PHILADELPHIA — No karaoke nights are offered, and no happy hours. Pour-your-heart-out talks with the barkeep? None of those either.
“We don’t ever really get any personal stuff, other than ‘I’m going to change my grocery list,’ ” said Heather Reilly.
And though her job involves mixing cocktails and serving up brews, don’t call her a bartender. Reilly’s a “service team member.”
At The Pub inside the Wegmans supermarket in Collegeville, Pa., a social experiment of sorts is in progress, at the point where one of life’s most mundane chores intersects with something that could go a long way toward blunting its misery: alcohol.
There’s even a chance at romance. So far, the store reports one engagement — which the happy couple toasted with champagne.
The Pub, the only one in the Wegmans chain of 75 stores in five states, opened when the market it sits in opened Oct. 11. A second Wegmans Pub is planned at a store scheduled to open in June in Malvern, Pa.
If three stores make a trend, the Philadelphia region is well on its way. Front and center in the Whole Foods Market in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., that opened Jan. 12 is the Cold Point Pub, a mini-model of the Wegmans watering hole.
At Cold Point, you serve yourself wine from preset taps after paying for an access card. Employees run the beer taps. If the munchies on the menu — such as a charcuterie plate, an olive sampler and soft pretzels — don’t satisfy your appetite, you’re free to buy something in the store and bring it into the 30-seat pub.
With its soft lighting and easy chairs, the Whole Foods establishment looks more like a coffee lounge than Wegmans’ 63-seat pub, where the bar top is Cambria natural quartz stone, surrounded by solid cherry and cherry veneers. Two flat-screen TVs offer patrons something to watch when they’re not gazing into each other’s eyes.
The food-service component has enabled Wegmans and Whole Foods to buy restaurant liquor licenses that allow them not only to dispense beer, wine and — in Wegmans’ case — spirits for consumption on the premises, but also to sell six-packs of beer for carryout.
For now, Wegmans is learning from its Collegeville pub — and making adjustments as customers dictate or events warrant, said Kathy Haines, regional restaurant manager for Pennsylvania.
She said The Pub was intended to fill a gap in the store’s Market Cafe complex, where shoppers can buy prepared foods either to take out or to eat at nearby tables. The Pub is a full-service restaurant “where you can enjoy a great meal and enjoy a drink with that meal,” Haines said — though, she insisted, “our focus is really on the food.”
That seems to go for the customers as well. Monthly Pub sales show just 20 percent of patrons ordering a beer, a glass of wine or a cocktail with their food order, Haines said.
That the bar tab isn’t more significant might have a lot to do with the abundance of mothers pushing carts bearing young children, particularly in the daytime, customers suggested.
“I wouldn’t want to get drunk in front of families and stuff,” said John Riggs, 33, of Pottstown, Pa. He opted for a tame ginger ale with his crab cake sandwich on a recent lunch outing to The Pub with three colleagues.
Half-joking, Riggs suggested there is much marketing genius in serving alcohol where groceries are sold: “You come in and have a couple of cocktails, and then you buy all sorts of things you didn’t come in for.”
Vincent Giancaterino, co-owner of DaVinci’s Pub just two miles from Wegmans, isn’t worried.
Though the Wegmans pub is “nicely done,” Giancaterino said, “it’s more like a resting place. We have live music five days a week.”
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