Owners target Thanksgiving for opening date
LEWISTON – Marco’s Restaurant could be serving up turkey as soon as Thanksgiving.
Owners of the popular downtown restaurant unveiled plans Tuesday to resurrect the business, closed for more than a year after a fire gutted the 177 Lisbon St. building that housed it.
It’ll be in a new spot, at 12 Mollison Way, a sentinel building at the entrance to the Fairgrounds Business Park off Main Street. The building once housed Cartest, an automotive outfit, and later Advantage Payroll.
Steve Taylor and Duane Arnold, Marco’s owners, said they intend to turn the structure into a restaurant that will combine “some old Marco’s, some new.”
At a news conference staged by city development officials in front of the property Tuesday, Taylor and Arnold were enthusiastic about their venture. They said they plan on building on Marco’s “26, 27-odd years. We’ll be here for another 20, 30 years.”
The location, they said, will offer a new customer base to enhance the one built up earlier. The business park and nearby enterprises employ hundreds of people. More are coming; Pediatric Associates will open its park offices within days and TD Banknorth just announced plans to expand there.
Just what they wanted
Side streets off Main Street also are filled with homes, providing additional future hungry patrons.
And the property has plenty of room for parking as well as grounds for use for outdoor weddings and similar gatherings.
“This building has everything we were looking for,” said Taylor. With renovations, he expects to “bring the feeling and food of the old Marco’s back,” but “do things … that we could not do in our old location.”
With the restaurant’s rich history, “old” was something of a theme.
“We had updated our menu just a week before the fire,” noted Arnold. “We will open with essentially that same menu, with a few further enhancements.”
Among diners’ favorites at the old Marco’s were its signature veal, eggplant parmigiana and shrimp scampi entrees. The owners also intend to revive Marco’s popular lunch buffet, which featured soups, salads and loads of Italian specialties.
Marco’s will feature a main dining room that will seat 100, three banquet rooms capable of seating between 10 and 120 people, and a large lounge area that will seat up to 50.
Taylor and Arnold said the lounge is being designed to serve as an after-work social spot for the adjacent business community as well as for nearby residential neighbors.
Marco’s should open “hopefully by Thanksgiving,” they said. They plan to advertise the date once renovation work gives them a feel for it. Reservations for parties, weddings and the like will be taken once the opening date is known, they said.
Mayor Lionel Guay was delighted by the owners’ decision to reopen the restaurant.
Standing beside a placard featuring Marco’s logo of a silhouetted gondola being poled across wavy water, he noted: “This is like welcoming an old friend home.”
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