Pine Grove Hall’s First Pop-Up Market Keeps the Focus on Local

In a first for Pine Grove Hall, the restaurant is hosting a pop-up market in its second-floor event space, from noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday. The market will feature more than a dozen local and regional vendors offering a range of items. 

“I’ve been doing pop-ups for a few years in my barn in Boalsburg, mixing artists with vintage vendors,” explains Laura Westley, event organizer and employee at Pine Grove Hall. “It has been a great experience to introduce artists to the community and share all the amazing talent and taste we have here in central Pennsylvania.” 

All 14 vendors at the event are from Centre County and their wares range from vintage finds to fine art, home decor to gifts, and all are part of what the event is branding an “eclectic mix of local makers, doers and finders.” The Fernweh Flower Truck will also be situated outside Pine Grove Hall, 101 E. Pine Grove Rd., allowing attendees to create their own bouquets. 

Pine Grove Hall owner Liz Grove explains that, while this is the restaurant’s first event of this type, the space is well-suited for the job.

“We have two floors — the first-floor dining area with the stage and the bar, and then we have a big room upstairs, 1,500 square feet. It’s wide open with really high ceilings and all these windows we can open,” Grove says. “When [Laura] looked at it, she said, ‘Wow, it would be really great to have a pop-up here. The space is kind of ideal.’”

Special precautions will be taken to keep vendors and shoppers safe during the pop-up, including positioning vendor tables at least 6 feet apart, limiting how many shoppers are in the space at one time, asking all vendors and shoppers to be masked and funneling shoppers through a separate entrance from that of the main dining room. 

During the event, Pine Grove Hall will be serving special, small-plate selections for lunch, with outdoor seating available. 

“[This] is new for us,” Grove says. “We’re not open for lunch yet on the weekends; we’re going to start that in June. We thought, ‘Why not open for lunch between 12 and 4 and let the people coming to the market see our menu and taste our cocktails, etcetera?’”

She adds that the pop-up market dovetails well with Pine Grove Hall’s overall focus on supporting local. The restaurant aims to source 90% of its food from within a 50-mile radius and full details on where exactly the restaurant sources its ingredients can be found on the Pine Grove Hall website.

“We have 25 different farms and purveyors,” Grove says. “[The pop-up market] dovetails nicely with continuing that community support. We’re doing the same thing with our local musicians, having them come out to play. Keeping everything local is a big deal right now.”

Pine Grove Hall offers live music on Thursdays and Sundays, with instrumental music only and no wind instruments, as a precaution. Thursdays are “jazz nights.” 

“That’s our way of trying to help support the local musicians in the community,” Grove says.

For those attending the pop-up market, free parking is available at Pine Grove Hall, as well as along the streets in Pine Grove Mills. Westley recommends attendees bring cash, though most vendors also will accept Venmo or PayPal payments. 

Vendors at the event currently include Rusted Few Trading, Steele Hollow Vintage, Tigers Eye Vintage, SometimesMary, The Giving Box, Tom Rosenow, Melanie Rosenberger Pottery, Hoop Honey, Fernweh Flower Truck, Clancy Skinfood, Bellwether Brooms, The Beefy Chicken, Cultivate Plant & Home and Husk & Honey. 

More details can be found on the pop-up market’s Facebook event page.

WHAT: Pop-up market featuring 14 local vendors.

WHEN: Sunday, May 2, noon-4 p.m.

WHERE: Pine Grove Hall, 101 E. Pine Grove Rd., Pine Grove Mills