The Man Behind The ‘Mar’ in Marlow & Sons: An Interview with Mark Firth

Written by Nathan Bodenstein

Andrew Tarlow, left, and Mark Firth, right. Photo Courtesy of The Marlow Collective

If you’re familiar with the Brooklyn food and wine scene, there’s a good chance you’ve come across two iconic restaurants on Broadway and Berry in Williamsburg - Marlow & Sons and Diner. These gems have withstood the test of time since their inception in the late 90s, becoming an integral part of the Brooklyn hospitality scene.

The story behind the birth of the 'Marlow Collective' starts with Mark Firth and Andrew Tarlow working together at Lynn Wagenknecht’s restaurant in Tribeca, The Odeon. Over the following 16 years, Mark and Andrew established themselves as the leading restaurateurs of Brooklyn, leaving a permanent mark on the food and wine scene. Together, they brought to life an impressive array of restaurants including Diner, Marlow & Sons, and Roman’s, as well as the old-school butcher shop and market, Marlow & Daughters.

In 2011, Mark made the not-so-easy decision to step away from what he and Andrew had built together and move to the Berkshires full-time. Within a year, Mark decided to bring a taste of Brooklyn to the Berkshires by opening up the Prairie Whale.

Fortunately, we had the opportunity to sit down with Mark to talk about his start in New York, what led him and Andrew to open Marlow & Sons, and why he left it all for a life in the Berkshires.

When did you first move to New York?

I moved to New York in 1994 with $3,000 saved up. My girlfriend at the time, Teri, and I just went to every restaurant possible for three weeks straight. We went all over. We went to upscale restaurants, down-scale restaurants, diver bars and pubs like McSorley's. We even saw the Black Crows perform at one of those places.

It ended up taking me only three weeks to blow through the $3,000 that had taken me two years to save up. I just blew it and that was a lot of money in 1994.

A few days later, Maria said to me, "Well, they interview at The Odeon on Tuesday’s, so I'll drive you there, then we'll go for a drink afterwards." As I'm sitting in the interview with the General Manager, Edward, and the Manager, Bruce, we just started chatting away.

They first asked me where I came to the states from because I have a bit of an accent. I said, "well, I went to Italy to watch the World Cup in 1990 because I got my call up papers for the South African army. Then I never left Italy because I loved it but I eventually met a girl from Brooklyn which led me here.”

Edward said, "oh, I have a house in Italy." Now, my Italian then was terrible, but we were just chatting away despite my terrible Italian.

Bruce eventually asked where I grew up and I said, "well, I grew up in Zambia but my parents are English. They moved to Zambia when I was two." Bruce goes, "oh, I'm from Zambia." It was ridiculous. I said, “wow, what a small world. So when do I start?” They looked at each other for a second and were like, “you’re too cocky but we’ll give you a try out.” The tryout ended up going well and I started working there as a server.

Did you move to New York with the mindset of pursuing a career in hospitality?

Yeah, I always knew I was going to work in restaurants and would eventually open my own bar. I went to college for about five minutes, but didn't stay very long. I ran a bar in Florence called the Stonehenge and worked in an English pub and an Irish pub there as well. I eventually started working at a cafe making salads and coffees. It was all a fun experience but by that time, I was 25 and felt the need to do something more.

When did you and Andrew Tarlow first meet?

Andrew and I met while we were both working at The Odeon in Tribeca. We quickly became friends then we found this loft in Williamsburg on the corner of Dunham and Broadway in 1995. We had about 6,000 sqft for just under $2,000 a month. We also had these artists living with us from upstate New York and a South African friend of mine from Johannesburg that moved in and it was just crazy. We started throwing parties and just having a great time.

When Balthazar eventually opened up, I was like, yeah, let's change it up a bit. So I left The Odeon and started working there. I think I worked six shifts a week. I was also hanging drapes for a lady named Michelle. She made these fancy curtains and valances for very wealthy people. My friend and I would show up to the house with just a screw gun. We called it ‘Hanging with Michelle,’ and she paid us $150 each for basically 2 hours worth of work which we loved. Then I worked at this little Italian restaurant. So I had three jobs and I was just bumping and bouncing from one job to the other.

