|
|
|
Irish Eyes Are Smiling
BusinessPersons of the Year
|
Business New Haven
1/21/2002
By:
Mitchell Young
|
Few cities the size of New Haven can make the pass at the “world-class” status the Elm City occasionally stakes a claim to. Now, our little “Paris of New England'' has a new star that shines an international light on the old home town.
Whatever one may think of town-gown relations, the global reputation and reach of Yale University has helped to power an important new economic engine for south-central Connecticut. It's bigger than biotech, more advanced than advanced manufacturing - indeed, more potent than any of the so-called industry clusters state officials have hung their hats, and our fates, on.
Our secret weapon? People. Specifically, immigrant people. More precisely, well-educated, energetic immigrant people attracted, if not to Yale specifically, then to a vibrant, friendly milieu heavily flavored by Yale and the ever-more cosmopolitan community that inhabits its leafy environs.
To novice observers, New Haven's international flavor is most readily savored in the restaurants, clubs and shops that dot downtown. Here an emerging cadre of entrepreneurs hailing from points across the globe have set up shop. They hail from Malaysia and Thailand, Ethiopia and India, Japan and the Philippines, Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, California and - oh yes, even Ireland.
Look a wee bit closer, though, and you'll see students and professors at Yale, scientists at Bristol-Myers and CuraGen, engineers and entrepreneurs at companies large and small, from TranSwitch in Shelton to SNP in Hamden. These energetic “foreigners” are the new visible hand shaping a new New Haven.
It's a place New Haven adman Russ Madison has tried to brand as America's “New Wave” city, and although timid City Hall solons ultimately posed a more modest challenge (“C'mon - Live a Little”) instead, New Haven is riding a crest of new energy and ideas, regardless.
There's a powerful force pushing them here.
It's a force you'll better understand when you it see at work in a new business that opened on November 15 at 142 Temple Street in downtown New Haven across from the Omni Hotel: the Playwright Pub & Restaurant. It's creativity, ingenuity, investment, internationalism - risk defying immigrant entrepreneurship at its best.
To recognize this once-in-a-decade effort and to draw attention to the dynamic economic and cultural forces reshaping New Haven and south central Connecticut, Business New Haven awards “Business People of the Year” honors to the principals of the Playwright Pub & Restaurant.
Richard and Denis Guilfoyle, brothers and “genetically identical” twins hailing originally from County Kilkenny, are joined with partner Eamon Ryan, who emigrated here from Limerick, in building and running the Playwright.
The lads, all U.S. and Connecticut citizens now, have hatched an effort that wears the “world-class” mantle easily in an entertainment niche few might know as global: the Irish pub.
The New Haven Playwright is one of four to share the name, each constructed by Denis Guilfoyle, who came to the U.S. in 1986 at the tender age of 21. From the Old Country Guilfoyle brought his energy and work ethic, his training as a carpenter, his ever-youthful Irish optimism and a dream to own and operate his own Irish pub.
Guilfoyle would eventually build the first Playwright in Stamford, in 1994. It was followed by Paddy Reilly's in lower Manhattan, which opened in 1996 and sold three years later. A Hamden Playwright debuted in 1999, then (in what seems an equally unlikely venue) another in South Beach, Miami, in 2000.
In each case Denis oversaw design and construction. New Haven's Playwright, which brother Richard refers to as a “superpub,” encompasses 15,000 square feet, spread over three floors of Old World ambiance.
Its many nooks and crannies stuffed with arched stone windows, painted wrought iron grille work, ancient architectural details, church pews, a 215-year old pulpit, a gazebo once housed in a monastery, and a massive pipe organ, the Playwright is a wee bit more than many area restaurant-goers might easily envision.
While Denis was building a small construction company in America, Richard was “chefing around the world,” as he describes his stints across Europe and Down Under to Australia. Richard had settled early on a career as a chef, attending Rockwell College, a small boarding college in County Tipperary, to study food service and management.
Like many young boys in Ireland, the Guilfoyles and Ryan had all worked in pubs at one time or another. As Ryan explains, In Ireland “You can work in a pub from the time you can see over the bar.”
Although Denis Guilfoyle wanted to build an Irish Pub, he wasn't necessarily keen on running it day-to-day. So, with the help of their mother and an airline ticket to the States, he urged his reluctant sibling in on the project. Now sisters Catherine and Ellen are part of the New Haven Playwright team, while brother Eamon runs the Miami pub.
The Stamford Playwright was an early hit, according to Denis. “There's a big Irish community in Stamford and they all came in - there wasn't anything around there like it. They were delighted to have a place to hang out.” Meanwhile, “More and more people were moving up from the Bronx to Stamford,” he explains. “In '94 it wasn't as expensive to live there as it is now,” he adds.
In Ireland, a “pub” is far more than a bar, explains Patrick Hosey, vice president of the Irish American Community Center in East Haven.
In Ireland, “The pub is at the center of the village and life,” Hosey says. “It's a place for meetings and organizing sports and fundraising to support community events.”
It's that niche in the community that Irish pubs in America have long sought to fill. The Playwright in Hamden and Anna Liffey's in New Haven, for example, offer Irish music, broadcast Gaelic football matches and run traditional pub quizzes to capture the public and re-create an authentic Auld Sod experience.
If that sounds like a romantic relic of bygone days, the Playwright uses the Internet to help generate a more close-knit clientele. At www.thePlaywright.net, regulars participate in “the Snug,” a message board that offers a latter-day version of the small group huddled in the corner of the pub.
