Camden pub helping riverfront development

Sitting in their spacious sports bar this week, watching a robust lunch crowd come and go, Sam Sarin and Mike Romano could breathe a little easier.

Last month, when they opened the Victor's Pub on the Camden waterfront, they faced an uncertain future.

"Nervous ain't the word," Romano said. "It wasn't the thought of making money. It was the thought of losing money."

Sarin added: "We didn't want to be standing out there throwing dollars up in the air."

On March 9, the two, childhood friends and business partners, opened their restaurant in the Victor Lofts, a building with 341 luxury apartments that has been open for four years. The developer, Carl Dranoff, had been trying to attract a restaurant tenant on the ground floor, but the big chains were unwilling to invest in this notoriously struggling city.

Sarin and Romano, owners of Sam's Bar & Grille in Blackwood, took the plunge, knowing a lot of people would be watching their experiment.

"You've got to get the fear of the word Camden out of people's minds," Sarin said.

The pub isn't the only restaurant downtown, but at quitting time, the professionals go home and the healthy number of lunch spots go dark. There have been other trailblazers, such as the 20 Horse Tavern in the port district, which brought white-tablecloth dining and a dinner menu back to Camden.

But the Victor's Pub might be the most important restaurant in the city right now. It's the type of place boosters have always said the waterfront needed - a keystone to the development envisioned there.

Think Baltimore's Inner Harbor or Hoboken's waterfront. Imagine nightclubs and bistros and upscale shopping, a promenade filled with pedestrians strolling the Delaware's edge.

At night. In Camden. America's twice-designated "most dangerous city."

A successful pub makes it "a lot easier to sell the location to entrepreneurs," said Tom Corcoran, head of the Cooper's Ferry Development Association, a nonprofit dedicated to development in Camden.

He pointed out that naysayers had questioned the wisdom of every other amenity brought to the waterfront - the marina, the aquarium, the Tweeter Center and the Victor Lofts.

"Everyone said, 'No one's going to come to Camden,' " Corcoran said. "Now it's restaurants. 'Who's going to come to a restaurant in Camden at night?' Every time we have to prove the same things."

For Dranoff, the developer of Philadelphia's Symphony House, Venice Lofts and the Left Bank, there's nothing left to prove. The toehold of development that once was the waterfront has reached a "tipping point," he said.

He said environmental remediation of his next waterfront project - the Radio Lofts, in another old RCA Victor factory building - could begin within 30 days. Another project - 1,500 housing units on the lot south of Campbell's Field - could begin in fall 2008.

"The waterfront will be completely transformed," he said. "By 2010, you won't recognize it."

He said Victor's Pub should create a "domino effect" that would bring more business to Camden.

"It's our breakthrough," he said. "The people who came to the waterfront, the people who were pioneers, they didn't have a place to call their own. It's become their place."

Corcoran said he hoped to see five or six "good, quality restaurants" on the waterfront in the coming years, followed by more and more entertainment.

"Restaurants and night life is the linchpin," he said. "That would get us to the critical mass where you create your own buzz."

Despite all the optimism, Sarin and Romano weren't so sure when they invested around $800,000 in the 6,000-square-foot restaurant, employed 32 people, and hired a chef away from the Riverton Country Club to make everything from burgers to lobster.

The pub has seating for 300 people, and it's appointed with 20 televisions, a 50-foot granite bar, and a wall of mirrors that reflect the Philadelphia skyline and the Ben Franklin Bridge.

The lunch crowd, they figured, would be steady. But what about when the sun went down?

"What's really been a blessing is the people in Camden staying in Camden," Romano said. "The firemen, the cops, the judges, the lawyers."

Sarin added: "They're meeting here instead of Cherry Hill. The nightlife is more than we thought."

The pub is open from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. seven days a week.

Romano said one night, around 12:30 a.m., the bar was nearly empty and they were considering closing early. Then 40 police officers who had just ended their shift came in to eat and drink.

It doesn't hurt to have 600 people living upstairs from the pub, either. Corcoran is one of those Victor residents. Recently, he said, he had his windows open to the uncharacteristic cacophony of pedestrians below.

"My wife said, 'What's that noise?' " Corcoran recalled. "And I said, 'That's the sound of a city coming back to life.' "