Pocomoke City building restaurant

By next spring, city officials expect to be cutting the ribbon on a brand-new downtown restaurant, one built right beside the Delmarva Discovery Center and on the banks of the Pocomoke River.
Who the tenant will be, and what the menu will look like, remains to be seen.

Pocomoke is building a restaurant on spec in the hopes that an accomplished Eastern Shore chef can be lured to town and set up a business. The Market Street site has been cleared and pilings are slated to drop next week. Because the land is municipally-owned, the city effectively is the developer of the project.
"I don't know anyone else doing this kind of thing," said City Manager Russ Blake. "Our city council is very forward-thinking, and willing to be entrepreneurial, to see that improvements that need to get done can be completed. They're very pro-business here. Always have been."

Plans call for a 3,025-square-foot restaurant and bar that will seat 100 inside and 45 outside on a deck. Blake said "it's too early" to speculate as to any tenants or their style of food or decor.
The total project cost is about $750,000 and is funded almost entirely by grants, Blake said.
The building takes its shape from its unique triangular site, which has a long, narrow configuration, according to lead architect Jack E. Mumford III of Becker Morgan Group.
He said the aesthetics of the building are meant to be "a bit nautical" while complementing the Discovery Center. A tower at the north end of the site, adjacent the Market Street bridge, is an element that will be lit up at night.

Blake hopes the new establishment will complement non-profit attractions already in downtown Pocomoke City, including the Discovery Center, the historic Sturgis One Room School museum, the Mar-Va Theater and the Isaac Costen House museum.
City officials would have preferred someone in the private sector build a restaurant on the waterfront.
"Lacking that, there was still the need for a nice restaurant in the downtown area, so the city stepped in," Blake said. "The restaurant was the missing piece."

Bringing a restaurant to downtown Pocomoke has been a project more than a decade in the making, under the guidance of the Pocomoke Marketing Partnership, a committee of local residents and businesspeople.

"I guess they're building it, and they think somebody will come -- like the baseball field," said Barbara Tull, the first president of the PMP and a former women's clothing store proprietor.
She said the idea for the restaurant was borne from the concept of the Discovery Center -- it was part of the original plan for the museum but did not make it into the final version. Planners decided to work toward a free-standing restaurant right next door.
"Of course, we don't want to be in the restaurant business. They hopefully will find somebody who's a wonderful restaurant operator," she added.

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Editors note: I think they should build the building to mimic an old Chesapeake Bay Lighthouse maybe like the old Lighthouse that was once in the Pocomoke Sound on the southern end of Watts Island [pictured below]. Then they could name it The Lighthouse.