Elkins Park’s Creekside Market & Tap replaced a community-owned grocery store. Will locals embrace it?

The food hall in Elkins Park has a lot going for it. It’s in a densely populated, walkable neighborhood. A small but diverse mix of vendors offers everything from restaurant-grade groceries to falafel and shawarma and comfort food like a fried chicken sandwich with Sri Lankan spices. There’s a retail stand from a Philly winery, local craft beer, and a full bar stocked with Pennsylvania products. Air hockey, foosball, flat-screens, and plenty of seating beyond the bar make it family-friendly, too.

In South Philly or Fishtown, this assemblage would easily generate buzz. Yet Creekside Market & Tap has often felt deserted over multiple visits made since its opening in August 2020.

Sammy Barouki, who co-owns the market’s deli, recites a conversation he’s had over and over. “Most people come in the first time, they live a few blocks away. ‘I didn’t know you were open.’ ‘Yeah, for a year and a half.’ ‘Really?’ ”

The owners and tenants at this fledgling food hall want it to become a “mini-Reading Terminal,” and it may finally be gathering steam. Two vendors — Mitchell & Mitchell Wines and Haven Local, from a.kitchen alum Tam Fuard — opened last fall, and two more prospective tenants are negotiating leases. As they remake this space, their success may ultimately ride on whether they can read the sensibilities of a changing neighborhood.

Creekside occupies a storied property in this quiet suburb north of the city line. For 42 years, the High School Road storefront was home to the Ashbourne Market, a bustling grocery store that anchored a commercial strip steps from the Elkins Park train station. But the community hub floundered after changing hands in 2000 and folded two years later. Neighboring shops started to flicker out.

“It was heartbreaking,” says longtime Elkins Park resident Rachel Ezekiel-Fishbein. “When Ashbourne closed, it really changed the center of our town.”

In 2013, the market got a promising new life: Creekside Co-op opened, founded on the equity of more than 1,800 member-owners who poured hopes and cash into the store. The effort took five years to come to fruition, and it lasted only six before closing in 2018 in dire financial straits. It was a deflating moment for the area, even as new businesses were percolating.

Creekside’s new owners — partners Jerry Benedict, Steve Everett, and Dan Glennon, an Elkins Park resident — were somewhat familiar with the space’s baggage when they bought it in July 2019. They chose to keep the name to signal their desire to be a gathering place for the community. Benedict, who spearheads operations at Creekside, points to artist pop-ups, Quizzo, and live music as the sort of programming they hope to build on moving forward.

“We wanted to still accomplish what I think the co-op was trying to accomplish,” he says.

Benedict also recognizes the building’s past can be a liability. “I got the sense that there was a bit of a mixed opinion about the space, which made it a little harder on us to reengage,” he says. “There were some folks that were a little jaded. People invested a lot of money.”

Creekside’s tenants inherit not only their predecessor’s legacy and footprint (the refrigeration units and sliding doors remained) but also its pricing predicament: The co-op struggled to compete with a slew of other grocery stores within a small radius. While Elkins Park is not rife with wine shops, bars, or even restaurants, it’s ringed by suburbs and Philadelphia neighborhoods with long-established alternatives.

“People just need a reason to decide to go there and not somewhere else,” says Ezekiel-Fishbein. “I think there is this huge desire for it to succeed. But that doesn’t mean people are going to give it a free pass.”

On a lively Elkins Park Facebook page, debates have broken out about the space. “Why is it that no one hangs out at The Creekside market and Cheshire Brewery?” asked one poster in October 2021. Replies flooded in. “Pandemic?” “Needs some snacks or something.” “I don’t know if there’s a huge drinking crowd in the general area.” “Never even heard of it before.”

Critics and defenders sparred, but there was consensus: Creekside Market & Tap has potential.

Benedict and his partners bought the Creekside primarily to serve as a platform for Cheshire Brewing Co., their Alice in Wonderland-themed nano-brewery based in Pottstown. They subdivided the 6,000-square-foot interior to make room for other tenants.

Transforming a grocery store into a food hall has been piecemeal. It took more than a year to get the building rezoned and outfitted for food and drink service for 125 seats. Even then, when Creekside opened in August 2020, Cheshire only sold canned beer out of the co-op’s repurposed dairy case. Customers couldn’t enjoy drinks at the bar until spring 2021, when its full brewery license was approved. The aesthetic evolution has been gradual, too. Two murals were completed last spring, and manager Brian McGinn tinted lights in the dairy case after customers complained.

Next to Cheshire, the second-largest tenant is Creekside Deli and Restaurant, offering many of the same prepared foods and cold cuts as the co-op. “We just carried on,” says Barouki, who co-owns the deli with his cousin Wissam. “Middle Eastern, Moroccan, Mediterranean, Italian, whatever you want, we got it!”

