Lord of the Barflies
That’s why many of his employees, like Gormley, have stayed with Hornik, whose Four Corners Management also runs Lucy’s Hat Shop and SoMa in Old City, and Bar Noir, Loie and Noche near Rittenhouse Square, for five years. Once or twice a year, Hornik demonstrates his appreciation by taking staffers on all-expenses-paid trips to Vegas, Miami, Madrid, Memphis or Disney World. (“It wasn’t that debauched,” says Julian, a Miami trip alum. “Although a fair amount of people were pretty ripped by the time we got on the plane. … I actually blacked out.”) Hornik’s employees love Hornik’s business so much that several of them decided one day to get matching tattoos that read TCB, for “Taking Care of Business,” the company motto, with a little lightning bolt next to the letters.
And although not all of Hornik’s establishments are as serious as Drinker’s, they all reflect a certain dedication to intoxication. They are the sorts of places neighbors will try to convince the authorities are nuisances; the sorts of places to which the cops occasionally get called and whose liquor license renewals have incited opposition; places where, as Four Corners director of operations Mark Fichera once admitted, “It takes a lot for someone to get kicked out.”
The sorts of places where none of Hornik’s waitstaff, no matter how much they love their jobs, seemed to make it in for Sunday brunch at Lucy’s. So Hornik, in the shower one morning, devised a plan.
“I thought, let’s just make Sunday a day where you can drink all you want and eat all you want for a fixed price, and make it a buffet,” Hornik remembers, sitting at a glossy new conference table in the conference room of his Center City management office. He is tall and bald, with an intense, unwavering gaze and a presence so forceful, it seems preposterous that he has insisted his tiny publicist sit in on the meeting lest he go “off-message.” Avram Hornik does not go off-message.
“So because it’s a buffet, the servers didn’t have to do a lot of work … and they could handle it hung over. And because it was an open bar, everyone would get sort of drunk, and none of the customers would really care anyway.”
This delightful cornucopia would come to be called “Drunken Monkey,” the Monkey being a man in a gorilla costume who would pour champagne directly into patrons’ mouths. Drunken Monkey is one of the ingenious marketing ploys (another rewarded female patrons with free shots if they dressed in only underwear) that made Lucy’s an Old City institution and Avram Hornik cash cow. Drunken Monkey officially established Lucy’s Hat Shop — opened in 1998 as a bistro, with a kitchen overseen by David Ansill, now owner of BYOB Pif — and the surrounding neighborhood as a place for virtually unlimited well liquor and beer pong on Sunday afternoons. By 2002, Lucy’s cash had begat two other Old City bars, the aforementioned Drinker’s and a small dance club called SoMa. Then, in 2003, Hornik decided to try the fine-dining thing again, hiring a chef with Le Bec-Fin on his résumé to run the kitchen at Loie, a brasserie just off Rittenhouse Square.