For more than three decades, Annamarie’s has operated out of the same compact storefront at 347 Main Street in Royersford. It’s a place where generations of residents have gathered for breakfast, shared life updates over coffee, and watched owner Annamarie Chestnut grow from a 19-year-old first-time business owner into one of Royersford’s most recognizable small business figures.
Now, the longtime restaurant is preparing for its biggest change yet.
Annamarie’s is planning to relocate to Royersford Commons at 624 Main Street, a recently constructed mixed-use development featuring apartments and first-floor commercial space. The move will allow the restaurant to expand its footprint and evolve beyond the limitations of its longtime home, which Chestnut says the business has outgrown.
“This is huge,” Chestnut said during an interview inside the unfinished new space.
The new location is expected to be comparable to the larger Annamarie’s restaurant Chestnut opened in Birdsboro in 2023 — a space that introduced regular dinner service and gave the business room to grow operationally in ways the Royersford location never could.
But as Chestnut considered relocating the Royersford restaurant, she said it was never about leaving the borough.
“Royersford is my heart,” she said. “I literally grew up in that building, but we’ve outgrown it.”
A Restaurant Built Alongside a Community
Chestnut’s connection to the borough runs deeper than business.
She grew up just blocks away from the original restaurant location. At age 19, after returning home from culinary school during winter break, she discovered the previous restaurant had closed and been condemned by the board of health.
Despite having little experience, she decided to take a chance and purchased the business.
“I walked in the house and I said, ‘Dad, I bought a restaurant,’” Chestnut recalled. “And he said, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ I said, ‘I know. We’re just gonna wing it for a little bit until I can afford to go back to school.’”
More than 32 years later, she’s still there.
Over time, Annamarie’s became woven into the fabric of Royersford itself. Chestnut described early mornings with police officers stopping in while the staff prepped food, longtime businessmen gathering daily, and families continuing traditions across generations.
“We have people who come every day,” she said. “For most restaurants, that’s not a thing.”
Chestnut credited the borough’s residents and business community for helping sustain the restaurant through every stage of its growth.
“Royersford rallies behind its people, its businesses,” she said. "It always has."
Outgrowing the Original Space
While the original location helped define Annamarie’s identity, Chestnut said the aging building increasingly limited the restaurant’s capabilities.
“There’s stuff that we can do in Birdsboro that we can’t do here because we don’t have the room,” she said.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Royersford restaurant temporarily added dinner service in an effort to keep employees working, but Chestnut said the building simply wasn’t designed to support that type of operation. She described it as “the hardest thing we’ve ever done.”
The larger Royersford Commons space will provide modern equipment, additional storage, and the infrastructure needed to expand what the restaurant can do.
“It’s an amazing opportunity,” Chestnut said.
A Future Centered in Royersford
Chestnut briefly explored spaces in areas like Pottstown and Gilbertsville before the Royersford Commons idea came together, but staying in Royersford remained important to her.
“I needed to make sure it was the right thing – where it’s a future for the kids,” she said.
Her daughter Zooey, who is currently in high school, is expected to join the business full time after graduating next year. Her son Cooper, who has been training as an electrician, also plans to work in the restaurant.
Zooey, an 11th-grade culinary arts student at Western Montgomery Career and Technology Center, said staying in Royersford matters because of the relationships the family has built through the restaurant over decades.
“I like the community there,” Zooey said of the Royersford location. “Everyone knows each other. All of the servers, we know all the customers because of how long we’ve been there. It’s kind of like one big family.”
She said the opportunity to remain in the borough while expanding the business “feels really good.”
“Being able to stay with everyone who has known us for so long and who has known the restaurant for so long — it’s really great,” she said.
Chestnut said opening the Birdsboro location gave the family unexpected confidence that the business could grow beyond its original footprint. On opening day there, the restaurant ran out of food after buying what Royersford typically used in an entire week.
“I thought Royersford made me successful because I was from Royersford,” she said. “When I moved to Birdsboro, it actually dawned on me that I’m really good at this.”
Becoming Part of Royersford Commons
To keep the restaurant in Royersford, they needed a location large enough to support the business’s next phase of growth.
The move to Royersford Commons still requires approval from the Royersford Zoning Hearing Board (ZHB) because borough rules require more parking for sit-down restaurants than the development currently provides.
During the May 12 Royersford Borough Council meeting, Royersford Commons owner Brad Sinrod presented traffic and parking information supporting the request and asked council to provide a letter to the ZHB recommending approval. He also discussed plans to add parking near the site and argued the restaurant would not create the level of parking demand assumed under the borough’s zoning rules.
Additionally, Sinrod noted that recent events at Royersford Commons — including a pop-up art show attended by more than 1,000 people and a craft show that also drew large crowds — did not generate parking complaints from attendees or nearby residents.
He told council members that Annamarie’s is an example of a successful woman-owned small business rooted in the borough.
“We’d like to keep her here,” Sinrod said.
Council unanimously voted in support of the request to recommend approval.
If approval is granted by the ZHB in June and construction progresses as expected, Chestnut said the restaurant could move into the new space by this fall.
Leaving the original storefront, however, won’t be easy.
“There is nothing about my personality that was not literally formed in that building,” she said. “It’ll be hard to not go in those doors and come to new doors.”
“I mainly grew up there,” Zooey added. “That’s all I’ve ever known.”
Still, Chestnut views the move less as an ending than an evolution.
“We’re growing up a little bit,” Chestnut said. “It only took me till I was 51.”
