Cold Point Pub, in the Whole Foods at Plymouth Meeting, recently added many items to their previously small menu. I had a chance to preview it this week to try out some of their new offerings.  For those of you that don’t know, within the Whole Foods, Cold Point Pub serves six local rotating beers on tap, wine, and has over 300 bottled beers for take-out. And of course, you can eat there too. And now, there’s much more to choose from.

I love me some sweet potato fries so I definitely had to try those. But I also wanted to order the fish and chips. Instead of getting additional chips, I asked them to hold the extra chips. These sweet potato fries are great! There’s actually a mix of regular ones and salted ones, so with the sweet potatoes, you get some that are a little salty, and some that are just sweet. It’s a nice mix. The fish came out nice and hot! It’s a nice quality turbot fish but the batter was a bit too greasy for me. It comes with a nice homemade remoulade for dipping. There’s also some zesty slaw that I absolutely loved and devoured.
I’m a bit of a mac and cheese addict, so I had to try that! As with their takeout stuff, this mac and cheese was great. It was rich but a nice and mild dish, without a sharp taste, which is what I prefer. It’s a nice and creamy mac. It was supposed to have a breadcrumb topping, but for whatever it did not. With that, it would have been even better, but it was already pretty great.
I got the apple pie a la mode for dessert. Look at this presentation! It’s gorgeous! It’s a little mini individual pie, that’s placed on top of a slathering of what I think is dulce de leche. It’s sprinkled with cinnamon, topped with vanilla bean ice cream, and has an almond cookie thing on top (I have no idea what those things are called). This was a rather decadent apple pie! It tasted great, and the dulce de leche was a nice and luxurious touch, but I would have loved having some more apples in the pie. It was a little shy on the apple side! The variety on the new menu is great, for young and old. This mini pub is a nice and casual option, and you get plenty of food for the buck. And don’t forget, you could always go on the roof for the tacos!

Santucci’s recently opened a location in Bella Vista. Apparently, it had been in the works for a long time, and voila, it finally opened! It’s bright and inviting on the inside, and is super casual. There aren’t too many tables, as it seems mostly to be a takeout place.
I read that they hand cut all the potatoes for their fries so I wanted to try out their sweet potato fries. None of the food came out quickly. In fact, all of the food took a long ass time to come out. I guess that’s what preparing every fresh and by hand takes. When these came out, I was a little disappointed with the portion. I thought wow, that bowl, which is the size of a soup bowl, is barely filled with fries. They tasted just fine. But with this type of portion, I thought this could get interesting. But then the rest of the food came out.
This is a personal size pizza. When I envisioned personal, I thought of the small pizza hut sized personal pizzas. Um, this pizza is pretty big for being called “personal”. Unless that said “person” belongs to a sumo stable. I’m thinking these were at least 9×9 if not 10×10. In any case, it was pretty damn big for a personal pizza. We each had two slices and couldn’t possibly eat any more. I was also really expecting a sweet sauce because that’s what everything I had read had said, but I didn’t find it sweet at all. I found it quite zesty and fresh tasting. But this is coming from a person whose favorite pizza sauce is from Franzone’s, and you know that is the sweetest of the sweet sauces around. So to me, Santucci’s sauce isn’t sweet at all! Overall, I quite liked it. But we both loved the crust. It’s not thin, but it’s not thick, and it’s not doughy. It’s a nice mix of chewy with a bit of crispness on the outside. And I’m definitely a fan of sauce on the top pizzas.
I also wanted to try the meatballs. You get four ginormous meatballs and a giant heap of spaghetti with gravy, yeah, I said gravy. The spaghetti looks fresh made too, as it’s a rectangular shaped noodle. These meatballs were awesome! They’re so huge that eating one is pretty much enough. This plate could easily feed four people. There’s visible bits of carrots too, so you know there’s even vegetables in those suckers! They’re cooked well, nothing is burnt, nothing is raw, and you don’t have to chew these very hard in your mouth. We’re big fans!

I don’t remember cooking much when I was a kid, but Eve made us some carbonara and it was great!
Here’s the pasta, cream, and bacon all going. She did mess up a little bit and put way too much salt into the cream. But then M put some raw potato hunks into it and the potato soaked up the salt. There was tons of bacon in it and this particular bacon was so thick and delicious. Eve can cook for me any time!