Mount Airy’s top-rated restaurant is closing in September
And with it, Whitemarsh Valley Country Club is leveling up its food game.
Jansen, the polished restaurant in an 18th-century stone cottage at Germantown and Gowan Avenues in Mount Airy, will close in late September.
Chef-owner David Jansen, who opened it in 2016, will join Whitemarsh Valley Country Club in Lafayette Hill as executive chef. He said he would bring executive sous chef Jason Burke and food-and-beverage manager Zachary Bourne with him. It will be business as usual at Jansen through the spring and summer.
Jansen said he and the team would do a long farewell as the restaurant’s days wind down. One of the last events scheduled will be Bourne’s wedding in September.
Economics played a factor in his decision to close. “I’ve had 10 great years there, but I could never really generate the revenue that I needed to actually take care of the people that have worked with me for so long,” Jansen said. He had been weighing other opportunities recently when the job offer arrived from Whitemarsh, where he had been a member.
“For me at this stage in my life, plus the commitment that the club has to making it a first-class country-club destination, I really bought into it,” Jansen, 58, said, adding that he would have control of the menu and “the club’s infrastructure and support behind me.”
The new role also will return him to the realm of banquets and other large-scale events. Whitemarsh’s main room can accommodate 275 people and a smaller room can hold 125, he said. “At Jansen, we can do maybe 85 comfortably.” Non-members can book events at Whitemarsh, he added.
Jansen spent 20 years at the old Four Seasons Hotel on Logan Square, rising through the ranks of chef Jean-Marie Lacroix’s crackerjack crew that included Martin Hamann (now at the Union League), Townsend Wentz (owner of Oloroso, Townsend, Caribou Cafe, etc.), and the late Tony Clark.
When Jansen left the Four Seasons in 2010, four years before its closing, he was chef de cuisine of its Fountain Restaurant. Jansen spent five years after he left the hotel doing consulting work and raising his three children.
Jansen, noted as one of The Inquirer’s 76 essential restaurants for the region, brought the Fountain’s polished but unstuffy verve to Mount Airy. The restaurant’s predecessors were the more casual Cresheim Cottage Cafe and Avenida, neither of which enjoyed Jansen’s longevity.