| Georgie's Grill & Dairy Bar
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| Georgie's Grill & Dairy Bar
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HAMMONTON — Sam Messina Jr. couldn’t find a job, so he decided to create one for himself and others.
After being laid off as an insurance appraiser for GMAC a year ago, the Vineland resident looked hard for a similar job before realizing it just wasn’t there.
“I did that for two months before I said to myself, I’m going to try to do something on my own,” Messina said.
So he took most of his savings and started looking for a place to open a restaurant, since his father, grandfather and uncle had owned pizzerias and luncheonettes. He found and bought the former Toni’s Custard here, something of a landmark visible from the town’s Atlantic City Expressway exit.
Starting a restaurant is never easy and especially challenging for the unemployed, but possibly as early as Easter weekend Georgie’s Grill & Dairy Bar will open and Messina will be an employer not only of himself but also nine others.
“I have been lucky, but I have also been resourceful. That’s the way I was brought up,” he said.
Even though Messina had $100,000 from savings to put down on purchasing the property, he had no job and no countable income, so getting a bank to lend the other $150,000 was nearly impossible.
After several banks in the region rejected him, he finally got financing through Century Savings Bank in Vineland. “They looked at my business plan and were really impressed,” he said.
“I’ve been fortunate to be able to pick up a lot of equipment at various auctions,” Messina said. “You’ve got to know what your looking for, what you’re seeing and what it’s worth.”
By driving to West Virginia, he was able to pay $26 for a warming cabinet that costs about $8,000 new. By driving to Schenectady, N.Y., he saved a few thousand dollars on two pressure fryers. Two soft ice cream machines came from the closed Stewart’s Root Beer in town.
One of his best finds was at the auction of another former landmark, the Richmond Ice Cream restaurant and dairy on Route 40 in Woodstown, Salem County. He needed to replace his restaurant’s drop ceiling and found boxes of commercial tiles — heavy and cleanable, worth about $15 each — that nearly no one recognized. He got 44 tiles for $35, and paid a hungry independent contractor $300 to install them (after getting an estimate from a ceiling company of $2,800 for the job).
Work on the restaurant immediately drew attention. Richard Spence, of Hammonton, came looking for a job as a cook.
“I’ve been out of work almost a year and my unemployment runs out next week,” Spence said. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t make ends meet.”
Donna Henning came looking for a job she used to have: She was a waitress at Toni’s Custard three years ago. Living on Route 54 in Buena, “I could be at Toni’s in four or five minutes,” she said.
Others want Messina to succeed for a different reason.
“I’ve had tons of salesmen coming in trying to sell me stuff, so that tells me that they’re hurting, too,” he said. “Everybody’s hurting.”
The people Messina is really glad to see are the divorced parents who still meet in his parking lot on weekends to hand off their shared-custody children.
Toni’s Custard — about midway on the direct line between Atlantic City and Philadelphia — has long been a meeting place for those wanting to split the travel requirements, he said, and he expects those children to be eating frozen custard soon.
Score, a nonprofit business counselor, figures only half of new businesses survive their first five years, but Messina isn’t worried.
He figures his sales need to add up to only $800 a day for him to break even, something he hopes to do by summer. By then, he said, he expects his full- and part-time employees (still including himself) to reach 20 to 24.
The connection to the name for his restaurant became obvious Thursday when the sign went up and the apostrophe in “Georgie’s” was a paw print.
“Georgie is my dog,” Messina said. “I figured for a custard place I should have a cutesy, two-syllable name.”
And he’s ready, when young pranksters or salesmen call asking for Georgie, to put his brown toy poodle on the line.
Sam Messina Jr. does some of the painting in the dining area of the restaurant. In an effort to save money, he is doing as much of the renovation and work as he can. The restaurant is named after his dog, Georgie.
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