I have been on an enforced three-month leave from the Local, you might say (details in a later article), but the last restaurant we went to before my unintentional absence was Spring Mill Cafe in Conshohocken, where the quiet, rural River Road meets Barren Hill Road.
Our distinguished dinner companion was the Rev. Robert L. Polk, 98, who at one time was the only Black resident among the more than 400 retirees at Cathedral Village in upper Roxborough. In 1955, he began his ministerial career at a church in Berthold, North Dakota, where he was the only Black person in the entire town.
Another of the most memorable people in our community, if not the entire Delaware Valley, is Michele Haines, 83, the beret-wearing native of France and former foreign language teacher at Germantown Friends School and civil rights activist who founded Spring Mill Cafe 48 years ago.
The rustic building was once a general store that also served as the town post office when it was constructed in 1831. At first, Haines just served light French country lunches in a small backroom with five tables. Today, Spring Mill Cafe is a sophisticated BYOB that features many classic French dishes.
Part of what attracted Haines to the area was the European vibe.
“I recall first driving down the winding road before there was much development,” she once said, “and feeling like I was in the French countryside.”
Haines, whose son Ezra, 52, now runs the restaurant, told me in an earlier interview, “Ezra probably does a better job that I did, but I did have fun. My customers laughed with me, danced with me, even jumped up and down with me. I’m a performer, and I am still a clown, but I just can’t do the physical things I used to do.”
(When Haines left the reins at Spring Mill Cafe, she worked for a time at Gallery on the Avenue in Chestnut Hill, which started as a pop-up shop in 2017 but has evolved into a permanent art gallery.)
Local French food aficionados are lucky to have an authentic classic French restaurant 10 minutes from Chestnut Hill. An appetizer of Coquille St. Jacques, for example, was an absolute epiphany ($24), mining flavors that were natural and pure. It steeped the heady essence of seared sea scallops with a citrus beurre blanc and caviar.
Escargots ($18.50) were a sublime collection of snails draped in feather light vol-au-vent pastry shells with just the right marriage of caramelized mushrooms, garlic, parsley, butter and cream.
A perfect selection for pescatarians is the deeply savory seared filet of sustainable salmon jeweled with a watercress citrus cream sauce dressed with tawny Beluga lentils ($38).
And any vegetarian would be delighted with the mushroom Bourguignon ($38), a refreshing ode to winter, with every element singing in harmony, especially the quality of the red wine reduction with onions, carrots and potatoes.
(On the Open Table website there are 2,519 reviews of Spring Mill Cafe. More than 90 percent gave it five stars, and the average grades were 4.8 for food and 4.9 for service.)
I think it’s worth mentioning that Michele Haines was born in 1942 in the Touraine region of France on the border between Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime. In 1944, when her father was killed in an American bombing, she was found safe in his arms. Though she won scholarships to Radcliffe College and Stanford University, her family prohibited her from attending. When the chance to work as a United Nations translator surfaced, she capitalized on the opportunity and in 1961 moved to New York City.
But she soon quit and joined a federal program training foreign language teachers for American high schools. In the summer of 1963 the program sent her to Tallahassee, which she had never heard of until then. That same year she traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, and marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in civil rights marches. She was arrested twice, once because she sat next to a Black friend in a restaurant and refused to move. On one occasion a man attacked her. She defended herself by picking up a nearby wooden stool. It was red by the end of the encounter.
“Because of what I learned as a small child from my family during World War II about the moral necessity to fight against injustice and other evils, I became involved in the civil rights movement after coming to this country,” Haines explained. “As I later told my grandson, I got to talk to Dr. King. I drank some water with him and listened to him talk.”
For more information or reservations, call 610-828-2550 or visit springmill.com. Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.
Dining and Cooking