Forest & Main Opens This Week in Fishtown

Forest & Main / Photograph by Mike Prince

It’s been more than a year since the space at 1416 Frankford Avenue (the former home of Cheu Noodle Bar’s Fishtown location) went quiet. May of 2024 was lights-out for the last location of Shawn Darragh and Ben Puchowitz’s era-defining experiment in deliberately unserious anti-fusion, and the address has been dark ever since .

But that all changes at the end of this week because that space — set right where Frankford Avenue bends, halfway between Pizzeria Beddia and Suraya — will become Forest & Main Brewing Co.’s new Fishtown taproom.

This is a big deal for a few different reasons. To start, it’s a great (small) space in a great (big) neighborhood, and having a serious operator in there is nothing but good news. Also, Forest & Main has been making some killer beers from the jump (way back in 2011 when partners Daniel Endicott, Gerard Olson, and Brian DeAngelo were working out of a partially converted Victorian in Ambler) and this move is a sign that they’re still growing. Not only that, but they’ve signed up one of the most interesting chefs in the region, Dane DeMarco, to handle the kitchen with a “Snack Shack” menu that’s 100 percent in keeping with their Nintendo-in-mom’s-basement culinary vibe that I can’t wait to check it out myself.

So let’s talk about these one at a time.

First, the ex-Cheu space is perfect for exactly this kind of taproom expansion because it’s not some big, hulking, difficult-to-manage behemoth with more room than a small brewery can reasonably fill, but neither is it so small that it feels insignificant or forgettable. The new Forest & Main taproom will have a 10-seat bar and seating inside for 35, plus another 20 on the patio. They’re not trying to do lunches, but will be open six nights a week, Wednesday to Monday, from 4 p.m. to midnight, for beers and snacks.

Second, the F&M partners made their names doing unusual, traditional, and hard-to-find styles of beer. We’re talking true English ales, farmhouse-style saisons using their own house-cultured yeast, that kind of thing. As mentioned, they started out in a house in Ambler, moved to a proper brewery space in 2021 (also in Ambler) that allowed them to do lagers and barrel-aged beers, and have outfitted the new Fishtown space with three Czechoslovakian Lukr side-pull faucets (which allow for the bartender to precisely control the amount of foam in said Czech-style lagers), hand-pumps for the ales, and seven additional taps which they’ll be using to round out the opening beer list which includes their house lager, pilsner, and festbier (on the side-pulls), a British IPA, a bitter, and Fair Winds Oat Mild (on the hand pulls), then a mix of IPAs, pales, stouts, and three different saisons (a foeder fermented Solaire Reserve, Cult Vibes with lemongrass and chamomile, and The Lady Saison). If you’re a super beer-nerd, all of this is very exciting. If you’re not, just get the IPA. No one will be disappointed.

And as for the food? DeMarco is a great pick for this. With places like American Sardine Bar, Second District Brewing, South Philly Taproom, and Hawthorne’s already on their resume, DeMarco opened a pandemic-inspired spot in New Jersey in 2022 called Burgertime that was video-game-themed and served things like hot dogs covered in peanut butter and Fritos, and burger smushed between two grilled cheese sandwiches. It was awesome and I loved it, but it was also short-lived. After that, it was Gass & Main in Haddonfield which refined the idea of cooking pure suburban Americana and put it on fancy plates: house-made chips with French onion crème fraîche and caviar, beef stew with a 10-hour red wine braise, truffled gnocchi mac-and-cheese in a perfect Mornay sauce … that kind of thing.

Here, DeMarco and the Forest & Main crew will be doing something halfway in between those two poles. There’s a burger on the menu with bacon, jalapeño, Shropshire Blue cheese, and blackberry jam. Pizza bread made on a semolina Italian loaf. A “Walking Cheesesteak” play on Friday night walking tacos, with Fritos, sliced ribeye, beer cheez wiz, caramelized onions, and hoagie relish. Fried Oreos. Gigantic “Table Pretzels” with house-made everything spice and beer mustard.

It’s an iconoclast’s menu that matches the iconoclast’s beer list — both of them witnessing the way the food and beer world is and then offering a different path. And I like that a lot. There’s a playful fuck-you-ishness at the heart of both that I respect. And I’m excited to see how they play together in the same space.

And the best news here? None of us will have to wait that long. The new Forest & Main taproom opens at 4 p.m. this Friday, October 17th, at Frankford and Belgrade. Want to know more? Check ’em out right here.