Restaurants in Willow Grove

Growing up, Marcie Spampinato watched her father, Mike, masterfully manage a local country club. By seventh grade, she was working alongside him, and today—with a restaurant management degree from Penn State under her belt—she joins with Mike to co-manage their steak-and-sushi joint, Spamps.

Chefs trained in Japan artfully stuff the eatery's sushi rolls with fresh ingredients such as black-pepper-crusted tuna and flying fish roe. Fusion flourishes such as kimchi tartar sauce, miso beurre blanc, and sake reductions give entrees such as rib-eye steak an Asian flair.

And much like a chocoholic's dream journal, the eatery's new cocktails revolve around sweet flavors, especially Marcie's favorite, the pumpkin-pie martini. Libations, which also include wine and beer, flow freely behind a copper bar with TVs or fill glasses in a dining room with exposed brick walls and private booths. At an outdoor patio dubbed The Grotto, lofted TVs illuminate trellises and tabletops as well as bar-goers shimmying to a live DJ's beats on Friday and Saturday nights.

Marhaba Blue Bell occupies an unassuming location just past the entrance of a Super Fresh market, but those who enter find Middle-Eastern dishes featuring flavors bigger than the restaurant's physical footprint. Using local ingredients, chefs whip up lemon-infused hummus and baba ghanouj and bake pitas fresh for each order. Lamb, beef, and chicken kebabs make savory meals or edible drumsticks for touring musicians, and the Marhaba meat extravaganza, with chicken, Middle-Eastern meatloaf, lamb, and gyro meat provides a multitude of proteins to pair with a BYOB beer or wine. A hookah's snake-like coils loop beside a cash register and multicolored lamps cast light across the ceiling's wooden rafters.

Though the county creek bubbling behind Zacharia’s Creek Side Café inspired the eatery’s name, it is the creativity of owners Andrew and Nancy Gallo and a team of trained chefs who keep diners enthused about each seasonal menu of Mediterranean- and New American-inspired fare. The casual BYOB restaurant—which has garnered praise from Zagat and LifeStyle Magazine—is outfitted with a 50-seat outdoor patio and on-location bakery and serves up lunch, dinner, and prix fixe menus amid Mediterranean-inspired interior decor. Housemade pastas are decorated with wild-boar ragu, goat cheese, and pork-belly confit, while the jumbo lump crab cakes come with an entourage of roasted potatoes and asparagus. An in-house pastry chef helps patrons cap off meals with fine cookies, seasonal cappuccinos, and over-the-top specialty cakes that are exact replicas of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee.

Executive chef Erick Jones incorporates the characteristic mesquite flavors of a wood-fired grill into the fresh seafood, meat, and breakfast dishes that earned the Timber Wood Fired Grill’s three from-scratch menus OpenTable's Diners' Choice award in 2011. Rustic wood-grain décor cultivates a comfortable atmosphere and distracts interloping beavers from the tasty menu of wood-grilled entrees, such as a garlic-marinated rib eye or braised fennel and shrimp pasta. On Sunday mornings, the cooks take inventive turns whipping up brunch provisions with ingredients ranging from caramelized peach toppings to a cool smoked salmon. Handmade desserts including crème brûlée and orange-infused cheesecake wait at the conclusion of every meal with the best challenge to ambitious appetites since the invention of the word bottomless.

From the outside, Springfield Inn is an anachronism. Its colonial-inspired structure—flaunting three tiered stories crowned with a swirling filigree—stands against its contemporary storefront neighbors as a symbol of an opulent past decade. Though its interior space regularly bustles with modern, DJ-fueled merrymaking, a menu of classic gourmet dishes still exudes the restaurant's timeless tenor. In the morning, chefs sizzle up a breakfast spread of waffles, omelets, and golden hot cakes to rouse incisors from their slumber, and evening selections range from honey-dipped fried chicken to filet mignon slathered in peppercorn demi-glace. Later hours bring strobe-light-splashed entertainment on select nights, rumbling the historic rafters with everything from live bands and DJs to rousing games of Red Rover.