Delany`s Public House
Back in 2009, Darren Shore left the construction industry in Belfast, Northern Ireland to work at his wife’s bar. He hasn’t looked back since.
“I got hooked immediately,” he says. “In my military career, I learned how to turn something serious into something fun, and it turns out that’s a critical skill in the bar business as well. I admit, I even like the drama—there’s always drama in any bar—but there’s just something about the industry that gets into your blood. It’s not rocket science, but it’s unbelievably demanding. If you don’t have follow through, you’re not gonna make it.”
But that wasn’t an issue for Darren, who moved to New York from Northern Ireland in 2009 to join his wife, Tory. He learned the business quickly while working with Tory, so when the opportunity came to open his own bar in the West Village, he was ready—even though he couldn’t have predicted just how hard the early going would be.
“As soon as we opened, Hurricane Sandy hit and knocked out the entire city,” he remembers. “We managed to hang on until St. Patrick’s Day, and that’s what saved us.”
From there, he opened two more bars in the city’s Financial District before he and Tory decided to relocate to Florida and do it all over again. After some back and forth around scope and scale of their next project, the right space fell into their laps, and they opened Allswell in Waterside.
Not long after, word spread that someone else in Lakewood Ranch was trying to get out of their lease. Darren and Tory had already been thinking about their next spot, but it was still too soon. Ultimately, they decided it was too good an opportunity to pass up. But they’d need financing for the renovation.
So, Darren called David Newton at Gulfside Bank.
“We’d actually been talking for years at that point, since before Allswell was even a fully thought-out concept,” David says.
“We always knew we’d get an opportunity to work together; we just didn’t know when.”
“David took me through the whole process,” Darren says. “I’ve never seen so much paperwork in my life. But David was excellent all the way through. We ended up getting the financing we needed from them, and that’s the reason we were able to build Delany’s to such a high standard of quality.”
“With a new loan of this magnitude—we had four guarantors, one with multiple companies, pulling paperwork together from so many places—there’s always going to be a lot to manage,” David says. “But this relationship has been really easy from the beginning. Whenever you do buildouts, you always expect challenges that you can’t necessarily predict. But nothing like that ever came to pass. Everything Darren told me was going to happen, happened bigger than we thought.”
For Darren, the experience of working with a community bank was a real game-changer.
“Being with a local bank is definitely the way I want to go from now on,” Darren says. “David has become a friend. He’s a consummate professional, a great communicator with deep attention to detail.”
Now that Delany’s is open and thriving, what does the future hold for Darren and Tory?
“The future is definitely more restaurants,” he says. “But you can’t do it alone. You need a David on your team. You need a Gulfside Bank.”