Considering Marco’s Kitchen, 26 S. La Grange Rd., opened at the same time the entire country was shutting down for a pandemic, the odds that it would survive seemed long — very long.
But Thursday saw the celebration of the La Grange restaurant’s second anniversary, with about 50 local leaders and residents turning out to help the business celebrate.
“Frightening is the only way to describe it,” Marco Conte, Proprietor/Chef, said of the prospect of launching a restaurant when draconian restrictions on public spaces were being imposed. “I had my whole life savings at risk, and we had no help from the government.”
At around 5 p.m., the restaurant’s normal opening hour, a group stood outside with Conte and participated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the establishment’s survival.
“Marco, we’re so happy to be celebrating your second anniversary with you,” Charity Jones, La Grange Community Development Director, said before Conte used a giant pair of scissors to snip the ribbon.
Wine and hors d’oeuvres were served for two hours as Conte mingled with the visitors, many who had businesses or worked in the downtown retail area.
Conte grew up in the Detroit area, where he gained his most valuable restaurant experience working in a family-owned restaurant in a Detroit suburb, although he did spend two years in a culinary institute in Michigan.
At the tender age of 25, he opened his first restaurant, Marco’s Restaurant, in Farmington, a Detroit suburb.
That experience, lasting from 1989 to 2003, and his love of travel, along with a challenging economic climate in Michigan resulting in part from the decline of the auto business, led Conte to relocate to Elmhurst, where he had been recruited to be the chef at Cafe Amano, a position he held for 13 years.
When it came time to return to being a chef/proprietor, everything seemed to be going well — until the pandemic.
“We were supposed to open in April 2020, but then COVID hit,” he said. “So we went to filling produce bags, and doing curbside service, and deliveries. That’s how we survived.”
Conte pointed out that the produce bags, which were only $10, turned out to be an unintended benefit of the pandemic.
“People were afraid to go to the stores,” he said.
Marco’s Kitchen finally open its dining room in September of 2020.
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If the first onslaught of the pandemic wasn’t enough to force the restaurant’s closing, the Delta variant closed its doors again in October 2020.
But the restaurant somehow survived until it was able to reopen in March of 2021, and as Conte put it, it was reopened to “a fantastic business.”
He described Marco’s cuisine as “upscale international fusion” and said that business both in the dining room and the bar, “are up quite a bit.”
Conte said that his business is facing the same challenges as almost everyone in the private sector — finding workers.
“We just can’t get enough staff,” he said, noting that the restaurant business was always challenging and he thought many experienced people had “found work outside the industry.”
Sarah Parkes, Executive Director of the La Grange Area Historical Society, praised Conte and his perseverance in the face of the pandemic’s challenge.
“We love to see the survival of local businesses,” she said. “Marco has been so creative.”
Other visitors spoke of pandemic-related challenges and the prospects for the La Grange business community’s future.
“The traffic from restaurants has increased,” Molly Acers, who works at Peak Running, 18 W. Burlington Ave., said.
She said that many of her customers wound up in the store because of the proximity to restaurants, whether because they were waiting for a reservation or had just finished dining.
Real Estate manager Jerry Burjan, of Burcor Properties, has several properties in La Grange and said he felt the current business climate was “doing well,” pointing out that there were “a lot of people looking for office space.”
He also noted that many of his tenants seemed to be “doing a lot better.”
As for Marco’s Kitchen, Conte said that perseverance had been the key to its survival.
“We stuck to our guns,” he said. “And we’re still here.”
For further information on Marco’s Kitchen, visit the restaurant’s website, MarcosKitchen.com
Hank Beckman is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.