Food & Drink

Restaurant Inside Baseball: How (Exactly) Greg Atkinson Opened Marché Bainbridge

By Seattle Mag May 30, 2013

0812rratkinson_1

Most of us fall into one of two groups.

There are the daydreamers, who fantasize about opening a bakery, cafe, bistro or restaurant of their very own one day. They imagine the space, the tables and chairs, the lighting, and of course what kind of food they’d serve.

The other group generally thinks people in the first group have a major screw loose. They can’t fathom why anyone in their right mind would ever open a restaurant. The financial risks! The grueling work and the long hours! The turnover of staff, the seasonality of business. They get headaches just thinking about it.

Let’s just say you fall into the first group. There’s still the matter of how? How does someone go about opening a restaurant. Where do you even start?

We hardly ever get a first-hand account of opening a restaurant as truthful, frank and complete as the one in this month’s Food Arts. Chef Greg Atkinson, of Bainbridge Island’s charming, sophisticated Marché, goes into painstaking detail about his circuitous path to owning his first restaurant at the not-quite-still-a-spring-chicken-ish age of 52.  He tells of meeting with lawyers, the search for investors, bank meetings, creating an LLC, consulting on renovation plans, the whole nine.

And then he tells us why: “The truth of the matter is…the bottom line is, that this is what I want to do. If I don’t do it now, I never will, and I really want to do this thing.

Read the full piece here. It’s worth your time.

 

 

Follow Us