Nick & Sophie's Tavern

Nick and Sophie Del Grande-Domenices are best remembered in Camden as the proprietors of Nick and Sophie’s Tavern, at 699 Central Avenue, in the Centerville section of Camden. The bar still bears their name, as does Central Avenue between South 7th and South 9th Streets in Camden.

Nicholas Del Grande-Domenices was born in Pennsylvania in 1908. The 1930 census shows him as living at 322 Walnut Street in Camden with his mother Maria and sister, Edith Del Grande. He was then working as a manager of a restaurant.

Sophie was born in New Jersey February 7, 1914 to Peter and Kathryn Koszarecki, Ukrainian immigrants who had both come to America from what was then Russia by way of Austria-Hungary as teenagers. Besides Sophie, there were at least two older daughters, Viola and Clara, and a younger brother, Alexander. When she was ten Peter Koszarecki and his family were renting the bar and building at 2001 Broadway, where they operated a cafe known as the Mill Inn. In later years this bar was known as the Belleview Inn. It appears that Peter Koszarecki at some point after 1930 became the owner of the Belleview Inn.

Sophie Koszarecki married Nicholas Del Grande-Domenices and bought an interest in the bar at 699 Central Avenue from Peter Kucharski prior to the birth of their son Peter in 1932. Peter Kucharski had a bar at 1701 Van Buren Street in 1929, according to that year’s city directory, and 699 Central Avenue was the home and business of a tailor, John Skoruk, who had been there as early as 1924. Peter Kucharski appears to have acquired 699 Central at some point after the April 1930 Census and sold the bar to Nick and Sophie shortly thereafter.

Sophie became ill sometime thereafter, and her mother Kathryn Koszarecki ran the bar for a few years in the mid-1930s, until Sophie was well enough to return to the business. The bar appears in the November 1936 New Jersey Bell Telephone Directory as Pete’s Cafe.

Grandson Mark Del Grande writes “…it was Sophie who actually bought the bar from Peter Kucharski sometime before my father Pete was born in 1932. She became very ill and was hospitalized for a year and during her recovery which took two years her mother operated the business. When Sophie was well enough to take over operating the bar her mother made her pay about $3000 to get the bar back even though Sophie still owned the bar.”

In 1947 the bar appears in the Camden City Directory as Nick’s Cafe, and in the New Jersey Bell Telephone Directories of the 1950s and 1960s as Domenice’s Tavern. Since the 1970s the listing has been as Nick and Sophie’s Tavern; those who frequented the bar simply referred to it as Sophie’s.

Nicholas Del Grande-Domenices passed away on July 25, 2003, three days short of his 93rd birthday. Sophie joined him on February 15, 2002. They rest together at New St. Mary’s Cemetery in Bellmawr NJ. Up until December of 2006 their grandson, Eric Del Grande, ran the bar. With the razing of the old Roosevelt Manor public housing project and the push for renewal in the neighborhood, various interests attempted to acquire the property, but the Del-Grande grandchildren stood fast. In March of 2009 an extensive remodeling, both within and without was completed. Sophie’s is back, now in its eighth decade of the family’s ownership, under the direction of Nick and Sophie’s grandchildren, Mark and Deborah Del Grande.

It is an island in turbulent seas. When you first spy “Nick’s Cafe,” the lone frame house standing amid the blocks of brick that are Roosevelt Manor and Branch Village housing projects startles you. Looking from Ferry Avenue at that corner of Seventh & Central you have the image of an outpost … a mission of some sort.

Sophie and Nick Domenices say they’ve never thought of leaving the place they’ve called home since 1932, when they took the third floor apartment above Sophie’s uncle’s tavern. They were just married two years then. By 1944 when Sophie bought and began to run the cafe, Nick had begun his 27 years as a welder at New York Ship (“He welded the keel plates on the Kitty Hawk”). In over 50 years Nick and Sophie have watched the neighborhood change dramatically, and as it changed their ties to it grew stronger. “How could we leave,” Sophie asks, shrugging off the question, “our roots are here.

Sophie Koszarecki grew up in South Camden, at 1929 South Seventh Street. Her father Peter was a “chipper ‘n caulker” at the shipyard. Her mother Catherine was sent from Poland alone at age 14, marked with a tag for her New York destination. With no relatives or connections besides the immigrants with whom she landed, she found a job in a button factory, worked her way to Philadelphia, and eventually to Camden.

When Sophie was ten her parents bought the Belleview Inn at Broadway and Jefferson. It was there that she gained her introduction to the tavern business. She helped her mother run the Belleview until she married at 17. She learned to cook there, to which she attributes the good cooking in the heyday of “Nick’s Cafe” — the 75 cent platters and 35 cent (or was it 25 cent?) crab cake specials.

Sophie and Nick are a two-volume encyclopedia of South Camden history. Sophie will tell you all about “the old neighborhood” (between Sixth and Eighth along Ferry Avenue) which was peacefully integrated by the early years of this century. She recalls a great spirit of cooperation among people, especially during the Depression — people were sharing food, collecting and selling junk, marketing horse manure to mushroom growers in Pennsylvania, and planting vegetables and flowers in all the vacant lots. Nick remembers the sports activities and the ballfields (like “Licorice Park” owned by MacAndrews & Forbes, at Sixth and Viola). It’s there, Sophie says, that the Italians celebrated Columbus Day with fireworks and a contest where the men and boys shimmied up a greased pole for prizes of salami and ham and cheese hung at the top!

Sophie adopted Sacred Heart Church from childhood, even when her mother and aunts were going to St. Joe’s Polish. She is proud that three generations of her family attended Sacred Heart School — she and her sisters, her nieces and grandchildren. While Sophie only attended sixth and seventh grades there, she has vivid memories of that time, including making her first communion and confirmation on the same day. “We did it all together then. You wore your white dress and veil for Mass in the morning, then you put on a red tam and the Bishop came to confirm you in the afternoon.

That Sophie has become a neighborhood institution is indisputable. Listen to her describe the Easter egg hunt she sponsored through the fifties: “Sixty dozen eggs we would buy, and a customer and his wife would dye them. We’d put money on the eggs and bury them in the lot at the corner.” She’d toss peanuts and pennies to the little ones as well. She smiles. “You know young men still drop by and tell me they were one of those kids, and how they’d just wait for me to blow the whistle to start the hunt every year.

Nick,” Sophie calls after a conversation over the half door of the kitchen, “he needs $25 to fix his car.” She pauses. “I help them out with money, fix ’em sandwiches or a bag of groceries when they need it. I won’t see anyone go hungry. We’re like mother and father to a lot of the people around here. And they watch out for us.

One of the funny recollections I have of my grandparents was when Nick wanted to get her goat during a heated discussion he would call her a Pollock and she would get furious with him because she was Ukrainian not Polish and would stop the argument to remind him of that fact and then throw a few ethnic barbs his way about his ethnic background (you get the drift). So, for the record her father Peter was actually Ukrainian and had migrated to the USA from Austria…

—Mark Del Grande, November 2005