In sharp contrast to the deli’s sweeping scope is the hyper-local inventory of Dave’s Backyard Farms. Owner Dave Hamalian has crammed his small stand with premier products: flours and grains from Castle Valley Mill, pork from Stryker Farms, cheese from Valley Milkhouse and Goat Rodeo, hard-to-find fungi from Mycopolitan Mushrooms, citrus from Bhumi Growers, rice from Blue Moon Acres, and more. The Huntingdon Valley native has a high bar for his wares, and they’re priced accordingly. He also strictly hews to seasonality; you won’t find tomatoes in winter here.

“I believe in local food,” Hamalian says. “I’m not going to compromise my values for more consistent business.”

Hamalian has been in business for five years and knows most of his customers by name. He sold produce to the co-op and held pop-ups in Creekside as soon as the new owners reopened. He’s actively recruited other vendors to join him.

One of those recruits is Tam Fuard of Haven Local. Fuard was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in the United Kingdom, and moved to New York, where he worked in advertising before shifting to restaurants. He cooked at an upscale Jewish deli and a gourmet chicken and waffles spot in Brooklyn before going to High Street on Hudson. He was offered a job at a.kitchen in 2018; it was an attractive offer for him and his wife, who wanted to buy a home and start a family, but the chef left after less than year to start something of his own.

Fuard was thinking of opening elsewhere in Elkins Park, at the busy intersection of Route 611 and Church Road, but Hamalian wrote him an email making the case for Creekside. Fuard was swayed by the argument customers would cross-pollinate in the budding food hall. He also liked the idea that he’d be joining other vendors knitting themselves into the neighborhood.

“I want to be part of this community versus another restaurant that you can order from DoorDash.”

“I want to be part of this community versus another restaurant that you can order from DoorDash,” Fuard says.

Mitchell & Mitchell Wines owner Frank Mitchell approached Creekside’s property manager for similar reasons. The Philly winery was looking for a farmers market setup similar to Headhouse Square’s, which the winery has long attended, but with expanded hours. He was “elated” to find Creekside.

“The idea of having a brewpub and then building a farmers market around it, it’s great,” Mitchell says. His license allows him to sell wine by the glass only one day a week — dubbed Wine Down Wednesday — but he’s content. He sees his wine, made from imported grapes, as a complement to Cheshire’s bar, which offers glasses from Pennsylvania vintners like Stone & Key Cellars and Galen Glen Winery. His five-days-a-week wine stand is also a well-positioned stop for customers headed to nearby BYOBs.

Another alluring aspect for Mitchell is Creekside’s all-ages vibe. “You wouldn’t dare think of taking your child to a bar. But here, it’s more relaxed,” he says.

At present, the market’s attempting a difficult move, straddling the tastes of an old Elkins Park and what might be a new one. The deli and Dave’s Backyard Farms operate on different ends of the spectrum, one offering familiar favorites and the other selling high-end groceries. Cheshire, Mitchell & Mitchell, and Haven Local hover in the middle ground, tempering local bents with modest pricing, not pushing the boundaries too far.

“There’s so much more money walking in and out of the doors in a city. When you get to the suburbs, you really have to win the community,” Fuard says.

Fuard and his wife, Molly, moved to Elkins Park from New York after vetting other suburbs and finding them too homogenous. They’re excited to raise their young son here.

“We chose this neighborhood because it’s diverse and affluent, which is a rare thing to find in the suburbs,” he says.

These are much the same reasons why Rachel Ezekiel-Fishbein decided to move to Elkins Park almost 30 years ago, after looking in Ardmore, Chestnut Hill, and Mount Airy. You could get the most house for the least money, and though the area skewed Jewish, it was still diverse, she says. Her three kids got great educations there.

She’s seen fellow empty-nesters decide to stay in their big, old houses, but she’s also noticed more young families moving in. When she walks the neighborhood, she asks dog-walkers and stroller-pushing parents where they’re from.

“There seem to be a lot of people moving from Fairmount, Center City, New York, North Jersey, definitely Fishtown, Northern Liberties,” Ezekiel-Fishbein says. “It has definitely become a bit of a hot spot.”

Creekside is primed for this crowd, and there are some signs it may finally be gaining traction. Fuard and Mitchell say sales are up after an expected winter slowdown. Cheshire and the deli recently started working in tandem, providing full food service to customers at the bar and doubling check averages as a result, McGinn says. As the pandemic restrictions have eased, he’s seen an uptick in commuters using the train station down the street, sending more potential customers past Creekside’s doors. He hopes to team up with neighboring restaurants for summer block parties, to let everyone passing by know they’re there.

With the weather warming up, a new marketing strategy in the works, and talk of more tenants, Creekside’s vendors are feeling hopeful. If they succeed in their balancing act and appeal to suburbanites new and old, this building could once again be the beating heart of Elkins Park.

Creekside Market & Tap is open Tuesday through Sunday. Check individual vendors’ hours at creeksidemarketandtap.com/vendors.