Michael Viscuso noticed very little entertainment in the Gaslamp Quarter and pioneered its nightclub scene. (photo/lambertphoto.com)

Veteran hotelman Renier Milan thought he knew plenty about Downtown San Diego. He had, after all, worked in a San Diego Doubletree hotel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But after an absence of six years — he had moved back to his hometown Los Angeles — Milan was in for a surprise. When he returned to San Diego in 2001 as general manager of the Hilton Gaslamp Quarter Hotel, he found a different city. “I was flabbergasted by the growth, by the gentrification of the whole area,” he says. “I remember when I first moved to San Diego in 1989, my next-door-neighbor said, ‘If you’re from L.A., you’re going to find out that this is a one-horse town. They roll up the sidewalks at 9 p.m.’ Nothing could be further from the truth now.”

These days, the Downtown hospitality industry is exploding in all directions, lighting up the city like the fireworks over the bay. The Gaslamp Quarter, for instance, boasts nearly 100 restaurants and nightclubs, with other establishments pushing into the former no-man’s land of the East Village. The aircraft carrier museum aboard the Midway opened June 7, attracting 100,000 visitors in its first 30 days. Cruise ships are making Downtown their port of call in greater numbers than ever. And the dazzling diamond of Petco Park illuminates the night sky in a part of Downtown once left to the shadows. They built it, and they are coming. Total attendance at 81 Padres home games will approach 3 million during Petco Park’s inaugural season.

The number of Downtown hotel rooms has risen beyond 11,000, drawing more visitors into the center of the city. The 511-room Omni Hotel opened in April. A proposed Hard Rock Hotel was just approved and others are in the works. On July 4 San Diego posted the nation’s second highest hotel occupancy rate — 85.7 percent vs. Oahu’s 92.9 percent — and Downtown was stuffed with the region’s largest concentration of Independence Dayrevelers.

Meanwhile, the expanded San Diego Convention Center and the headquarters hotels flanking it continue to fuel this renaissance. A hospitality giant, the convention center had 900,000 visitors in the fiscal year ended June 30 — 90,000 more than the previous year. The annual total is expected to rise as more Downtown hotels come on line. For the first time, more than half of last year’s visitors came from out of town, considered a plus since they fill hotel rooms and drop their money in the local economy. But the convention center — and more recently the ballpark — also has helped hundreds of thousands of San Diegans reconnect to a livelier Downtown.

“I can’t begin to tell you the number of people I encounter in the convention center every day from El Cajon or from Escondido or from Encinitas or Oceanside who had not been Downtown in a long time and would not necessarily come Downtown were it not for the convention center or the new Padres ballpark,” says Fred Sainz, the center’s vice president of public affairs. “They are seeing this vibrant, energized, modern environment that a few years ago was beyond their wildest beliefs of what Downtown could be.”

Renier Malin says the Downtown boom reverberates even more when the Padres win. (photo/lambertphoto.com)

Feeding all those visitors is big business. The convention center alone served 261,000 breakfasts, lunches and dinners during the past fiscal year, and baseball fans consume 10,000 hotdogs per home game. Even so, convention-goers and Padres fans do not limit their meals to the center or the ballpark. Many explore and patronize the nearby bars, restaurants and clubs. Hilton general manager Milan notes that the ballpark, within easy walking distance of his hotel on Fifth Avenue, benefits the Hilton’s bar and restaurant business on game days. How much depends on how well the Padres perform. “After the game, the activity is always better when the Padres win,” he says.

Restaurateur David Cohn agrees that the new ballpark — added to convention-goers and other visitors, office workers and the growing number of Downtown residents — has helped the Downtown hospitality scene catch fire. His four Gaslamp restaurants — Dakota Grill & Spirit, Blue Point Coastal Cuisine, the coyly named steakhouse Gaslamp Strip Club and the newest, Mister Tiki — serve between 1,500 and 2,000 meals a day. Nevertheless, Cohn, owner of Cohn Restaurant Group, cautions that running a successful establishment in the Gaslamp still requires more than sitting back and waiting for baseball fans and conventioneers. The “treacherous” restaurant business, he says, also demands a sense of timing and a cuisine that will draw a sizable, steady clientele. He found out firsthand when one of his Gaslamp ventures, Hang Ten Brewery, failed.

