After years of throwing dinner parties and barbecues where we told over and over again that we should start a restaurant, we decided that maybe they were right. Sprinkle a liberal dose of Hell’s Kitchen, Restaurant Nightmares, and years of watching the Food Network, and voila! we’ve become convinced that maybe, just maybe, we can pull this off.
So who are, anyway? Well, I’m Marie. I’ve been a software engineer for 24 years, and my food favorites include Southwest food (both Mexican and Tex-Mex), Asian (I love good sushi!), and dishes from the American South. One of my favorite ingredients are dried chiles, especially of the New Mexico variety. I think pork fat rules, and a good barbecue sauce does not start with a ketchup base.
And I’m Suellen, and I’m the baker. I love to create inventive desserts and my favorite ingredient is Belgian dark chocolate. My other specialty is Maryland crab soup. I grew up in the D.C. metro area, and I’ve been a software quality assurance engineer since 1996. My basic belief is that no good meal is complete without dessert.
It all started in February, when I (Marie) decided that 24 years in the software industry might just be enough. We’d really been enjoying Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nighmares, making mental note of all the basic mistakes that so many struggling restaurant owners seemed to be making. I’d sit there and say, “Jeez, I could do so much better.” It just doesn’t seem that hard.
Well, now it’s July and we have a business plan, a marketing plan, a menu and corresponding recipe book, and we’re in the process of incorporating. We’ve found a space that was a former restaurant that closed, and we were happy to discover they left almost everything, even the pots and pans!
Yes, it’s a big change, and we’re giving up the security of a steady income to follow our dream. Are we nuts? I wish I knew the answer!
