When opening a restaurant, bar, or tavern and you decide to use your own name and likeness out front, there is definitely a heightened sense of responsibility to deliver tasty food, great drinks, and top-notch customer service. Just ask Tony Marciante who operates not one, but two Chef Tony’s Seafood restaurants in Montgomery County – one in Bethesda and the other in Rockville.
"The buck always stops with you,” he said, during a recent interview with the Beverage Journal in our ongoing series chronicling Maryland and D.C. eating and drinking establishments named after their owners or family. “If it’s called Texas Roadhouse, no one really knows who [the proprietor] is, do they? But when your name and your face are on the front, you have to field calls for all kinds of things. Of all the people we serve every day, 99 percent are going to leave happy. But there’s always going to be something that happens – that 1 percent – and they’re going to want Chef Tony!”