When the little restaurant up the street from our apartment in Williamsburg came up for sale, Andrew and I worked it out and got it opened.

Diner’s present-day exterior

What was the timeline of restaurants that you two had opened up together?

We first had Diner, which opened in 1998, then came Bonita, a little Mexican restaurant, that lasted nine years until we lost the lease, and the third restaurant was Marlow & Sons.

The name ‘Marlow & Sons’ comes from the ‘Mar’ in Mark and the ‘Low’ in Tarlow, and we both had sons. Then when we opened the butcher shop, Marlow & Daughters, which is still Mark and Tarlow, but we both had daughters by that time.

What was the inspiration behind opening up Marlow & Sons?

It’s quite funny actually. The reason we opened Marlow & Sons was because the space next to Diner had become available. The space was occupied by an exterminator but he was retiring and we thought that if someone moved in next to us, we would be pissed so we quickly decided that we'll just take over the space and figure it out from there.

We really didn’t even know what the concept would be but we eventually came up with this idea of groceries in the front and oysters and meats in the back.

You wouldn’t guess it now but it took a while for us to get Marlow & Sons going. Since it was just meat, cheese and oysters, we eventually added a couple of hot dishes. It started more as a waiting room for Diner, which was weird because when we added hot food like the brick chicken, it kind of flipped. Then Diner became a waiting room for Marlow & Sons.

It was at that time when we started getting into natural wine as well. Andrew had met Joe Dressner at a tasting and that really kicked things off. At first I just drank beer and cocktails, sometimes I'd have a glass of wine with a steak but I wasn't obsessed with wine like I am now.

Andrew and Joe started putting some of the wines in front of me and I was like, what the hell? This is so good. So I started to get more and more into it.

One of the things I love about the Dressner wines is that their palate seems to be similar to what I enjoy.

I tell people all the time when they come into the Prairie Whale and ask me, where do I find this? I say, look for this label and I'm telling you that 99% of the time you're going to be happy with the wine you get because there are no duds in their portfolio. Familiarize yourself because there are enough wines and different grapes in an importer’s book that you should be able to nail it down. And every so often you can take a risk and try something different.

Mark Firth at Prairie Whale in Great Barrington, Massachusetts

At what point did you realize you wanted to step away from all of it?

I started transitioning out around 2011 after I had found a farm in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. It was just time for me to do something else because I felt pretty much useless. As the restaurants got bigger and bigger and we started expanding more, I realized that was not my forte. I needed to be hands on and I really can't sit in meetings or just tell people what to do.

I also think when I was working with a partner and had so much to do, I kind of got left behind a little when it came to the wine.

When I was opening the Prairie Whale, I was able to jump back in feet first. I made a list of all my favorite wines from the list at Marlow & Sons. I was like, you love this, you love that. I just got into it, and then my brother-in-law started an importing company called Bon Raisin. When I didn't have to worry about payroll for four restaurants and managing the managers, it cleared the space in my brain for wine especially since I have a lot of trouble learning and I just couldn't remember wine regions or grapes.

But I knew what I liked so I started writing everything down and learning slowly since I had to because it was just me doing the wine at Prairie Whale and I was responsible for it.

I’m fortunate to have my brother-in-law, Chris, as a resource and someone who I could just ask 100 questions to, even if it was the same question over and over, and he wouldn't get mad at me. Then it started sinking in.

When I started driving back and forth from the Berkshires to Brooklyn, I would go into UVA and ask Justin Chearno, what have you had recently that’s good? I want a case.

How did you decide on the Berkshires?

We got really lucky. The in-laws of a guy that lived above Bonita had a house in Stockbridge, a town very close to Great Barrington. My partner, Bettina, and I were cruising around with the kids looking at farms all over New York State but it never occurred to me to look in the Berkshires, mainly because I hadn't even heard of it.

When my friends in-laws said that we should visit them in Great Barrington, we went and stayed the night. While we were looking around, we were like, wow, it's really nice here. Then our other friends from Brooklyn had opened a little French Cafe in town called Bizalion’s, just down the street from the center of Great Barrington. We stayed with both people, had a great time, and we realized that might be the area for us. From there, we started looking around for properties but it ended up being more expensive than we had hoped since there was a certain limit to how much we could spend.

