A former GOP elected official has gone from serving his Staten Island constituents in the City Council to serving them frosty brews in his new outdoor beer garden.
Joe Borelli was a member of the Council from 2015 to 2025, and its minority leader from 2021 to 2025, and often ripped lefty politics for driving businesses out of the Big Apple. He’s now gambling on his own venture, called The Garden by Hop Shoppe, in the pedestrian plaza at Staten Island Mall on Richmond Avenue in New Springville.
“We are sort of taking the Brooklyn urban beer garden and bringing it to Staten Island,” said Borelli, who is partnering in the seasonal venture with borough-based restaurant and bar king Carmine Gualtieri.
The venue is decorated with picnic tables, gazebos, palm trees, umbrellas and a shipping container that was retrofitted to be used as the main bar. It has cornhole boards, foosball tables and other games, and it will feature bands, DJs and other live entertainment.
Borelli said it’ll offer a wide variety of foreign and domestic brews and a menu similar to what Gualtieri offers at his popular pub The Hop Shoppe in Stapleton.
The beer garden briefly opened May 5 for a Cinco de Mayo bash that drew a large crowd, and it hopes to be running permanently by Memorial Day weekend.
Borelli, who stepped down from the Council to take a job as a lobbyist, said he knows as well as anyone that New York is so saddled by high taxes and other anti-business policies that he’s taking a big financial risk.
“It’s ironic,” he said. “I’ve been such a critic of New York for so long” as a place to do business. “It’s not lost on me that I’m now investing personal money into the future of the city, but I want this to succeed, and I want to have more locations someday.”
“The biggest attraction we have going is that there’s not many outdoor bars on Staten Island, and people want to spend time outside, listening to music, playing games,” he said. “So we’ll be doing a lot of things like bingo, live music, psychic nights, doggy brunches.”
“People are now also looking to malls in a different way than they used to 30 years ago, and people want to have new experiences,” said Borelli.
