The gang at Alfie’s is the
highlight of a partying night

Robyn’s ’Hood
By Robyn McCloskey

Good friends of ours recently celebrated their 19th wedding anniversary and invited us to join the fun. My husband and I, the feted couple, and another couple we are friends with spent a Saturday night out on the town, something none of us typically gets to since we all have kids, mortgages and credit-card bills.
Not to mention that we pretty much tend to poop out by 10 at night, since we’re all in various stages of fortysomethingness.
But our friends had cause to celebrate, so celebrate we did. We celebrated that they’re still madly in love with each other after all these years. We celebrated that they have three wonderful kids. We celebrated that the husband made it home in one piece after serving our country in Afghanistan as a captain in the Army — a Special Forces Green Beret, no less.
Our night began with a chauffeur-driven RV. Not a limousine or even a party bus, but an honest-to-goodness recreational vehicle with a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom. None of which we took advantage of.
We rode into center city Philadelphia amid quite a few stares, probably because an RV is not a common sight on the narrow and congested streets of our fair city. Our reservations were at Tinto on Rittenhouse Square. Tinto is the second restaurant owned by renowned chef Jose Garces, who also is the genius behind Amada, another hugely successful Philadelphia eatery where my husband and I had the opportunity to dine not long ago.
I say "genius" because Tinto and Amada are based on the same food philosophy. Seems that Tinto is a pinxtos-style (pronounced peen-choes) restaurant, while Amada serves food tapas-style, but in any language these two words, pinxtos and tapas, bear the same definition.
Loosely translated they can be defined as miniscule amounts of food served on really cool plates. This is where the genius comes in. Somehow, Jose is getting people to fork over beaucoups bucks for bite-size servings of food. Guess he figures the really cool plates will distract from the fact that the slices of meat are so thin you can see through them. Or that the shrimp is served with the head intact, perhaps with the hope you won’t notice that you’re getting just one.
As someone who’s used to frequenting eating establishments where my food order can be supersized, I didn’t quite get the appeal of the mouse-sized portions. Somehow, though, our bellies ended up full.
Since we still had use of our chauffeur-driven RV, our little party decided to continue partying by dancing away what was left of our evening. And that is how we ended up at Alfie’s, the Italian restaurant by day, dance club by night that is in the Blue Grass Shopping Center on Welsh Road.
Seems the Green Beret among us had done some reconnaissance work and resorted to Google to discover that Alfie’s was the place for us "older folks" to kick up our sagging heels. What we didn’t realize until we got there was just how much "older" the "folks" would be.
It’s been a long time since any of us has lowered the median age of a room. But these folks with AARP cards firmly secured in their wallets were having such a good time that we decided to be part of it. And after just a few spins on the dance floor, we realized something. These guys still had it in ’em. They could still move and groove with the best of them.
Quite a few even put us "kids" to shame. While shaking it up to Madonna’s Vogue, I was transfixed by the woman beside me. She had big bright clothes and big bright nails and big bright hair, all perfectly complemented by an even bigger and brighter smile. She noticed me noticing her, and with the warmest of hearts and the strongest of arms, she hugged me into the Alfie’s fold.
I would love to go dancing at Alfie’s again some day. Maybe my friends and I could even have dinner there first. We’ve already discovered we like the people, so there’s no doubt we’d like the food.
And I have a feeling the portions at Alfie’s are not meager, just like the hearts of its patrons. ••
Robyn McCloskey’s column appears each week in the Northeast Times. She can be reached at crmccloskey@verizon.net