ShareStarr Power
Stephen Starr, the big cheese of Philadelphia restaurateurs, puts his stamp on Atlantic City, which long ago put its stamp on him.
Stephen Starr isn’t a chef, he doesn’t like to cook, and he readily confesses, “I’m sick of restaurant food. I’d rather have a can of tuna fish and a Diet Coke.” Hey, that’s his prerogative, but it is jarring to hear those words from the mouth of a bona fide dining magnate.
Starr owns sixteen upscale restaurants, twelve of them in his native Philadelphia (where he still lives, in Center City). The 50-year-old entrepreneur has shown an unerring knack for creating compelling dining experiences in a variety of themes. The food is reliably tasty and attractively presented, but the buzz comes from the lavish and imaginative interiors, conducive to a bustling, and profitable, bar scene.
“He’s almost solely responsible for pushing the design of restaurants to a much more cutting-edge, and expensive, level in Philadelphia,” says architect Elizabeth Knapp, who has designed several small independent restaurants in Center City. “He does develop unique characters for each place. He does interesting things with lighting. You don’t walk into a Stephen Starr restaurant and think it’s a chain.”
Last year, Starr branched out. He wowed Manhattan with an over-the-top incarnation of Buddakan, his Asian-themed Philadelphia flagship, and also opened Morimoto, featuring Iron Chef star Masaharu Morimoto. In Atlantic City, he opened two restaurants on the luxe new Pier at Caesars, a $175-million project built on the bones of the old Ocean One Pier. Buddakan and Continental (a “global tapas” place that is his second most profitable Philly brand) are "
