BRIDGEPORT — It was 1994, on a gray and blustery Sunday in February, when an aspiring writer named Lou Cumino walked into the Polo Café and made a lifelong friend.
A native New Yorker with a knack for nailing down discount deals with restaurants — his “bread on the table” gig, he’d later call it — Cumino had arranged to meet with Dave Samber, the storytelling pioneer behind one of the neighborhood’s most treasured landmarks.
“Guys like you I don’t need,” Samber remembers thinking of the weathered salesman trying to sell him something. "But 21 years later, he's still around."
On a recent Monday morning at 3322 S. Morgan St., Cumino, now a producer and writer in Los Angeles, rolled into town for a short visit at the Polo Café, a stop on his way to see his daughters in Kentucky. When he saw Samber pull up to the restaurant in his minivan, the men embraced through the van window — even though they had seen each other the day before.
"He's a pioneer," Cumino said of Samber, his 65-year-old friend, who opened the joint as a nuts and candy shop three decades ago in 1985. "He's one of the hardest workers I know."
Since then, the Polo Café evolved with the neighborhood’s ever-changing economy and clientele.
Today, the Polo Café serves as a restaurant, B&B and banquet hall. Samber's latest mainstay is his “Hallelujah! Bridgeport Gospel Brunch." There always-packed shindig features music played by an in-house organist and a menu stacked with items like the “Mayor’s Steak & Eggs” and the “Three Little Piggies” breakfast hash plate.
Samber grew up in East Cleveland, where, at a young age, he planned to enter the seminary. But he later discovered he was better suited for life as a businessman. After a short stint studying child psychology at Valparaiso University, he transferred to the school’s business college and graduated with a degree in accounting. In 1973, Samber landed a job in Chicago at Ernst & Ernst, a public accounting firm from Cleveland.
“It was one of the best things that could’ve ever happened to me,” Samber said.
Samber spent three years as an accountant, learning the basics of juggling cash as a businessman, before he jumped into real estate as a developer. Though he made a lot of cash in real estate, something was missing.
He wanted a simple life, and thought, “How hard could it be run a little candy store?”
In 1985, he bought a little storefront on Morgan — down the block from what was once the neighborhood’s Polish dance club, Bucket of Blood, and next door to The Eagle picture show — and opened Polo Nuts & Candy.
Samber eventually branded the place as a Christmas shop, sporting shelves covered in everything from cookie trays to fine candies from all over the world to dolls priced as high as $350. Despite the price, people bought them, drawn inside by Samber’s reputation as a friendly, street-wise businessman — and the gummy bear Christmas tree in the front window.
Five years later in 1990, a Dominick’s grocery store opened in the neighborhood and gave locals a one-stop shop to buy their snacks and Christmas supplies.
“I realized I couldn’t keep this going,” said Samber, who had a staff and mortgage to pay.
Samber had experience working in a kitchen from his early days working side jobs as an accountant and decided to open up a restaurant. In 1992, Samber signed on with the Taste of Chicago and started to make big bucks catering for companies like Best Buy at the storied Chicago celebration.
In 1996, Samber got a call from Hollywood. Bill Duke, then a director with United Artists, wanted to film a scene for “Hoodlum,” a crime film starring Laurence Fishburne as recently released convict Bumpy Johnson. Film crews transformed the store into an old-time Walgreens for the summer popcorn flick, stenciling Samber’s wall mirrors with the convenience store logo. Walls were extended, a soda fountain installed.
For the three-minute scene, the production company spent 90 days and $1.5 million, Samber recalls.
The scene spotlighted the hoodlum’s innocent vice: “He didn’t smoke or drink,” Samber said. “He had a fetish for banana splits.”
Over the next month and a half, director Duke sat next to the restaurant's fryer, watching the scene unfold in his monitor. He'd yell, "Cut!" And order the actors to do the scene again. Duke filmed the scene over and over again over the course of a month, switching the camera angles every time.
"They did it 42 times, that one scene," Samber said. "And I know it was 42 times, because I sold him 42 banana splits.”
Listening to Samber tell the story, sipping his coffee in a booth beneath of the Walgreens stenciled mirrors still hanging in the restaurant today, Cumino said, “That’s a good way to keep track.”
When the film crews left, Samber decided to keep the shop the way it was. The film came out a year later.
“Dumb as nails,” he said of the finished flick.
For the next decade, Samber beat on with his restaurant and catering business, but when the economy crashed in 2008, Samber had to reinvent himself again.
“I can almost tell you what hour it happened,” Samber said. “All of a sudden it was, ‘Where is everybody?’”
Samber lost two thirds of his business. Regulars died, moved away or fell on hard times too. He took $62,000 he had saved and borrowed money and refurbished the upstairs of the Polo Café, where he also lives. He built a laundromat exclusively for the B&B residents.
“My income at the restaurant stopped right as the B&B took off,” Samber said.
Today, three decades after setting off on his candy shop adventure, Samber has redefined what he’s after.
“It’s a happy life,” Samber said. “I thought simple would be happy.”
Instead, Samber found happiness in the people he has come to meet. In 2010, Mayor Richard M. Daley showed up to the Polo Café, ate and signed his name on the restaurant’s signature chalkboard hanging at the front of the shop. Samber had to pipe up, confronting the mayor: “See this chalk? You know how much dust is on this chalk from waiting for you to come in here all these years?”
But Samber finds more solace in the stories of the commoners that so often find the Polo Café and wind up reminiscing about growing up in the neighborhood.
Two brothers recently stayed at the B&B. One was 71, the other 75. They decided to rendezvous at the Polo Café and spend the night before they went on their ways, back to their lives apart. The brothers ended up next door, at the former site of The Eagle picture show, where Samber has opened a banquet hall, and snapped photographs.
“They were walking me through their memories of what was there,” Samber said. “They’ll tell you, ‘My mother gave me an extra nickel, and I took this girl on a date, we were both 11½ years old. I went underneath the staircase and she got her first kiss.’”
After a beat, to drive home the wonder of his tale, Samber said, “Really!”
Cumino has a different set of memories attached to that banquet hall.
During his first visit to the Polo Café in 1994, Samber showed him the space next door: A dilapidated mess of a room with nails sticking out of the floor, broken glass scattered everywhere. Before Samber showed up, the vacant room bared scars left by past owners. After it was a movie theater, it was a pickle depot. Then an auto repair garage.
After that first meeting, Cumino noticed Samber’s steady work to transform the broken-down building into a money-making business. With every visit, the room looked better and better.
"He turned it into this beautiful hall,” Cumino said. “He’s a pioneer.”
"Pioneer" is Cumino's go-to title for his long-time friend, but Samber is humble about his place in the neighborhood. He celebrates his regular guyness. He's often the guy who calls in gunshots to police. He's been an advocate for troubled kids in court.
But Samber insists he's “street-level," a common man with big dreams. He just so happens to have a talent for turning his dreams into real experiences people can carry with them forever.
“It’s better to do it than to dream it,” he said. “It’s about having the presence to know how you can be resourceful to others… We’ve made memories for others.”
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