During a busy weekday lunch service, Terence Tubridy sat in a booth at his beloved bar and restaurant and reflected on what it means to own a piece of Park Avenue history.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re Queens Irish guys, third generation, fourth generation immigrants. For us to have a restaurant on Park Avenue … We built this place to be here for generations and we plan to be. Our children are going to be working here,\u201d he told Straus News.<\/p>\n
The Broad Channel native grew up in the restaurant business as his father, Daniel, opened Pier 92 in Rockaway Beach in 1978. Upon graduation from Xavier High School, he went on to attend the University of Mount Saint Vincent, and worked at some iconic Manhattan bars that are no longer in business, such as McFadden\u2019s in Midtown.<\/p>\n
After 9\/11, Tubridy and his young friends pooled resources to open their own places. Today their list of successful Manhattan bars now includes Metro 53, Saloon and Libation. But once the group hit their late 20s, they felt the need to search for a more sophisticated venue and that spurred them to take over a failed bar at Park Ave. and 39th St. and transform it into the thriving hot spot it is today.<\/p>\n
It was a coming of age moment for him and his partners. \u201cWe needed to start getting a little bit more serious. We were like, \u2018We can\u2019t be out \u2018til 4 in the morning.\u2019 So we started looking at taverns because now me and my friends want to sit at the bar. We don\u2019t want to go crazy,\u201d recalled the prolific entrepreneur, who now owns In Good Company Hospitality, which operates 18 venues\u201312 in Manhattan, five in Queens, and one in Orlando, FL.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring the week here, it\u2019s business and suits and they\u2019re great,\u201d he said. But on weekends and on the slower nights, we service this whole community. We\u2019ve become that neighborhood staple,\u201d said Tubridy, who also serves on the board of the New York City Hospitality Alliance.<\/p>\n
He jokes that the place is so warm and congenial that many of his single friends have found find lasting love there. \u201cMy friends call this place \u2018The Husband Factory,\u2019\u201d he said, laughing. \u201cIt\u2019s countless how many friends of mine actually met at Park Avenue Tavern.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tell us about your prior experience in the Manhattan bar business. <\/p>\n
We worked all the East Side saloons, and I\u2019m going to drop names, Dapper Dog, Last Second Saloon. My brother and I opened McFadden\u2019s as bartenders. I was the first barback there. So when I was a freshman in college, I was barbacking or bartending or deejaying at McFadden\u2019s. And from there we learned the business.<\/p>\n
You then opened your own bar, Metro 53, with your brother, cousins and friends. <\/p>\n
After 9\/11, everybody started to rethink their whole lives. We were like, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we just open up our own place?\u201d So we did, we opened up Metro 53, which was extremely successful. And from there we opened up a bar on the Upper East Side called Saloon on East 83rd and York Ave. which, at the time, had one of the only cabaret licenses. Then we opened Libation on the Lower East Side in 2007. At the time, I was 26 years old.<\/p>\n
What was here before Park Avenue Tavern?<\/p>\n
This was actually Bogart\u2019s, they used to do promoted parties here, and we were able to convince them to sell it to us. We figured this was a great location, even though many of the places that were here, failed. We basically tore out the whole place. We wanted to make it look as classic as possible and sophisticated, targeting 26-year-olds and up.<\/p>\n
Who did you open it with?<\/p>\n
My brother, my college roommate Jeff Brosi, and friends from the neighborhood. We have two firemen, Steve Malley and Eugene Brennan, we\u2019re partners with. When you\u2019re opening these places, you need a lot of people for it to be successful. But at this point, Jeff and I are controlling In Good Company Hospitality and we run day-to-day operations. We created the hospitality group in 2008. Under that group are places like Refinery Rooftop, Parker & Quinn and Winnie\u2019s Jazz Club. We just redid Rare Rooftop on 37th and Lex and it\u2019s called Vintage Green. And then we have a place called O\u2019Toole\u2019s Way, an Irish Pub, in Hudson Yards, right underneath the High Line. We opened the Rockaway Hotel too. [The brothers also run their father\u2019s former Rockaway Beach restaurant, Pier 92, which is now called Bungalow Bar.]<\/p>\n
During COVID, you re-signed PAT\u2019s lease. <\/p>\n
We had about two and a half years left. In March of 2020, obviously we were shut down, but in April, we called the landlord and we\u2019re like, \u201cWe\u2019re looking to stay. But it only makes sense for us to stay if we have a long road ahead.\u201d And he\u2019s like, \u201cYou guys want to stay?!\u201d We reopened in May of 2020. Literally the neighborhood, they were crying when we reopened, and saying, \u201cThank God you\u2019re here.\u201d<\/p>\n
What are the pros and cons to operating in this neighborhood?<\/p>\n
The pro is that we\u2019re on 39th Street, because 39th Street and up, it\u2019s all business. We\u2019re two blocks away from Grand Central. So we get a great tourism business, great commuter business and great corporate business. And then everything down is Kips Bay, it\u2019s Park Avenue South. So they\u2019re all looking for that neighborhood restaurant. The con is we were never allowed outdoor dining because of some rule with the Grand Central Partnership. And the sidewalk here is huge. So COVID helped us get outdoor dining.<\/p>\n
Tell us about Hurricane Sandy. <\/p>\n
Bungalow Bar in Rockaway was completely destroyed. A lot of the people that worked in all of our places are from Rockaway. If you remember, the power went out downtown. The power on the Upper East Side and on the Upper West Side was totally fine. It was like nothing happened. From 40th Street down, there was no power, so we were closed for about a week. So all the people that worked here started dropping off necessary things to help our neighbors. On Twitter, celebrities were like, \u201cRaise money for the American Red Cross.\u201d We didn\u2019t see the American Red Cross during Sandy. And we\u2019re like, \u201cWhy are they getting all the money? Let\u2019s raise our own money and we could give it directly to the people who need it.\u201d We raised $150,000 within about five weeks and got that money out within two or three months to people who needed to pay their mortgage or their kids\u2019 tuition.<\/p>\n
Do you have any funny customer stories?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s only one plaque over there for a regular of ours Mark, a beautiful guy who passed away. He worked upstairs and would come in for lunch. Actually his daughter still comes in to have lunch here. This guy asks, \u201cI\u2019m here all the time, how do I get a plaque like this?\u201d And the bartender tells him, \u201cYou gotta die.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During a busy weekday lunch service, Terence Tubridy sat in a booth at his beloved bar and restaurant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-219919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}