People think that since you own successful businesses that they're worth millions of dollars, but we were only really worth what the lease is and what your profit is annually divided by two people. And I had a certain budget just under $500k.

One day, our friend received a call from his friend saying, “I need to sell my farm to move back to the Carolinas and be with my kids.” Our friend responded and said “I have a friend from Brooklyn that would be interested. I live above his old Mexican restaurant.”

Once I received the call, I drove up the next weekend and there was 4 feet of snow everywhere. I'm like, this is amazing. So she gave me a price, which was $100k more than we could afford and I was like, oh, shit. She said, “well, look, I want you to have it. I like you, you're going to keep it as a farm and take care of the land, so go and talk to the Land Trust and see if they'll help you out.”

We went to the Land Trust and they made up the difference. We put it under agricultural conservancy and boom. It's never going to get developed which of course also wipes a ton of value off of the property but then I was like, well, yeah, who cares? It's where our family is going to live. My kids’ kids and so on. So they’ll just keep it because really you die and you can't take it with you.

I also think we liked it here because when we moved, there was a lot going on in the arts world with Tanglewood, Jacob's Pillow and Shakespeare company in the area. There was a lot of culture. I don't know much about New York State, but I hadn't seen it like I see it here. Maybe obviously Hudson is a little different. Or maybe I just went to the wrong places.

After we moved up and settled in, I had pigs every year for a few years, but the busier the restaurant got, I realized that sheep and chickens were way easier and chickens were great because we were doing brunch. Then we stopped doing brunch so there was no point in keeping a lot of chickens around if we weren’t using the eggs. So now I have 9 chickens and 9 lambs right now. I'll eventually get pigs again. I had pigs last year, and made the most delicious prosciutto and pig head rillette.

The exterior of Diner in 1998. Courtesy of The Marlow Collective

How did raising pigs impact your decision to open up the Prairie Whale?

My old butchers had opened the Meat Hook in this big old space under the BQE in Brooklyn. They bought the first pig from me for like $11 a pound and I basically broke even.

But then I would call people to buy our pork and they'd come up with every excuse under the sun. So I was like, okay, well, I’m going to need my own restaurant for these pigs.

It was a wake up call and economic reality that it's super hard to be a farmer. You also have to be a full on PR guy and brand all your shit, too. Otherwise people are like, no, not buying your pig. It's not cool enough.

At the time, there were really not that many restaurants in Great Barrington that were doing what we were doing in Brooklyn. The more Bettina and I thought about it the more it made sense to just open a restaurant. I knew it was going to be a place where you can get a burger and a cheap beer, or you can get a dry aged steak and a glass of wine.

We got super lucky with Steve Browning and Daniel Studwell because they wanted to move up from Brooklyn and help get us open.

Steve was actually working at Marlow, but wanted to move to the country. Dan was working at another restaurant in Brooklyn but came because he wanted to help us out. Dan stayed a couple of years then went back to New York. He eventually came back because of COVID, got settled, and bought a house nearby. When Steve decided to retire this past August, it was an obvious choice for Dan to step in. We hoped he would take the job and he did. It was a seamless changeover.

How did COVID affect the business?

I know not many people can say this but we did well because we just moved everybody outside. We didn't skip a beat and it was crazy busy. I know that didn't happen in New York and other areas. That was terrible for a lot of businesses and friends of mine.

We’ve grown a ton and my interest and knowledge of wine has grown, too. Especially now, going to the tastings in France where sometimes I’d find myself standing at two in the morning with nine French people having a great laugh while none of us speak each other's language.

We had a guy come in the other night, and he goes, “wow, you have Dressner wines. How do you get them?” And I’m like, “We're not in Alaska.”

When I first walked through the door of the Prairie Whale, I was like, holy shit, I’ve been teleported to Marlow & Sons.

That's a funny story. Me, Andrew and Ken Reynolds, who had founded a Brooklyn-based contracting company, Execution by Design, had built all the restaurants together. Ken's the legit builder, whereas Andrew and I were ‘design consultants.’

