Leo's Corner Has a New Name. Mount Pleasant's Fall Weekends, Downtown and Beyond.

Banners for the Mount Pleasant Glass and Ethnic Festival were up around Veterans Park, and sidewalk crews staged barricades along Diamond and Washington streets for the parade that closed Main Street on Saturday afternoon. A few doors down, the building at 202 North Diamond still has the same brick front and the same corner windows it had for almost thirty years, but the sign over the door reads Tuscan Table and Tavern now, not Leo's Pub and Grille.

The Glass Festival weekend came after that sign changed. Leo's ran that corner from 1996 until it closed last year, long enough that three decades of Mount Pleasant residents never had to think twice about what was behind that door. The 39th festival brought its annual crowd downtown during the restaurant's second year. The festival weekend was another chapter in the corner's changing story.

The Corner That Used to Be Leo's

Leo's Pub and Grille served Mount Pleasant and the surrounding Westmoreland County area for close to three decades, built around a wide draft list, weekly food specials, and a connected six-pack shop that let regulars grab a case on the way out. That kind of run does something to a building. People stop noticing the address and just say "Leo's," the way a town settles into a habit without ever deciding to.

The bar closed in 2025, and the space was taken over by Jaffre's, a small local restaurant group that already operates a location in Greensburg and Jaffre's Stone Bar and Kitchen in Latrobe. Mount Pleasant became their third address, and the corner reopened in mid-May 2025 as Tuscan Table and Tavern.

Sixteen Months In

The building itself is the same. Same brick, same corner windows, same full bar along the same wall. What changed is what comes out of the kitchen. Where Leo's ran on pub food and lunch specials, Tuscan Table and Tavern is built around an Italian-leaning dinner menu, a seven-hour burgundy braised short rib, a seafood broth over polenta with cod, shrimp, scallops, mussels, and clams, a Sicilian-style deep dish focaccia pizza, the kind of plates that ask for a slower sit-down meal rather than a quick stop after work.

That shift puts two full-service Italian dinner spots within a few blocks of each other downtown. The Village, a family-owned restaurant that has been a fixture in the heart of town, has built its own following around ravioli and gnocchi. Neither restaurant needs the other to fail for either one to work. Between them and the pizza-and-sub counters that have anchored the same stretch for years, downtown Mount Pleasant has more sit-down dinner options right now than it did two years ago, which is a different kind of change than a bar simply closing.

Sixteen months is enough time to find a rhythm on a normal Tuesday. The festival Saturday brought a different pace to downtown.

The Festival Around the New Sign

The Mount Pleasant Glass and Ethnic Festival, a tradition for decades, ran September 25 through 27 this year; it was the 39th. It has been recognized by the Library of Congress as a local legacy, and past years have drawn attendance estimated around 47,000 people across the three days, spread between roughly two dozen food booths and more than a hundred craft and art exhibitors.

The schedule followed a pattern regulars know well. Friday and Saturday ran from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., and Sunday wrapped by 7. Saturday afternoon brought the parade down Main Street at 2 p.m. Each night, the gazebo lit up for what the festival called its Sparkle Spectacular, more than 12,500 lights synced to music. Sunday shifted toward families with a KidsFest lineup before the fireworks closed things out. Admission was free, as it has always been.

None of that changed when a bar became a restaurant. During the festival, foot traffic on Diamond Street was heavier than at any other point in the year, and the corner that used to be Leo's was part of that scene. A festival crowd does not know or care whose name is on the door. It just walks past, and sometimes walks in.

A Few Weeks Later, Somewhere Quieter

A few weeks after the parade, the town's other big fall weekend happens outside of downtown entirely. Greendance Winery and its sister farm, Sand Hill Berries, host a Fall Open House on October 24 and 25 this year, a tradition on that Deer Field Road property that goes back more than 25 years.

The scale and the setting are almost the opposite of what happens downtown in September. Instead of parade barricades and gazebo lights on a town block, the festival spreads across an orchard and garden property outside the borough. Live music runs both days on the garden stage, with Michael Krejci and the Hickory Bottom Band booked for Saturday and Michael Krejci again with The Casual Hobos on Sunday. Vendors set up around a working cider press and an apple barn, and the same local names tend to show up year after year, including Slope Hill Honey, run by the Grindle family right in Mount Pleasant, Out of the Fire Cafe, and a booth for the Friends of the Mount Pleasant Public Library.

Where the Glass Festival concentrates a huge crowd into a few downtown blocks over one loud weekend, the Greendance event spreads a smaller one across open farmland with room to spare. Both weekends sit inside a five-week stretch on the calendar, and together they cover most of how the town spends early fall, one version downtown and dense, the other rural and unhurried.

The Glass Festival has come and gone, and Leo's is gone either way. Tuscan Table and Tavern's story on the corner is still unfolding, one Saturday afternoon at a time.

If you have thoughts on what's changed downtown, or you're just looking for a local perspective on Mount Pleasant beyond the festival flyers, Elizabeth Bires is easy to find and always happy to talk shop about the town. Let's Connect.