wake up to a savory serving of crab hollandaise over poached eggs, a homemade biscuit, and steamed asparagus ($9.50) or keep your strength up for a long day of clown wrestling with a protein-packed breakfast sandwich ($7.25), which you can top with apple-wood-smoked bacon or maple sausage, scrambled eggs, and cheddar and jack cheeses—all encased in either a pub roll or a garlic-herb wrap. Patrons with sweetie-pie palates will be more pleased with a decadent plate of cinnamon-bun french toast topped with maple butter and pecan syrup ($8.25) or the banana-walnut pancakes ($8.25).