This impresario quietly built a Center City nightlife empire. Now he’s looking to settle down (and trade up).

Teddy Sourias has been a part of the Center City bar scene since he and his father took over a corner taproom nearly 25 years ago.

From Finn McCool’s Ale House at 12th and Sansom Streets, where he bartended before he was old enough to legally drink, Sourias has built a sprawling portfolio of nightspots under the umbrella of the Craft Concepts Group, which employs about 300 people in peak season.

Last week, Sourias and partners bought Memories in Margate, the Jersey Shore nightclub owned for five decades by Philadelphia disc jockey Jerry Blavat, which is expected to reopen for the summer season.

Most of Sourias’ empire, which has largely catered to younger people, is within a few blocks of City Hall: Above McCool’s is the hangout Prime Lounge. Tradesman’s, BRU Craft & Wurst, and U-Bahn have created a zone on Chestnut Street near Broad. There are Halloween- and Christmas-theme seasonal bars in a former jewelry store next to Finn McCool’s. Next door is a Mexican bar, Sueño. At 16th Street and JFK Boulevard is Uptown Beer Garden, and at 1500 Locust St. is a seasonally changing pop-up bar, popularly known as Blume. Since it appears that everyone wants to party with Sourias, he also has a members-only speakeasy-style club, with a $1,000 buy-in and an unpublished address, called 101.

But Sourias wants more. For his next two restaurants, he’s aiming to attract the demographic that he — at 43 with a wife and three sons — is now part of: elder millennials.

Mona, a posh Mediterranean restaurant, is being built on multiple levels at 1308-10 Chestnut St, while a splashy Japanese-inspired restaurant is taking shape on the courtyard side of 1515 Market St., adjacent to Uptown Beer Garden. He’s hoping to open both in mid-2024.

Sourias, born in 1980, grew up in a rowhouse in Northeast Philadelphia with two sisters, whom he insists are smarter than he is; one is a nurse-practitioner and the other owns day-care centers. His father, Peter, who emigrated from Greece at 21 and went to work tending bar at Fisher’s, a nearby seafood restaurant, is retired. His mother, Maria, still helps with Craft’s books.

Sourias started working with his father at Fisher’s at age 13. “Nobody asks you how old you are,” he said. He also picked up shifts at his aunt’s Greek restaurant. Better at business than schoolwork, he got a job in high school at a beeper store. “Don’t say beeper — just say cell phone,” he said. “Nobody knows what beepers are anymore.”

Around 2000, his dad was bartending at a hotel and heard that Finn McCool’s was on the market. They began going to other bars, he said, “and we would sit there and just take notes.”

One night before they made an offer, Peter Sourias watched a guy get thrown through the front window. “He comes home that night and he’s like, ‘We’re not buying that place.’” Teddy laughed it off. He wanted to be downtown.

Teddy had some money and his job at the beeper store, while Peter had money and health insurance from his day job, so they gave it a go. Teddy hustled in the early years, working at McCool’s, running a neighboring bar, and bartending weekends at the Crystal Tea Room. Over the years, father and son fixed up McCool’s and opened Prime Lounge on the unused second floor.

A decade ago, Teddy saw an opportunity around the corner. The south side of Chestnut Street between 13th and Juniper was largely empty, and available. In 2013, he took over the Mitchell & Ness sporting-goods store and opened BRU, one of the city’s first beer gardens that allowed self-service ordering. Over the next several years, he expanded next door, digging out the basement to yield 16-foot ceilings and create U-Bahn, a bar modeled on a German subway station. On the other side, he opened Tradesman’s, a bourbon and barbecue bar and restaurant, in 2018.

“I don’t live a fruitful life,” Sourias said. “ I work literally seven days a week. I think I have a good crew behind me to help me out.”

Mona’s three-story building is just on the other end of the block. It last was Luxe Home Philadelphia, a home-goods store. “The rooftop was always the thing that really enticed me,” Sourias said.

It is his first attempt at a high-end restaurant, and will aim at the young professionals who want to “make a night out of it. Let’s say you’re the 7:30 Saturday night couple. Will they just leave at 9:30 after they finish dinner or is there more for them? The plan is for them to stay longer, and also [draw] bar guests from 13th Street, which is all higher-end restaurants,” such as Barbuzzo, El Vez, Darling Jack’s, and Sampan.

Sourias is eyeing more glitz at 1515 Market in Penn Center. He first saw the potential of the area nearly a decade ago, when he opened the initial incarnation of Uptown Beer Garden in the BNY Mellon Bank Center courtyard. (Uptown relocated to its current, permanent location in 2021.)

He describes the menu at 1515 Market as “sushi fusion,” while the design by Oscar Soto is equal parts “Tokyo bar” and “TAO New York.” The building was last an HSBC Bank branch — “a beautiful space when you first walk in,” Sourias said, pointing out pink terrazzo floors, pillars, high ceilings, and a mezzanine. “You can’t buy anything like that now.”

The restaurant, near 16th Street, will spill out into a 4,000-square-foot patio, adjacent to Uptown. Sourias said he wanted to open for lunch in addition to dinner, because “there’s nothing around there.”

Sourias isn’t the only nightlife operator hoping to bring new life to Penn Center, which remains an underutilized office canyon in the wake of the pandemic. In addition to the 1515 project and Uptown Beer Garden, the Atlantic City-based Rhythm & Spirits is setting up a bar-restaurant, including a “chocolate speakeasy,” inside Suburban Station, at 16th and JFK. Another veteran bar owner, Avram Hornik, owns Concourse Dance Bar, a fun house with ball pit and ice room, on the west end of Suburban Station, at 17th. There’s also the new Puttshack, a bar-restaurant with high-tech mini-golf, in Liberty Place on the Chestnut Street side at 16th. There also has been talk for years about a restaurant going into the spaceship-like former visitor center at 16th and JFK.

“We live in a new world now,” Sourias said. “I hate to say it, but are [these offices] really going to get filled? I think you need an amenity and I think that’s why 1515 and us works so well. ‘If you want office space, sure, but we also have a restaurant downstairs.’”

Clint Randall, vice president of economic development for the Center City District, called the area’s pivot to nightlife “a natural response to the lower daytime population. Office landlords are more motivated than ever to think outside the box to fill space.”

Sourias thinks entertainment can draw crowds, and Penn Center — built over a Regional Rail station and adjacent to bus lines — is uniquely situated for this. “We need people to want to come to the city,” he said.