'A constant gamble': A veteran restaurateur in Seattle shares her recipe for success

In one minute, restaurant servers hurriedly sweep from one table to the next like a well-practiced waltz, swiftly carrying trays scattered with myriad appetizers or emptied plates to and from an even busier kitchen, all while shuffling wait lines of eager guests spill onto blocks of scuffed pavement beyond rotating restaurant doors.

The next minute, nothing rests within but a thin shower of dust and a vacant hostess stand.

This is the revolving door of restaurant life in Seattle, one that is so familiar it sometimes resembles a visiting circus -- filled with an abundance of intriguing acts and stirring courses, then vanishing overnight.

It's a lucrative yet unforgiving industry, something Donna Moodie, a restaurateur with 25 years of experience, describes as no easy feat and an endless gamble.

“Sometimes friends will say ‘Hey, want to come to Las Vegas with us?’ and I’ll always say ‘I don’t even need to go to Las Vegas, I own a restaurant, I gamble every day,'” said Moodie, owner of Marjorie, Capitol Hill’s eclectic eatery famed for its global comfort fare.

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Yet, Marjorie seems to be doing quite well on its own. A patio exploding with greenery bustles with post-work happy hour snackers, servers sweep by with plates of brittle plantain chips (famed by visitors and sold by the box) and sticky jerked chicken, while a multiplicity of guests leisurely greet Moodie before finding their seats like it’s their own home to chat, sip and dine.

But even for the most popular and frequented restaurants in Seattle, Moodie says the gamble is still perpetual.

“It’s one of those things that’s a constant gamble because there’s so many factors at play,” she said. “I was talking to chef Edouardo the other day, the owner of Salare, and he made a joke saying, ‘Aren’t we all just one busted water heater away from going out of business?’ And it’s so true, because you never know what could happen.”

Yet, Moodie must be doing something right to still be standing behind her suppers decades after her first opening.

She was born in Jamaica, and soon after moved to Chicago. It wasn't until 1993 she made the move to Seattle and opened her first restaurant to great acclaim, Marco’s Supperclub. Four years later, she struck a second smash hit known as Lush Life dishing out Italian cuisine, even amid a then-derelict Belltown.

The restaurants’ globetrotting menus vibrated through the neighborhood, that is, until Moodie branched out independently to transform Lush Life into Marjorie, which shifted from Belltown to Capitol Hill and officially opened its doors in the spring of 2010.

Following a fruitful run through the past few decades, she naturally uncovered her restaurateur's recipe for success in the Emerald City:

First, Moodie based her inspiration for the restaurant (and the name itself) on the person who pulled her into the kitchen years before: her mother.

“My mom Marjorie was exactly like Julia Child in ‘The Art of French Cooking,’ she’d just cook anything she conjured up from a cookbook, and invited me to follow her around the kitchen” she said. “She’d invite so many people over to our house they couldn’t even all sit at the table. They’d sit on the floor, plates in their laps, singing, dancing, eating, drinking until the wee hours.”

For Moodie, this is what motivates her in her own restaurant, and what she encourages other culinary entrepreneurs to find within their own.

“At our house, it would just be this mix of people on the south side of Chicago when it was extremely segregated. My mom would just cross barriers all the time,” Moodie said. “She taught me there’s room at the table for everyone, so that’s what I focus on, not some competing industry.”

More than half of the time, Moodie knows who walks into her restaurant like it’s a quaint neighborhood café, and in some ways, it is. Sound panels wrapped in silk Moodie brought back from India speckle the interior, hanging from the ceiling, providing a sense of warmth and comfort rather than a trendy unfamiliarity.

“My staff know people by name, I have relationships with my customers. You have to look at it like a community rather than a business doing commerce,” she said.

For Moodie, this sense of communal comfort is embodied within something as simple as a wedding cake.

“There’s this couple I’ve known, and when gay marriage was legalized, they had already been together for nearly 25 years,” Moodie said. “So they decided to get married and wanted to have a reception at Marjorie. Nearly 50 people showed up, and I surprised them with a wedding cake.”

Even when Moodie was in the midst of moving her restaurant from Belltown to Capitol Hill, her doors never really closed.

“In the year and half that I was looking for a new space, we had a lot of regulars who would call me and say, ‘Hey Donna, can you have a dinner party or something? We haven’t seen everybody in a really long time, and we just want to know how they’re doing,’” she said. “If you’re operating a restaurant, you have to realize food is a tool to bring people together in a community.”

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But in tandem with communicating with your customers, Moodie believes communicating (rather than competing) with fellow restaurant owners and chefs is equally significant.

“I have to say I’m often so surprised when I hear other people say it’s just a competitive jungle of restaurants out here,” she said. “I find it to be so untrue, especially from a standpoint of people that are likeminded, all of us out here making food with love and quality ingredients, I feel like we all need each other to thrive in an ecosystem when we don’t get enough support from the city or government alone.”

In fact, one of those supporting relationships turned into Marjorie’s most unique cocktail: Donna’s Diaspora, composed of Plantation Xamayca Rhum, ginger juice, lime, sparkling wine and Bissy Kola Nut Beverage.

