Ciao to Testa Rossa Glen Mills which opened Friday, December 6, 2024, in the former Ruby’s Diner at 919 Baltimore Pike, at the Shoppes at Brinton Lake.
Fearless Restaurants opened a new concept: a vibrant, casual Italian American restaurant that exudes fun in its décor and its menu. Testa Rossa, which means redhead in Italian, embodies its namesake’s fun and fiery spirit.
Testa Rossa offers a vibey atmosphere with familial and inventive takes on classic Italian dishes. Testa Rossa is a restaurant born in Italy but raised in America with a menu heavily focused on house-made pizza, pasta, and Italian favorites, “Our menu is a mashup of Italian and American cuisine. We romantically embrace Italian culinary technique while unapologetically breaking all the “rules” we just don’t feel like following. The menu features Italian classics, elevated riffs of American-Italian staples, and new dishes that fall somewhere between,” said Culinary Director Merick Devine who also leads the kitchen at Fearless Restaurants’ Rosalie Wayne in a statement.
Stokes Architecture +Design of Wayne, PA designed the restaurant using 1960s-inspired bold patterns and geometric prints positioned against Ferrari red moments, giving the room a mid-century Italian maximalist allure. The centerpiece is a horseshoe-shaped pink marble bar top, accompanied by round pedestal stools with green leather seats and triangular black-and-white printed backs. Brass shelving spans the back bar while high-gloss red finished display cases flank the bar. Opposite the bar, U-shaped booths in blue flame-stitch fabric are surrounded by silver pinecone table lamps and backed with a red-and-white mod-style screen divider. The striking Mutina Matonelle Margherita tiled flooring is a focal point of the bar area with bright colorways continuing the Italian superfluity motif. Custom upholstered banquettes, custom-designed patterned tabletops, and scalloped chairs pop in vibrant colors of orange, emerald, canary yellow, black, and white throughout the room. Solid wood and wallpaper valances on pill-shaped windows help conceal the restaurant’s surroundings, making a more intimate dining experience. Two types of terrazzo tiles are arranged as thick stripes across the dining room floors, leading the early 20th-century Italian futurist design to the exterior with a circle-shaped breezeblock and scalloped lemon-colored umbrellas and rattan banquettes on the outdoor patio.
There are 180 seats indoors including booths and a large center bar, and an additional 100 seats outside on the patio.
Testa Rossa, an Italian American Kitchen, features house-made pasta like its sister restaurant Rosalie Wayne. “It is a more casual menu than Rosalie, heavily focused on pasta and pizza. For snacks and apps, there are selections of salumi, Italian meat products (some brought in, some made in-house), cheeses, and salads. Meat, fish, and vegetables are simplistic with an emphasis on product sourcing and cookery,” according to Chef Devine who added, “Save room for dessert which includes soft-serve gelato, Chinotto floats, and Tiramisu.”
Before leading the kitchen at Rosalie, Devine served as the Executive Chef at White Dog Cafe in Wayne. Prior to joining Fearless Restaurants, he worked at Frasca Food and Wine in Colorado for over six years. While serving as Chef de Cuisine, Frasca was nominated twice for the prestigious James Beard “Outstanding Restaurant” award.
Devine said, “I don’t have a romantic story about sitting around my Italian grandma’s stove and watching her stare deeply into a pot of Ragu. That’s not how my passion for Italian cooking started,” Devine said, “I wasn’t the guy who always knew he was destined to be a chef. I never even really liked to cook. But what I liked to do, was eat. I was very fortunate growing up that I had an amazing family that valued time together and always placed importance on it. It wasn’t until college that I started buying cookbooks instead of textbooks. I started skipping class to test new recipes and practice sharpening a knife. It was during this time that my career and path was ignited,” he added.
A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park, NY, Devine also served as chef de partie at Craft, Los Angeles. He developed his love and experience for pasta making while traveling throughout Italy working at an array of restaurants including the One Michelin Star La Subida in Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy.