Cohn and his wife, Lesley, began their restaurant career 22 years ago with a hotdog and frozen yogurt eatery on Mission Gorge Road. During the 1980s, they opened the popular ‘50s restaurant, Corvette Diner, in Hillcrest and the similarly themed Galaxy Grill, which they operated for 10 years in Horton Plaza. In 1992, they jumped into the heart of Gaslamp, opening Dakota in the historic Watts-Robinson Building at 901 Fifth Ave. At the time, with the Gaslamp Quarter just catching on with the public, Cohn discovered that convention-goers rarely ventured as far north in the Gaslamp Quarter as his restaurant. “Lesley and I spent many nights waiting for customers to come.”

Even so, Dakota Grill offered American cuisine, something different from the crowded field of Italian eateries opening in Gaslamp’s early years. So numerous were those early Gaslamp restaurants, recalls Cohn, that they inspired a bumper sticker that said, “Honk if you don’t own an Italian restaurant.” The competition eventually caused the demise of several fine Italian establishments. Two of Cohn’s Gaslamp restaurants now operate in spaces left by Italian predecessors. In 1996, Blue Point Coastal Cuisine opened where Tomaso’s formerly operated. Earlier this year, Mister Tiki, a Polynesian restaurant, began doing business in a space occupied by Fio’s, which closed after 14 years in business.

While Cohn developed restaurants in the 1990s, entrepreneur Michael Viscuso noticed very little entertainment in the Gaslamp Quarter and pioneered its nightclub scene. He had a hunch his first venture might pay off. “Real estate was at the bottom when I first moved to San Diego in 1991, and then I saw things come back a little,” recalls Viscuso. “I said that this is too nice of a city not to develop and grow.” His first opportunity came when he entered a 25-year lease for 19,000 square feet of space at Fourth Avenue and E Street. After more than a year of renovating and designing his venue, E Street Alley opened in 1992. To Viscuso’s surprise and delight, business was double what he expected.

David Cohn says a successful restaurant still requires the right timing and cuisine - even in booming Downtown. (photo/lambertphoto.com)

Since then Viscuso has added other Downtown venues — Red Circle Café and Deco — both of them restaurants and nightclubs, and the On Broadway Event Center, which opened four years ago. He has invested $15 million in the ventures. His clubs proved that visitors would stand in line and pay cover charges for his brand of entertainment. And they drew a new group of patrons — followers of the DJs booked into his clubs. Viscuso says the DJs promote their own appearances through the Internet, e-mails and computerized messages to cell phones, generating a crowd of followers from around San Diego and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Viscuso says the clubs also are doing a booming banquet business. On Broadway and Deco — the two venues he promotes and markets for banquets — showed a 110 percent increase in banquet business in the past quarter compared with the same quarter a year earlier, he says. As Viscuso’s businesses flourished, others took note. Cohn, for instance, has opened two Downtown nightclubs, ROX in the basement below Dakota Grill & Spirits and L5.

Viscuso says he is exploring the possibility of developing other Downtown entertainment venues. Potential nightclub or lounge sites, he says, include the historic U.S. Grant Hotel, owned by the Sycuan tribe; the new 235-room Solamar, a project of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants due to open next year at Sixth Avenue and J Street; and the proposed 250-room Spinnaker Hotel, a high-end waterfront project that would be built behind the convention center. Viscuso holds the franchise for the Coyote Ugly Saloon concept in San Diego and Los Angeles, he says, and he envisions opening a Coyote Ugly venue in a 4,000-square-foot space in Gaslamp.

As the Downtown hospitality industry blossoms, Viscuso and Cohn express confidence in its future, even though they operate some business ventures outside of Downtown — and in Viscuso’s case, outside San Diego.

“I’ll never leave San Diego,” says Viscuso, who spent 10 years in Texas learning about restaurants and nightclubs before moving here 12 years ago. He has encouraged his family to get involved in Gaslamp businesses. A brother, Brian Viscuso, manages E Street Alley and recently opened a high-end lingerie shop in the Gaslamp Quarter. His sister, Maria Viscuso, operates two Gaslamp businesses, The Lime, a tequila bar and restaurant, and a sister restaurant, the Grape, on Fifth Avenue.

For Cohn, a past chairman of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau, Downtown is no longer just a place to do business. He says he will soon move into a new Downtown condominium where he will enjoy the urban scene he helped create. He marvels at the speed with which Downtown was transformed into a place to live, work and play. “I truly believe that this is one of the most exciting new downtowns in the country,” he says. “It’s the right place, the right climate, the right development opportunities.”