Bissy was drafted by James Swinyard and his best friend of nine years, Zachary Jide En’Wezoh.

As En’Wezoh was flipping through a book about his great grandfather, once a chief of the Nigerian Igbo tribe, he repeatedly noticed its regard of “kola nut,” a cocoa-like fruit pod native to the rainforests of Africa, one of Nigeria’s largest cash crops, and the original main ingredient in Coca-Cola.

So En’Wezoh and Swinyard teamed up to develop Bissy, the only kola nut energy drink on the market in the United States. Comparative to two shots of espresso, the natural energy produces a comfortable climb rather than a boost and crash.

Partly due to Moodie’s interaction with visitors, she was the first to drop a cocktail like it in the country.

This support for Moodie from outside producers is crucial, because for her, running a restaurant in itself is a job that never ends, even at home.

“I get up early, I come take care of the garden, I do small tasks like painting the bathroom, and then at 5 o’clock a big party might be coming in, it’s an all-day job,” Moodie said. “There’s always something to do. You feel like you could work 24 hours a day and seven days a week and still be behind.”

And even when the day is through, it’s still a gamble.

“I think even if you’re doing everything right, you’re still gambling,” she said. “I think when places close down there’s often instant criticism like, ‘They weren’t doing this, or this dish wasn’t good,’ but people who are putting their heart and soul in this can fail just as easy. The perseverance and attention to detail and burnout factor is really easy to reach.”

Yet primarily for Moodie, the successful restaurants aren’t merely the ones who work the hardest or the ones who acquire the most skilled chefs and servers, it’s the ones who commit to their project at play.

“I think people that do it and last, they just really love it,” she said. “It’s not just perseverance and good food. Some people do it for the trendiness of it, some people are really committed to it.”

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At Marjorie, the menu changes frequently though iconic recipes inspired by Moodie’s mother remain, like those of the Jamaican jerked chicken with bourbon sweet potato puree, and the brioche bread pudding dotted with homemade toffee and cream.

Why? Because Moodie believes a key ingredient to a successful restaurant is the ability to adapt and adjust. Hence, her menus remain paper.

“So when my sister and I became vegetarians for a few years my mother said, 'Now don’t go thinking that I’m going to cook special for you, we’re all eating the same food,'” Moodie said with a laugh. “We’d all sit down for dinner, and sure enough, she’d start with ‘Well, I pulled the meat out before I made the pasta sauce.’ She was a constant show of love.”

Now, Moodie incorporates the same ebbs and flows of a rotating menu to foster the changing appetites of Seattleites daily.  

“In the restaurant industry, you’ve got to adapt to the changing ways while retaining your own vision,” she said. “For example, it doesn’t make sense anymore to have a 4,000-square-foot restaurant, where on a slow night it feels empty. It doesn’t make sense anymore to not have vegetarian options, to not be flexible about vegan or gluten-free guests, so you make room for everyone at the table.”

Alongside a dedicated staff like that of Mikey, Marjorie’s bartender of five years, and Max, Moodie’s son who works in the kitchen (and curates a nod-worthy Spotify playlist amid the eclectic ambiance,) Moodie works with a series of dedicated growers and farmers, as she has since she was 14 years old.

“I grew up with a health food store on the corner where I lived, my sister and I started hanging out there, and the guy who owned it would educate us on things like social justice, food, black history, why you should eat healthy, and all if it just stuck with me,” she said. “I go to farmer’s markets probably two or three times a week and just shop. I’ve been doing business with growers for the last 20 years. You start building relationships that are really important, they take care of you.”

And while basing a menu off local foods and farmers sounds like a given for any successful restaurant, Moodie stresses that it is not an easy feat.

“It’s hard, it’s really hard to do. Seeking out great food is a time sacrifice, and you really have to be on top of it while being flexible. Your farmer might run out of things on a whim,” she said. “I ordered strawberries for Wednesday, got a call that morning, and one of our growers just couldn’t supply enough. You have to be prepared to restructure things on the menu.”

But for Moodie, her dedication to Marjorie comes down to one lone ingredient: the work is simply worth it. Perhaps that’s what makes Marjorie more than merely a successful restaurant, and more so a place for quality conversation over good food.

Moodie enjoys conversing and laughing with new and old guests over a gnarly hunk of street corn dripping with cotija and chili-plum sauce (manners aside for this dish.) She enjoys discovering new music with Max to play at Marjorie (even a few hits from Beyonce and Jay Z.) She enjoys bragging on Mikey, who she believes to be “bartender of the year” (and perhaps considering his skill with a mojito, might just be in the running.)

While Moodie finds restaurateurs predominately dictate their own success or failure, she also believes the consumers themselves play a large part in an eatery’s survival, a part that is solely their own enjoyment and engagement with the art that we know as food.

“I think we have a different environment of consumers that maybe don’t always appreciate that thing you’ve built, that intimacy. Sometimes we prioritize being insular at home because our world is so exhausting. We forget how beautiful it is just to interact and have human contact over food.”

For Moodie, she fosters that interaction one chaat-spiced plantain chip at a time.