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The ‘cheap wine’ bar that saved a white-tablecloth restaurant on Manayunk’s Main Street

Affordable wine and brick oven-fired pizzas at Cooper's Wine Bar 'saved the day' for its 35-year-old sister restaurant, Jake's. It remains one of the city's best-priced wine bars.

Head bartender Carrie Hice chats with folks at Cooper's Wine Bar in Manayunk this month.
Head bartender Carrie Hice chats with folks at Cooper's Wine Bar in Manayunk this month.Read moreElizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer

Of all the conversations you might have with strangers in a Manayunk bar, you might expect it to drift toward biking the Wall, taking scenic walks on the towpath, or navigating the neighborhood’s treacherous two-way alleys.

Nope. The go-to topic is real estate and its ever-upward trajectory here in the hilliest enclave in the city.

If the regulars sitting at Cooper’s Wine Bar on a weekday night are to be believed, 1970s Manayunk was a rough-and-tumble place, home to mean streets and trash can fires. (If that sounds wrong, fear not: They only moved to the area in the last decade.) Over their pints of beer and my $9 draft pour of crisp Basque Txakolina, we talked about million-dollar condos, an increasingly upscale Main Street, and how Dawson Street Pub used to be a biker bar named Uncle Charlie’s (pronounced Chaw-ly’s).

A couple drinks doesn’t allow nearly enough time to recap the evolution of Manayunk. The neighborhood went from industrial hub to tight-knit working-class town to “another New Hope” to college-kid central over a century, and it’s still changing. In the late ’90s, development grew so frenzied that City Council imposed a five-year moratorium on new restaurants on and around Main Street — a move that would be unthinkable today.

There may be no more appropriate forum for this conversation than the bar at Cooper’s — or more accurately, Jake’s and Cooper’s, two very different Main Street establishments that fused into one over time. Without Jake’s, there wouldn’t be a Cooper’s, and without Cooper’s, Jake’s would be long gone.

Jake’s opened in 1987, early on in Manayunk’s restaurant renaissance. It was a white-tablecloth spot that attracted a tony audience clad in “enough fur to insulate One Liberty Place,” according to the Daily News. Owned by Bruce Cooper, formerly the executive chef at Lankenau Hospital, it served swordfish salad, grilled foie gras, roast duck in Chambord sauce, and veal with lobster mashed potatoes. It scored Craig LaBan’s first three-bell review in 1998.

Fast-forward to 2008, the thick of the Great Recession. Cooper finally acquired the retail storefront next to Jake’s after several unsuccessful attempts and within months converted the space into Cooper’s, a casual wine bar with a brick oven for firing thin-crust pizzas that featured local cheese and meats.

The timing couldn’t have been better. Cooper’s cheap wine program — inspired by an Italian restaurant with three wine options: cheap, cheaper, and cheapest — and its affordably priced pizza were perfectly positioned for hard times. It was an instant, raucous success, to the chagrin of some Jake’s regulars. One customer had a mutual friend call Cooper to deliver a message.

“‘Could you tell him to put something over that door?’” Cooper remembers, gesturing to the door connecting the two establishments. “The change was that dramatic.”

The wine bar’s business kept Jake’s afloat through the recession, and Cooper eventually married their menus (now sprawling as a result), then their names. The white tablecloths disappeared. A wall inside Jake’s now hosts a pandemic-born wine shop with wines listed under “every day,” “pay day,” and “special day,” currently curated by former Tria partner Michael McCaulley, who first worked here in his teens. “We have more wines under $40 to $50 than the whole city combined,” Cooper boasts.

Like its prices, Cooper’s is accessible. It’s less fussy (and chic) than the natural wine bars cropping up downtown, attracting a mix of young couples on first dates and Gen Xers catching up over drinks. Regulars are quick to chat up a stranger, and your bartender’s likely a longtime local, like Carrie Hice, who moved to Manayunk in ’03 and has worked at Cooper’s for eight years. She’s seen its clientele shift away from Main Liners to folks from the immediate area.

» READ MORE: The best wine bars in Philadelphia

“Sometimes people think Manayunk is this rowdy place with college kids,” Hice says. “People like me that were younger when they moved here started feeling comfortable and settling around here ... I came to realize what a small-town feel the neighborhood can have.”

She points to a telltale sign of change: “The restaurant even has a kids menu. We didn’t have one when I started.”

Cooper’s Wine Bar at 4365 Main St. is open Monday through Thursday 4 to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 1 to 11 p.m., and Sunday 1 to 9 p.m. 215-483-0444, jakesandcoopers.com.