Restaurant Group Couldn't Let Bull Mansion Fail
From left to right: William Giannopoulos, Mark Aaronson, Paul Demoga and Edward Madaus.
A group including the two men who oversaw the rebirth of the defunct Poli Place Theatre as the Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts say they couldn't let another restaurant at the Bull Mansion go out of business.
Ed Madaus and Paul Demoga, who formed the nonprofit Worcester Center for the Performing Arts in 2002 in order to restore what would become the Hanover Theatre, plan to open a new restaurant, 55 Pearl, at the Bull Mansion Thursday.
An open house is scheduled for Wednesday and the restaurant hosted a short series of tastings earlier this week. The restaurant is named for its address.
G'Vanni's, the last restaurant at the Bull Mansion, closed last winter. The property's owner, Frank D. Kirby, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Restaurants, and fine dining restaurants like 55 Pearl in particular, are "important to downtown Worcester," Demoga, a local attorney, said. "It's a piece we couldn't let go out of business yet again."
Demoga said one of the only complaints heard from patrons of the Hanover Theatre, which attracted 170,000 show-goers last year, is that there aren't any fine dining restaurants nearby. Along with 55 Pearl, the group operating the new restaurant, which includes William Giannopoulos, the owner of Friendly Discount Liquors in Whitinsville and Mark Aaronson, the owner of a large portfolio of commercial property in Worcester, West Boylston, Shrewsbury and Millbury, plans to open another restaurant at 551 Main St., a mostly empty building adjacent to the theatre, in August.
"One of the issues with everybody is there's nothing happening downtown," Madaus said. "But it's going to happen block by block."
Block By Block
And the group has picked quite a block. While the Poli Place was a boarded up wreck in need of a top-to-bottom restoration, 55 Pearl is in good shape and until last winter, home to operating restaurants. It's just that none of them could stay open.
As 55 Pearl Street Restaurant Corp. LLC, the group has come up with a plan to run the restaurant while Kirby remains "debtor in possession" of the property under bankruptcy court supervision.
"We came in with the operating capital," somewhere between $50,000 and $75,000, to get it going again, Demoga said. Kirby will continue to own the 55 Pearl St. property and the restaurant group will rent it from him.
After it sat vacant for nearly a year, Kirby bought the building in early 2008 for about $775,000 plus about $26,000 in back city taxes and fees and opened the short-lived G'Vanni's restaurant there. Prior to that, the building was owned by Mitch Terricciano, who spent close to $2 million on the purchase and renovation of the historic stone building beginning in 2005.
Terricciano, also ran the former Tiano's on Grove Street, ran a restaurant called TiNovo there, but couldn't make it work and the property was foreclosed by Digital Federal Credit Union in April 2007.
Under 55 Pearl's plans, the bar on the restaurant's lower level will be known as the Bull Tavern while the second and third floors will be used as dining rooms and a banquet hall that seats 90 and will be used for live entertainment. The third floor will also house the Alumni Club, a meeting and event space.
In addition to serving theatre patrons, Giannopoulos said the restaurant will serve another unmet need in downtown Worcester, a place for a business lunch.
"This place is a businessman's dream," he said. "The whole building is very versatile. You can come down here and have lunch or a meeting and not be on top of the other customers."
"This place is key to the revitalization of Worcester," Giannopoulos said. "It's going to be important to CitySquare, and hopefully it will attract more restaurants and more businesses. It shows our interest and our civic obligation."
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