This article won second place in the 2021 Michigan Interscholastic Press Association spring awards ceremony.
The front door is locked at Marco New American Bistro. The windows are dark, the parking lot is empty and silence has replaced the usual classy jazz music in the dining room. This little gem, nestled between Forest Hill Avenue and Cascade Road, is typically teeming with activity seven days a week.
Although quiet for the time being, the restaurant is very much alive.
On the other side of the building, underneath the “Marco To Go” sign, Rick and Beth Buskard work alongside their co-owners and neighbors of twenty years Mike and Kelly Domine.
In 2019, they purchased Marco with their company, Providence Street Restaurant Group LLC, which is named after the neighborhood in the heart of Northview where they watched their kids grow up together.
“When we found Marco after it went up for sale, it just fit what we were looking for,” Rick said. “The clientele base here is loyal, and it’s a really nice community. It kind of all came together.”
Loyalty and community are familiar concepts to the Buskards and Domines, seeing as both families are heavily involved in the school.
Kelly substitutes at the elementary schools, Rick coaches boys varsity soccer and served a 3 year term on the Northview Education Foundation and Mike coached two elementary level Odyssey of the Mind (a creative problem solving program) teams to the World Finals.
Although the restaurant is a good twenty minute drive from the Northview area, they knew that they were surrounding themselves with like-minded people when they settled in Ada.
Customers at Marco know the employees by name. They want to talk to Rick and Beth’s daughter Taylor, and Kelly’s daughter Cori when they come in to help their parents out.
According to Beth, some of their regulars even pray for them.
“It’s a community so similar to Northview,” Beth said. “The people are so generous and kind and they just want to see you win. They keep us going on the days we feel like we can’t.”
About four months after they started, it became suddenly apparent how crucial it is to have a community at your back as a small business. The amount of people the restaurant saw dropped by about thirty percent after Valentines day as the public became more aware of the developing Coronavirus situation.
Then came the Governor’s executive stay-at-home order on March 16.
“As a new business with only a few months under our belt at that point, we didn’t have a lot of savings built up. We had put our money into this already. To be shut down that quickly was going to be financially tough on us,” Rick said.
At two o’clock that day, Beth told her servers and kitchen staff to go home, and that she didn’t know when they could come back.
The couples are immensely proud of their employees. They especially take pride in the fact that the employee turnover at Marco’s is low. Some of their workers have been around for over twenty years, two owners ago before the restaurant was even called Marco. Numerous others have worked there for eight to fifteen years.
“People stay here. They love working here because it feels like a big family,” Mike said.
Family or not, they were forced to place everyone on furlough for the time being.
It was time to sink or swim. They needed a plan.
“Once food was deemed essential, we had to re-evaluate. Our customers were too scared to even go to the grocery store at that point. The good news was that we already offered some items as take home to-heat items before COVID,” Rick said.
They chose to swim.
Each week they sent a menu to their customer email base, advertising pre-cooked meals like pot pies, lasagna, meatloaf and beef stew. All packaged and ready to be heated in the oven at home.
Sure enough, friends, family and strangers alike showed up for their favorite bistro on Tuesdays and Saturdays week after week.
“They would be calling my cell phone ordering pot pies while I’m at home,” Beth said.
The ready-to-heat meal sales sold a couple hundred items every day it ran. It was always enough to pay the bills and carry them into the next week.
Even while they fought for their livelihood one week at a time, they still found ways to lend a hand to their neighbors.
“We did have some ready-to-heat meals left over at the end of the night so we’d deliver them to Mr.Van (a former school counselor) who would give them to Northview families,” Kelly said.
One night, Beth even delivered toilet paper to an elderly customer after her daughter called from Chicago to order dinner for her.
“I said ‘absolutely, is there anything else you’re worried that she doesn’t have?’” Beth said. “She said she’d been trying to buy her toilet paper from the Forest Hills Foods website but it was out of stock.”
Beth assured the woman that they had plenty of toilet paper in the restaurant, and she would drop some off when they delivered her mother’s food.
“She was waving and blowing me kisses through the window,” Beth said.
Eventually, take home lasagnas transitioned into a full blown takeout operation as Coronavirus cases declined. Reworking and polishing needed to be done, considering Marco was a sit down place, and the to-go system was a bit clumsy at the beginning.
The summer allowed for many full-time workers to return. However, Marco was only open from four to eight pm at fifty percent capacity. This meant that Mike and Rick, who work fourty plus hours a week at their regular day jobs, and Kelly, who owns a medicare company, had to put in some extensive hours to help Beth man the fort.
“What we did learn is that we can run the bar ourselves, we can serve food ourselves, we run the dish, we do salads, we do desserts, marketing, you name it,” Mike said. “We know how to do everything. When we first were here, we relied on our employees to help teach us that.”
Both couples understand the importance of the shutdowns. They know that you can’t replace a life.
But after losing about eighty percent of their revenue this year, they feel that the government has a responsibility to support them financially. They’re counting on Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funding and unemployment benefits.
Above all, they want their “family” back.
“To get our employees back and to be together again is what I’m hoping for,” Beth said. “Having more hands on deck makes lighter work for everyone, and we miss them. We care about all of them.”
