Harbor Region’s Façade Program Helps Get Pizzeria Up & Running

With its flat screen TVs, plentiful tables and an abundant selection of pizzas, pastas, salads, burgers and ribs, Niko’s Pizzeria has been drawing local families and football fans to its corner location at West Sixth and Mesa streets in San Pedro since it opened on Halloween 2007.

“Niko’s is an unqualified success,” says Walter Beaumont, an assistant project manager for the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA). “He came in at the worst business climate, yet he’s surviving and thriving because people like it. It’s just a good place.”

Niko’s is one of 22 downtown San Pedro businesses helped by CRA/LA under a Harbor Region program – the Business Incentive and Commercial Façade and Signage Program. It provides up to $75,000 in financial assistance for entrepreneurs to open a new business or spruce up the  exterior of an existing one.

This year, $410,000 has been set aside for the program. Since 2006, CRA/LA has provided $710,000 in such help, while business owners have spent an additional $3.5 million of their own money to improve their businesses.

For Niko Tsouloufas, the $50,000 he received from CRA/LA was part of the overall $750,000 he spent to get his restaurant up and running. CRA/LA money helped him create a contemporary, upscale 19-table, sports bar restaurant that brings to life a crucial downtown San Pedro corner.

It was an undertaking that he was practically born to do.

His grandparents ran Long Beach’s Olympia Café and the Checkerboard Café at the old, Long Beach seafront amusement area, The Pike, which existed in the early 1900s to the 1960s. As a kid, Tsouloufas was fascinated with cooking and watched Julia Child’s television cooking show. In high school, he worked in his aunt’s Italian restaurant in Long Beach.

So, it wasn’t surprising that he spent nearly two years in culinary school in Pasadena and afterward opened his own small, take-out pizza place in San Pedro, Big Nick’s Pizza. On his way to his pizza place, he regularly drove along Sixth Street.

“My first impression was that it was like a little boardwalk,” he said. “It was pretty much run down, but CRA/LA and the City Council were trying to do something.”

After selling his interest in the pizza place and spending a couple of years traveling in Europe and Greece, he returned ready to plunge again into restaurants with a business partner, Deno Boosalis. They focused on a vacant building on Sixth Street, a former coffee shop, and when Tsouloufas heard about CRA/LA’s program for start-up businesses, he was one of the first to receive funds.

Converting the 3,050-square-foot space into a fully functioning restaurant required a year’s worth of renovations, including new plumbing, venting and electrical work, plus construction of a full kitchen and new restrooms. Additional decorative touches included wooden windows, awnings and neon signs. CRA/LA money helped provide a healthy chunk of all that was spent.

Since the pizzeria’s opening, Niko’s loyalty to San Pedro prompted him to hold a fundraiser last year in Niko’s for slain San Pedro SWAT officer, Randy Simmons, raising $7,500 for the Simmons’ family. Tsouloufas also supports all local high school community events. After just two years of operation, he is considering expansion because of the high volume of local customers.

“They have supported us because people are interested in seeing what’s going on in their own downtown,” Tsouloufas said. “San Pedro is probably one of the last neighborhoods that still feels like small village.”