Pick a favorite Main Line restaurant and there is a decent chance John Donohue has drawn it. The John Donohue restaurant prints launch at LAA Art Collective in Wayne on Friday, November 6, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The collection is 12 x 12 drawings of 20 Main Line restaurants, priced at $95 each, with complimentary sips and snacks from local eateries.
The John Donohue restaurant prints were developed in partnership with Lauren Addis, who owns LAA Art Collective, and they are sold only at her gallery at 122 E. Lancaster Avenue and on the gallery’s website. A portion of the proceeds goes to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has benefited from sales of Donohue’s work before.
The Restaurants in the John Donohue Restaurant Prints
The list reads like a Main Line dinner calendar. Wayne has the most, with Autograph Brasserie, Christopher’s: A Neighborhood Place, Cornerstone, Gryphon Coffee Co., Mad Anthony Wayne Café, Rosalie, The Silverspoon, Teresa’s Café and Next Door, Tredici and White Dog Café. Bryn Mawr is represented by Carina Sorella, The Grog, Johnny’s and Otto by Pulpo.
The rest of the John Donohue restaurant prints cover the neighborhood around them: 333 Belrose in Radnor, Char & Stave in Ardmore, Hope’s Cookies in Rosemont, Plant Roots in Havertown, The Refectory in Villanova and Roache and O’Brien in Haverford. A coffee shop, a cookie shop and a brasserie sit on the same wall, which is how most of us eat out anyway.
How the John Donohue Restaurant Prints Get Made
Donohue is a former magazine editor and cartoonist who began drawing restaurants in 2017 in his hometown, New York City. He is self-taught and works in pen and ink from life, with no corrections, usually standing on a busy street in front of a place. About 20 minutes goes into each drawing, and he does not use AI.
Later he adds his signature one-color detail, and that version becomes a signed, limited-edition print. His project, All the Restaurants, has grown to more than 1,600 drawings from Paris, London, the Napa Valley, Philadelphia and beyond. It started as a personal side project and turned into an archive of restaurants and the memories attached to them.
Three books came out of it: All the Restaurants in New York in 2019, A Table in Paris in 2021 and A Taste of London in 2023. His first museum show was at the Napa Valley Museum in 2022. Sales of his artwork have also supported the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation’s Covid-19 relief fund, City Harvest and the Napa Valley Museum.
Donohue treats the drawing as something close to meditation. “Drawing gives me focus, clarity, and peace,” he says, and he has made it a daily practice. The restaurants themselves are the subject because, in his words, they hold our stories: first dates, anniversaries and meals that changed everything.
John Donohue Restaurant Prints at LAA Art Collective
Lauren Addis opened LAA Art Collective in Wayne in 2016. The gallery is a contemporary art gallery, an art advisory, a custom framing studio and an online gallery, and it specializes in regional emerging artists and new collectors. Addis also serves on the Women’s Committee of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and on the board of Anthony Wayne Theater.
The launch is open to the public. Drop in any time between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. on November 6, look at the full John Donohue restaurant prints collection and talk to the gallery about the drawings.
Wayne also hosts another November art stop. The Wayne Art Center is one of the exhibition partners in CraftMONTH 2026, and its annual Craft Forms show follows in December.
Every restaurant in the John Donohue restaurant prints collection is a place somebody has a story about. A Donohue drawing keeps that table, that corner and that Friday night on the wall long after the check is paid.
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