Restaurant · Guide Updated September 2026

How a Fine Dining Restaurant Pivoted During COVID-19: Lessons from Canlis

When the rules changed overnight in 2020, Canlis, one of Seattle’s most celebrated fine dining restaurants, did not wait for permission to reinvent itself. Mark Canlis and his brother Brian cancelled 1,000 reservations, shut the formal dining room, and opened a drive-through burger stand in the same driveway where valets used to whisk away cars. That is the short version. The longer version is a masterclass in operator mindset that applies to any restaurant, at any price point, in any crisis.

What Is Canlis and Why Does This Story Matter?

Canlis has been in the Canlis family since Mark’s grandfather opened it decades ago. Mark’s parents ran it for 30 years, then Mark and his brother Ryan took over about 15 years before this pivot. It is a reservation-only fine dining restaurant in Seattle, perched on a hill with a stunning view, running a four-course meal at $135 per person. At its core, it is 115 people working out what genuine hospitality means, expressed through food, wine, and service.

The reason this story matters to you, whether you run a taqueria or a café, is that Canlis is the exact opposite of a scrappy startup. It has 70-plus years of systems, manuals, trained staff, and operational memory. If they can flip the model in a week, your excuse list just got a lot shorter.

How Did They Actually Make the Pivot?

Mark describes a team sitting around a table, afraid, uncertain, and asking one question: what do we actually have right now?

The answer was: 115 willing employees, a kitchen capable of volume, a location on a busy road, and a shipping container already sitting in the parking lot with a pizza oven in it.

From that inventory, they built three new revenue streams in one week:

Drive-through burgers. The valet drop-off, a covered Porte cochere, became a drive lane. They served a $14 burger, hot salty fries, and a handmade ice cream sandwich. On opening days they sold out in a few hours, moving roughly 1,000 burgers and 400 veggie options per day, about 1,500 customers coming through.

Home delivery. A separate channel to reach customers who could not or would not leave the house.

Bagels. One of Mark’s expediters turned out to be a serious baker from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They put her at the shipping container with the pizza oven and kept another ten staff members employed making bagels.

Each idea rolled out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, day by day through that first week. None of it was planned. All of it came from looking at resources on hand rather than lamenting what was gone.

What Happened to the Numbers?

They lost money the first week. Mark is direct about this. Going from a $135-per-person ticket to a $14 burger, while running fine dining labor (including traffic marshals on the street to manage the hour-and-a-half traffic jam they accidentally created), is not a profitable equation out of the gate.

Canlis’s monthly payroll runs $400,000 to $500,000 depending on what is happening, on top of a mortgage on a standalone property with a large bank loan. That is not a business that can absorb losses indefinitely.

But Mark’s framing is worth internalizing. Profitability is a rule of the game, not the only rule. The rule says you must make enough to pay the bills and keep the lights on. In a crisis, that rule becomes: make enough, or use savings to bridge, or accept that losing money for a week or even a year does not end the game. It just means you pay closer attention to that particular rule for a while. The soccer game is not over because you kicked the ball out of bounds once.

They raised prices after the first week. That is the fix. You iterate.

How Did They Keep 115 People Motivated?

Mark draws on a military background here, and it is not accidental. His grandfather served in the Navy, his mother’s father was a Marine for 39 years, several uncles were pilots, and Mark and his brother served in the Air Force. That foundation shapes how they think about leadership under pressure.

The strategy is not a speech. It is a practice. They made a discipline of not starting the day in the news cycle. Mark’s rule: 20 to 30 minutes of staying informed, then stop. After that, you are feeding anxiety, not making better decisions.

Instead, they started each day by naming out loud what they had. The staff is healthy. We have a kitchen. We have a road out front. We have a baker who makes incredible bagels. Starting from gratitude is not soft. It is a pre-mission inventory check. You cannot deploy what you have not counted.

They also gave people meaningful work fast. Mark’s point: these are people who were built to solve hard problems in real time, whether that is getting food on the plate, fixing plumbing during service, or putting a roof fire out while pouring a glass of wine. Give them a hard challenge and let them run at it. Keeping staff at home waiting for a stimulus check was a worse outcome than keeping them in motion, even at a loss.

What Is the Mindset Shift Every Operator Needs Right Now?

Mark frames the pandemic as a rule change in the middle of the game, not the end of the game. The referee did not blow the whistle when you expected. The economy shifted the goalposts. That is disorienting, but it is not fatal.

The operators who froze were the ones scanning headlines waiting for certainty about the future of restaurants. Mark calls that a tone-deaf question during a crisis. The better question is: what can we do today, for the people immediately around us?

He is also honest that the first instinct at Canlis was to hunker down, pull the covers over their heads, and wait. That instinct is human. It is also a slow way to die in business. At some point you have to peek around the corner, look into the uncertainty, and move forward anyway. That is not fearlessness. It is doing what you are convicted to do while afraid.

The practical version of that looks like this: rewrite your website four times in a month if that is what it takes. Mark mentions they rebuilt the Canlis drive-through website three or four times as they figured out what customers actually needed. Done is better than perfect. Refinement is the strategy.

What Does This Mean for a Small Restaurant or Café?

You do not have 115 staff or a 70-year brand behind you. You probably do not have a shipping container with a pizza oven in your parking lot. But the framework is identical.

Step one: list what you have, not what you lost. Your kitchen, your regular customers, your social media following, your lease location, whatever staff is still available.

Step two: match those resources to what your neighborhood actually needs right now. Canlis did not ask “how do we save fine dining?” They asked “what does Seattle need today?” The answer in their case was an approachable $14 burger that anyone could pull up and grab without a reservation or a dress code.

Step three: launch something imperfect and fix it fast. The traffic jam on day one was embarrassing. They put eight people in the street, lost money on pricing, and ground their expensive dry-aged beef into drive-through patties. None of that stopped them. They adjusted every single day.

Step four: hold profits loosely in the short term while protecting cash in the medium term. Losing money for a week to keep your team together and your brand visible is a legitimate investment. Losing money for six months without adjusting is a different problem.

The Bottom Line

Canlis went from $135-per-person fine dining to $14 drive-through burgers in less than a week, kept all 115 employees working, and served roughly 1,500 customers a day by asking one question: what do we actually have right now? The rule of the game is not that you must be profitable every week. The rule is that you must stay in the game. Count your resources, give your people a hard problem to solve, start from gratitude, and move. As Mark puts it, scrappiness is not a startup trait. You are not still in the restaurant business if you do not already have it in you.

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