North Shore businesses thrilled to welcome fans back for Pirates home opener

The first Pirates home game usually brings a sense of excitement and renewal for players and fans.

But not many are more excited about fans being allowed back into PNC Park than Kyle Martin, a server at the North Shore Tavern on Federal Street across from the ballpark.

Restaurants and bars won’t be able to pack people in like they did before the pandemic. At least not yet. But before Thursday’s home opener, there is a general feeling among owners and managers of the various North Shore establishments that things are looking up.

A year ago, Martin, a 27-year-old Highland Park resident, was on unemployment because the pandemic prevented the Pirates from playing. No baseball games meant no job for Martin and other servers. He was hired back at the end of July when the 2020 Major League season started, but with no fans attending games and limited capacity at the tavern, he was making about half of his usual night’s earnings.

Now with roughly 8,500 fans being allowed into each game at PNC Park, Martin feels much better about this year’s home opener.

“I’m very excited because we’re going back to 75% capacity, and we can be open longer plus fans can go into the stadium,” said Martin, referring to restaurant capacity. “It’s very exciting because spring to the end of summer is usually our busiest time and it’s always just packed in here. It hasn’t been like that since the last Steelers game of 2019.”

Martin’s boss, Mike Sukitch, 57, of Cranberry, owns both the North Shore Tavern and Mike’s Beer Bar next door. Sukitch said Thursday is a day he has long been waiting for. The Pirates open their home season against the Chicago Cubs on Thursday at 1:35 p.m.

“With the year that we’ve just had, having more people down here on the North Shore and having fans inside the stadium is going to be a great first step for us to get our business back to where we think it can be,” said Sukitch. “We took a big hit (in 2020). The business was probably half or 60% of the year before for the two businesses together, but we made it through and now we’re quite excited about the prospects of summer and baseball.”

Near Sukitch’s establishments is SoHo, a restaurant/sports bar located in SpringHill Suites by Marriott. The restaurant usually does brisk business during baseball season, located in a hotel where out-of-town fans prefer to stay. With no attendance at PNC Park last season, SoHo lost 80% of its business, according to general manager Daniel Moya, 42, of Pittsburgh.

With no fans, “you didn’t even know there was a game,” said SoHo bartender Jean Sowinski, 42, from Ross. “I would go outside and hear fireworks and say, ‘I guess there’s a Pirates game.’ It was a strange time for sure. I mean it was a ghost town for a year down here, so it’s very exciting to see things kind of get back to a little bit of normalcy.”

With the prospect of out-of-town fans returning to the hotel, Moya expressed cautious optimism that the restaurant will have more customers.

“I’m hoping to get at least half of the business back that we had before,” he said.

On the other side of the ballpark along North Shore Drive, Michael Milinkovic, general manager of cigar lounge Burn by Rocky Patel, is sporting a black Pirates polo shirt. Milinkovic, 38, from Mt. Washington, looks like he could be one of the athletes or celebrities who frequent his restaurant and cigar bar. He’s been running the place since it opened in April 2018 and said the last year has been his most challenging.

“The easiest way to put it is it’s the epitome of sitting in detention for not doing anything wrong,” Milinkovic said. “It’s been tough. The North Shore (last summer), outside of people coming down to walk and hit the river walks, was a ghost town. With no fans, you had no idea the Pirates were at home. It’s been getting better month by month but it’s nowhere near what it was. Right now we’re doing about 40 to 45% of the revenue we were doing in 2019.”

Milinkovic said having the Pirates back with fans allowed in is going to give his business a tremendous boost, at least initially.

“People are stir crazy. They are going to want to get out of the house and as the Pirates go, so do their fans,” he said. “Either way it’s going to help with numbers. Foot traffic is always good. It always drives business and hopefully we can get some people walking by that haven’t been down here.”

Across the street, at the Foundry Table & Tap, owner Andrew Stackiewicz, 36, of West Mifflin, said just having a limited number of fans at Pirates games isn’t necessarily going to boost business at his restaurant.

“I mean what they’re ramping up to do right now, for a normal game during the week they get what, four or five thousand? It’s not really beneficial to us,” said Stackiewicz. “Weekends we see an influx and families come in and we have kids’ menus. It depends who they play sometimes, too. Now, if they were filling the stadium, (business) would be crazy.”

But filling the stadium means lifting the attendance limits like they have in Texas, where the Rangers sold over 38,000 tickets to their home opener on Monday. It also means the Pirates would have to field a pennant-contending team, neither of which appears to be happening anytime soon.

Just having some fans back isn’t exactly a panacea, said Milinkovic, of the Burn cigar bar. The Pirates need to be playing at a high level.

“If they are doing what they did when I first moved up to Pittsburgh, when they made the wild card games, it was awesome, electric with all those people following them,” he said. “The difference between a good Pirates team and a bad Pirates team for this building is $750,000 to a million dollars. You get me an extra 20,000 people coming down to the Pirates games, if I’m getting 1% of that times 81 home games, you do the math.”

Milinkovic, a Pirates fan himself, said it’s disheartening to see them letting go of marquee players such as former National League MVP Andrew McCutchen, star pitcher Gerrit Cole and 2019 All-Star first baseman Josh Bell.

“What’s the draw for the Pirates? What’s the incentive for the fans? This city is begging for a good Pirates team. We need the Pirates to be awesome,” Milinkovic said. “If we can get relevancy out of the Pirates, this whole North Shore changes its outlook on everything. The bars are busier, the restaurants are busier, if they don’t capture their fan base, we can’t capture it.”

But for now at least, North Shore bar owners like Mike Sukitch say they will take what they can get.

“If the team, as young as it is, is exciting, even if their record isn’t good, then I think there will be a buzz and there will be people down here,” said Sukitch. “But as I like to say, whether there are 40,000 people or 4,000 people at the stadium, my job is to get 150 (at Mike’s Beer Bar) and 150 (at North Shore Tavern) and if I can do that, then we’ll have a good summer.”