Eamon Ryan, the odd man in in the Playwright partnership, left a large family that ran a pub and what Americans might call a “general store” back in Limerick.
Ryan's family was surprised that he left for the States in September 1994 at age 24. After all, he was having a grand time right where he was (“I was playing sports, meeting 30 guys three or four nights a week,” he recalls). “It was a big change to just pull the plug, and then you're over here and basically I knew just one person.”
Before long he found his way to the Irish Club in East Haven. “At least I was meeting people,” Ryan says. “There were a lot of good contacts; you could always find work with someone.”
He eventually found jobs at Kenny G's Irish Pub in Wallingford and the Black Rock Castle in Bridgeport. He later met and became friends with the Guilfoyle brothers, and the trio soon began to hunt for a pub site in Miami. When that didn't come together, they seized an opportunity to build the Hamden Playwright. They finished it in 1999 on the expanded footprint of a former Irish bar, the Leitrim House.
Ryan gutted the buildings himself and then Denis came in to work a wee bit of Irish magic. The result is a cozy yet “rich” environment. One local reviewer called the Hamden bar “a study in elegance.”
“Everywhere I went I was getting compliments,” Ryan recalls, “and people were telling me how nice it was: the music, the food, the atmosphere, the décor - everything. We imported nearly everything from Ireland.”
The warm charm of the Irish pub seems to be catching on far beyond the millions in the Irish diaspora and those simply seeking a friendly neighborhood bar. There is a growing legion of Irish pubs sprouting up nearly everywhere in the U.S., and beyond it seems.
And while starting an Irish pub in South Beach may require a few variations on the theme (“It's a different entity,” Richard says, “It's an Irish Pub with an Art Deco marble floor, more of a nightclub bar with a little bit of food”). Irish pubs are conquering the globe in a way no Gaelic army ever could. How else to explain the Fiddlers Green in Bahrain, or Slattery's in Nanjing or the Dublin in Kazakstan?
For decades the Irish pub was really just a neighborhood bar with a cultural twist. A change seems to have started soon after the Guilfoyles opened up in Stamford. Larger more elaborate Irish pubs - many with corporate backing - began brewing in Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas.
“The success of [the Broadway hit] Riverdance and the spotlight on Irish culture did a lot for business,” explains Ryan.
Whatever the ,a yearning for the warm glow of “pub life” or the fiery eyes of redheaded heel-tapping lassies, Irish pubs are hot. And it's not just the lines outside the Playwright that prove the point.
One firm, the Irish Pub Co. has built for independent and corporate owners more than 400 Irish pubs worldwide over just the past five years. These “authentic” Irish pubs are constructed and than crated and shipped to a site. Give them a P.O. and get a “pub” in just 18 weeks.
With Irish pubs sprouting like four-leaf clovers on March 17, the market was clearly changed. “When we went to Stamford in '94 we were the only Irish bar; now there are five or six,” says Denis. “But we've secured our customer base there.”
Richard finishes the thought: “The same is probably going to happen here. But to build a bar that's going to create the 'wow' effect after someone's been in here - that will be a bit tougher.”
“A bigger tree to chop,” adds Denis.
Bigger, indeed. Authentic, too, at least according to The Irish Immigrant, a weekly newspaper covering the east coast Irish community. The New Haven Playwright “is the largest and most strikingly original Irish bar on the East Coast,” wrote Cahr O'Doherty in the January 14 edition. “There has never been a more noteworthy unveiling of an authentic Irish restaurant and bar in the United States.”
At a cost in excess of $3 million plus the value of the Guilfoyle design and construction labor, it might seem a very big risk in a marketplace that grows in fits and starts.
Neither Ryan nor the twins think so. “We wanted to do a much bigger pub, and New Haven is right here beside me [in Hamden], says Ryan. “Why not do it here? There's a college; there's a ton of businesses down there.”
Richard agrees. “You gain experience every time you open up a bar. We've been around the country and seen other bars working. The population in New Haven is like the way Stamford was in '94 - it was waiting for something to happen. So rather than open a small bar and wait for some bigger companies to come in and outdo you, so to speak, we decided, 'Let's go all out.'”
“Anyone will tell you, you never expect to go as far as you do,” continues Richard. “You know you expect to spend a lot less money, but in the back of your mind you sort of know [you'll spend more]. Denis' imagination is unbelievable.”
Adds Denis: “I said, 'What do you want to do here? Go ahead. It's going to get into serious money. Can we do this? Yeah, yeah - go ahead!' It's just a fear of stopping short” that drenches big dreams.
Their timing may be just right, if New Haven's numbers add to the tale.
In 1990, Elm City revelers wined and dined to the tune of $99.3 million, representing four percent of total retail sales. Eight years later the total eating and drinking business was virtually unchanged, while overall annual retail sales had declined 16 percent from $2.36 billion to $1.97 billion.
By the year 2000, eating and drinking sales had taken an upward swing and a bigger bite of the retail pie, reaching $116 million, according to the state's Department of Revenue, and six percent of total spending.
That performance places New Haven third in Connecticut in eating and drinking, behind Danbury at $171 million and Stamford at a $132 million. In those cities, however, retail sales are more than double New Haven's, with $4.8 billion and $5.1 billion, respectively.
Will the New Haven market prove resilient? Will a new trend built on old traditions last? Those are question awaiting answers over the next few years. What we do know about the Playwright's chances for continued success is that creativity, inspired ingenuity, and immigrant entrepreneurs almost always win out.
As, in America, they usually have.
|
Go FirstGo PreviousGo
NextGo LastGo
to Index
|
|
