Walk into Academy Grill on South Bethlehem Pike and order the burger. Comte cheese, a sunny-side-up egg, crispy shallots, brioche bun, chef-cut fries on the side. If it tastes familiar, that's because it should. It's the same burger that closed out sixteen years of service at Dettera in Ambler this spring, carried over onto a new menu by the same chef who built it in the first place.
That's the part of this story most people in Fort Washington are missing. The restaurant everyone has been talking about since July isn't a new operator testing the neighborhood. It's Ambler's most mourned closure, relocated to Fort Washington, with the same chef and a bigger room.
The Closing Nobody Wanted
Dettera Restaurant & Wine Bar served its last customers over a weekend in April 2026, after roughly 16 years on East Butler Avenue. Chef Jeffrey Power had run the kitchen since the beginning, back when owner Frank Lutter first opened the place in 2009. For a restaurant that had become the default choice for anniversaries and quiet celebrations in downtown Ambler, the closure landed as a genuine loss. It wasn't a business failing. It was a business being bought and repositioned.
The buyer was Fine Line Dining, the group behind Jasper's Backyard in Conshohocken and The Fort Kitchen & Bar in Fort Washington. Fine Line acquired Dettera in April, shut it down almost immediately, and moved its chef down the Pike to open something new.
Same Chef, Different Zip Code
Academy Grill opened at 424 South Bethlehem Pike the week of July 7, in the building that had sat empty since Cantina Feliz relocated to downtown Ambler back in 2024. That's worth sitting with for a second: one of the more visible commercial addresses on the Pike went two years without a tenant before this deal filled it. Whatever the holdup was, it wasn't a lack of interest in Fort Washington as a dining destination. It was a matter of the right operator finding the right chef at the right moment.
Jeff Power is running the kitchen, and the menu leans into the kind of white-tablecloth ambition that would have felt out of place on this stretch of Bethlehem Pike a few years ago. There's a raw bar tower built around a jumbo lump crab cocktail, striped bass ceviche, yellowtail crudo, a crispy polenta sampler, six East Coast oysters, six West Coast oysters, and six shrimp cocktail. There's Royal Osetra caviar service with potato blini and crème fraîche. There's a Berkshire pork chop and a burrata salad that early diners have already singled out. And there's that burger, unchanged from its Dettera days, sitting on a menu built mostly around seafood, steaks, and house-made pasta.
The restaurant opened for dinner first and added lunch service within days, Tuesday through Saturday from 11:30 to 2. It's a pace that suggests the owners weren't just testing demand. They already knew what Fort Washington wanted.
Why the Name Fits
Academy Grill sits about a block from Germantown Academy, and that's not a coincidence. Michael Sloane, one of the two partners behind Fine Line Dining, is a Germantown Academy alum. The name is a small, deliberate nod to his own history in the neighborhood, the kind of detail that only makes sense once you know it, and one that most people ordering the caviar service probably don't.
The Liquor License Has a Longer Memory Than the Restaurant Does
Here's the part that never makes it into a restaurant review but tells you something real about how this neighborhood's dining scene actually gets built. Academy Grill's liquor license didn't come from nowhere. It was transferred from Westside Bar & Grille in West Conshohocken, a bar Sloane had owned and closed in 2024. Westside itself had replaced a longer-running spot called Baggataway Tavern, which had replaced Cunningham's Court before that.
Whitemarsh Township's board of supervisors first considered advertising a public hearing on the transfer at its November 13, 2025 meeting, and approved the transfer at its January 8, 2026 meeting. That's roughly two months of municipal process between the paperwork and the pour, a timeline that's easy to miss if you're only paying attention to the "now open" announcement. It also means the license attached to Academy Grill changed hands three times at that one West Conshohocken address before ever crossing into Whitemarsh Township, a fairly ordinary path through Pennsylvania's liquor licensing system but a detail that says something about how much of Fort Washington's newer restaurant scene traces back to the same small group of owners.
What's Still Coming
Academy Grill isn't the end of the story. Fine Line Dining has said it plans to reopen the old Dettera space in Ambler later this year under a new name, Luna, as an approachable Mediterranean concept. Reporting has also pointed to a pizzeria called Home Slice in the works at Ninth and Fayette in Conshohocken, in the former home of Ashley's Deli.
Put together, that's four restaurants in three towns under one ownership group within about a two-year span: Jasper's Backyard, The Fort, Academy Grill, and soon Luna, with Home Slice next in line. For a neighborhood used to independent, single-location restaurants coming and going along Bethlehem Pike, that's a different kind of dining scene taking shape. Whatever you think about that consolidation, it means the choice between The Fort and Academy Grill isn't really a choice between two competitors. It's two rooms under the same ownership, aimed at slightly different nights out.
What This Actually Means for Your Dinner Plans
If you've been putting off trying Academy Grill because it felt like an unknown, it isn't one. You already know the chef. You already know the burger. What's different is the room, the raw bar, and the price point, which reads closer to a special-occasion dinner than a neighborhood hangout.
If you're looking for something more casual on a weeknight, The Fort is still the better call, still under the same ownership, still just a short drive away. And if you found yourself missing Dettera's wine list or that particular corner of Ambler's dining scene, keep an eye out for Luna. When it opens, it'll be worth a visit, if only to see what the same team does with a room they already know how to fill.
Fort Washington's restaurant scene isn't getting more crowded with strangers. It's getting more concentrated in the hands of people who already know the neighborhood, which might be the most useful thing to understand before you make your next reservation.
We spend as much time tracking what opens and closes on Bethlehem Pike as we do tracking what homes sell for on it. If you're curious what either one means for your own address, the Sean Ryan Team is happy to talk through it. Get your free home valuation whenever you're ready to see where your Fort Washington home stands.
