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Moe Chabuz: Skinny Legs Bar and Restaurant

Moe Chabuz, who owns Skinny Legs Bar and Restaurant in Coral Bay, St. John, is a man who made the most of opportunities that came his way.

Born in 1949 in a displaced persons camp in Germany to Polish parents who were there after their release from a forced labor camp, Chabuz learned about opportunities from his father. When friends left the camp for Canada and Australia, his father held out for America.

"He wanted opportunity," Chabuz says.

The family settled in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Chabuz followed his father into a textile factory when he was 15 for a part-time job. He then went off to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to get a bachelor's degree in biology.

Chabuz learned some kitchen management skills while working for the anti-nuclear power movement in New England. He coordinated a kitchen that fed protestors.

In 1979, adventure beckoned — so he headed to St. John with a friend. The friend moved on, but Chabuz felt the island was a place he could call home. He did odd jobs, worked in restaurants and learned to dive.

Opportunity came knocking when the Virgin Grand Hotel — now the Westin Resort and Villas — opened in the mid-1980s. Hoping to get a job, any job, he made friends with the two women who worked in the employment office.

"I wanted a foot in the door," Chabuz says.

Soon he was scraping plaster off the floor. Other Virgin Grand jobs followed until 1991, when he left to open Skinny Legs with friend Doug Sica, the hotel's cost controller. Chabuz learned skills that served him as the bar and restaurant grew to become one of Esquire's top 100 bars in America. It was the only bar in the Virgin Islands to make the list.

Sica died in 2006, but his spirit lives on at Skinny Legs. Indeed, the name reflects the fact that both Sica and Chabuz sported slender gams.

While Chabuz, 58, puts in long hours at the bar and restaurant, he still has time for family matters. Married in 2006 to Toni Lacer, he's also the father of two grown daughters. Melanie, 35, lives on Long Island and has two children. Carolyn, 15, is on St. Thomas.

Along the way, he developed a taste for running marathons and has competed in Boston, Philadelphia, Victoria, British Columbia and Portland.

"And in 2007, I did New York," he says.