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New restaurant Harpoon Willy’s opens in Town Center anchor location
BI MICHELE ALPERIN
BU BILL SANSERVINO
Jersey Shore Restaurant Group formally opened its new Harpoon Willy’s location in Robbinsville on Jan. 13. The new venue, located in Robbinsville Town Center at the corner of Route 33 and Robbinsville Road, is the first expansion of the popular Manasquanbased restaurant. Harpoon Willy’s is the latest eatery to land in the space, and the hope is that it will have longer staying power than the spot’s four previous tenants. Since the Town Center opened in the early 2000s, restaurants there have included Kuo Social, Centro Grille, Poseidon Mediterranean Bar & Grill, and Santino’s Bar One. The Robbinsville location will feature seating for more than 300 guests, including a 70-seat bar area with TVs and a seaSee NEWS, Page 4
Robbinsville High School swimmers Ariel Bernard (left) and Emily Volchansky at practice at the Mercer County Community College pool facility. (Phot by Rich Fisher.)
D-1 recruits Volchansky and Bernard excel for RHS swim team BY RICH FISHER
Robbinsville High seniors Ariel Bernard and Emily Volchansky are good friends who are both 4.0 students, volunteers at Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Hospital and headed for Division I swim programs in college, where they will both be pre-med students.
And to think they started out so differently when it came to swimming. “I first started when I was four, and since then I’ve never stopped,” Bernard said. “My sister was in swimming, my parents said ‘We’ll just put you in too,’ so we swam together. I loved it and never stopped.”
Then there is Volchansky, who didn’t want to start. “I didn’t know how to swim until I was 11,” she said. “I was always just around the shallow end. One of my fears was deep water. Even at my first tryouts I was crying. I didn’t want to get in because it was deep water, but I See SWIMMING, Page 12
Amy Flynn, the new chief executive officer of the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen, grew up poor on a dairy farm in rural Ohio, with early memories of an absence of heat during the cold winters. She remembers “going to bed at night and my mom stacking blanket after blanket on top of me and waking up in the morning and seeing my breath.” But an ethic of communal sharing trumped poverty in her farming community. “Even though our family didn’t have a lot, we never had so little that we didn’t have something to give back,” Flynn recalls. “We canned all summer to have food for the winter and shared some of that food with others who had less.” This commitment to communal sharing was exemplified for Flynn by her grandmother, “a person of service, who was always giving back to the community.” Flynn says that the big meals her grandmother cooked for See TASK, Page 8
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