Lord of the Barflies

No gold Buddhas. No undulating bamboo ceilings. Yet with his six bare-bones bars, Main Line-raised lawyer Avram Hornik is the king of sticky-floored nightlife

At lunch, Loie seems like any other vaguely charming, dimly lit bistro where the burgers come with Roquefort and salad greens. Above the bar hangs a dazzling chandelier of aluminum and blue stained glass, a chunk of which had been missing for a year until it was recently repaired. (Wherefore the chunk, you ask? It remains a mystery. “Someone threw a quarter? A bottle cap?” ventures Four Corners’ Fichera.)

Before the chunk of chandelier fell out, there was no sign at daytime Loie of the nighttime Loie — the Loie that teems with accountants and MBA students and status-bag-toting Penn seniors all exhibiting their dedication to intoxication. Restaurant watchers took daytime Loie to be a sign of Hornik’s growth and maturity, a sign that as he approached 30, he was creating a brasserie where he would like to go.

 

 

The truth is that Hornik doesn’t usually hang out at his bars. While there are old-days tales of Hornik boozing post-­midnight with the TCB’ers, Avram Hornik no longer seems to create his places with Avram Hornik in mind, which is his biggest strength. Throughout Philadelphia, bars and restaurants dazzling and divey have been opened by people looking for the types of places they would like to hang out, and their restaurants and bars bear the unmistakable notes of their individual proclivities, their fastidious eclecticism, their “special affinities.” Standard Tap owners William Reed and Paul Kimport spent the better part of a year building their bar to resemble one that might have existed in the 18th century; Starr wouldn’t stop altering the blueprints on his New York Morimoto until he found a guy who could make a water wall that went backwards. From Ellen Yin’s Fork to David Fields’s defunct Salt, this town is dotted with labors of love disguised as businesses.

Hornik, on the other hand, builds bars. Craig LaBan awarded Loie a single bell (Gormley, when I asked if Drinker’s served food, said, “Do we have food? Yes. Do you want to eat it? No!”), but that didn’t affect Hornik’s self-esteem, or his bottom line. Alcohol is the unquestionable draw at Noche, his months-old “Argentinean-themed” lounge at 19th and Chestnut. Alcohol is the reason Hornik knows his next restaurant, a kosher-vegetarian place next to Noche, will succeed: “The drinks,” he explains, “actually subsidize the food.”

Speaking of subsidies, Hornik is an unusually social-minded entrepreneur, the type who never sold out his liberal-arts college politics. (He majored in poli sci at Vassar.) “Avram’s kind of a socialist,” says Tayyib Smith, an ex-manager of Lucy’s Hat Shop. Hornik defends Philadelphia’s wage tax and unions, and extols the virtue of the night students — “the hardest-working people you’ll find” — at Temple Law School. He’s used his alcohol profits to support causes from the Philadelphia Fringe Festival to the Kerry campaign to tsunami relief. Although a survey of random patrons at this last function revealed few who actually knew they were attending a tsunami benefit.