When I was building the Prairie Whale, I was like, well, you know what? I really wanted it to be cozy, like an American tavern. So more like an English pub meets American tavern. Like, what's that? How does that translate? I thought, well, I love the walls at Marlow & Sons. And I saved so much of the scrap wood from the demolition of the antique store where the Prairie Whale is now. The antique store was painted this terrible yellow so the first thing I did was paint the whole place white so we didn't have to work in the yellows around us then we knocked down all of the walls. Then I thought, you know, I really love the wood at Marlow & Sons, and that was just rough pine that this guy Brendon would stain, wax it then stain again, polish it and it was put up. So the side that's visible is like this beautiful old wood and the other side of the walls is just rough pine.

I wanted to get in touch with Brendon but he didn't have a phone; fortunately, though, I had his sister's phone number. I called her up and I said, "Hey, it's Mark from Marlow & Sons. I'm building another restaurant. Where's Brendon? I need him to come up here, stay in my barn and help me build it out." She goes, "Oh, he's in rehab." I was like, "Oh, shit." She responds and says, "He's in rehab in Vermont." I was like, "Whereabouts?" I googled it. It's like 2 hours away. "Can I have the number?" She said, "No, I'll call him at rehab, and he'll call you back if he's interested." Two days later, I get a call from Brendon, and he says, "Tell me about this job."

He ended up coming for five months and lived in my barn. It took us a whole summer to build the place. He did all the wood, all the faux finishing, everything. It looks amazing, right? And then we would go in the truck and find a stack of old bead boards, and that's what one wall is. After we finished it up, I said, “well, did you want a job?” He goes, “no, I think I'm going to go to Florida.” We're like, okay, well, we paid him then he went to Florida. Next thing I hear, he's working at Hooters as a line cook.

Are you and Andrew still in touch?

Oh yeah. We’ll text back and forth. Andrew’s son, Elijah, turned 21 last year. And Andrew’s wife, Kate, and I had made this lamb dinner the night before she gave birth to Elijah. We had built this brick thing in the back of Diner and we put a leg of lamb on it, spinning it, and we were brushing it with rosemary leaves and olive oil.

Elijah ended up recreating the last meal before he was born. Kate usually cooks the same meal every year, but this is the first year I think he cooked it from start to finish and it was unbelievable. He's a chef now and has been working at Roman’s.

Elijah was the first born, and I remember carrying him around Bar Pitti. Some gorgeous woman said, "Oh, can I hold your baby?" And I'm like, "Sure." So I handed him over, and then I saw Kate outside, and she was like, "Where's Elijah?" I said, "I know where he is. Some supermodels got him inside." So Kate went into the restaurant. Sure enough, he was getting passed around.

Photo Courtesy of The Marlow Collective

What was one of your favorite memories while at Marlow & Sons and Diner?

Very early on we would have brunch on New Year’s Day and would take turns if someone would go home early then do brunch. But obviously when it was my turn, I wouldn't go home early, I would just get up in my tux and go work brunch.

Then every year for ten years, we would have an early dinner at Peter Luger’s that night with a nice bottle of wine and just decompress. That was great. But then our steak was eventually better than Luger’s because of the butcher shop, Marlow & Daughter’s. We were buying good meat and dry aging it. It was always so much fun. I really felt like for four days I didn't sleep. But then you have kids and you're not sleeping anyway.

Did you ever regret your decision to leave what you had built?

Not at all, I was ready to leave. In the restaurant business, we worked every day for years and years and years and that was your life. I remember early on, I walked down the street after a shift and there were a bunch of people hanging out in a parking lot. There ended up being this big band who were just standing on top of a car in the lot playing. And I missed that because of work, and so much other stuff passed me by as well.

I had tickets to see LCD Sound System a few weeks ago. They came to Marlow & Sons for years and years. I've known them forever but I've never been to a show and have barely been to any concerts in general, well, at least since my first week after having moved to New York when I saw the Black Crowes. It was very rare that I’d get a night off, which only started around the third year we were open.