Hard times in Manayunk?

Took a mental health day yesterday with a friend and drove up Monument Road and West RiverMartin Luther King Drive in Fairmount Park to look at the autumn leaves. After digging the whispering benches at the Civil War monument, my companion and I drove off, took a wrong turn, and accidentally ended up in Manayunk at lunchtime.

Though it was the middle of the week, and close to 1:00 p.m., there were very few restaurants open on Main Street. Taverns, pubs, bars, sandwich shops, pizza parlors, all closed. A Thai restaurant was open, though empty. (I'll be happy to tuck into a plate of drunken noodles any time, but my companion was looking forward to something more Western.) One pizza shop, a café and a Starbucks were open. There were about a dozen empty store fronts with "For Rent" and "For Sale" signs in them. We stopped in a specialty foods shop to look at imported cheeses and pastas, but the shelves were sparse, the shop's wares purposely spread out -- I've heard, second-hand from someone who was trying to start up an import olive oil business, that the market for upscale imported foods is really tight. The dollar has been way down against the euro, and in any event no one wants to pay $20 for a few ounces of olive oil, even if it's genuinely Lesbian.

My impression has been that Manayunk is kind of a weekend and evening destination. For a few years now, Main Street has been catering to a younger crowd with a lot of disposable income. My guess is that the crowd is being downsized and outsourced, while at the same time a lot of the entrepreneurs had shaky business plans, markets that were too narrowly targeted, and unwise loans.

Final verdict: Main Street was a bust for a spontaneous weekday lunch. We drove a little ways up the hill to a Mexican restaurant I'd been to a few times when a family member of mine was living in the neighborhood, but it was closed, too.

So we headed down Ridge Avenue and landed at Johnny Mañana's, a mini-chain Mexican restaurant in East Falls. Nice enough, though it looked like the kind of place that gets a little frat-boyish toward the evenings and weekends. Portions were good, the food wasn't overly salty the way they do it at some restaurants to make you order more drinx, and the prices weren't bad. We were too early for the margarita happy hour, but they made up for it by having Rogue Dead Guy Ale on tap to offset the lager and Budweiser options.

All in all, not a bad mental health day. I'm sad to see so many places closing on Main Street in Manayunk, but it's not as if I'm in a position to keep anybody in business, myself.