Siouxland Magazine - Volume 3 Issue 2

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Enjoy Your Life.
Adventurous
Mitch Martin, co-owner of The Marquee, with a few of his creations.
Keeping Spirits High at The Marquee
By Adrian Kolbo
Early last year, just before the pandemic
shutdowns, many event spaces and restaurants in
Siouxland had just closed the books on a banner
year and were expecting more of the same.
One relatively young live music venue on Historic 4th
Street, The Marquee, had been humming along since
their opening in May of 2017. “We were just cranking ‘em
out, national shows, regional shows, local shows, I had
everything booked up until about August 2020,” says The
Marquee co-owner Mitch Martin. “Normally we book 3
months out. At that time I was booking out 6-8 months in
advance and everything was looking great,” Martin said.
At the time there was really no way of knowing what was
in store for this community, and certainly no idea of how it
would affect the events industry.
“Come February 2020 we started hearing rumblings of a
global pandemic. And then I remember hearing that New
York (had) shut down, and then Illinois shut down, and
then it was like, we’re on our way here,” he explained. It
was clear that the shutdowns were moving inland.
“Then on March 17,” he continues, “which is historically our
second busiest night of the year - St. Patty’s Day - we got the
word that we had to shut down by 12pm. I shouldn’t have
been in shock because I had been watching it happen to
other states, but I was just in shock.”
As I write this it is officially just shy of one year later, February
2021, and Martin now stands behind his bar in a black
hoodie with a matching buff around his neck. He asks me if
I would like a glass of water and I accept with appreciation.
I can see that it’s been a challenging year for him, but I can
also tell that he’s proud to be where he is right now.
After what has now been a full year of unexpected twists and
turns, it’s safe to say that major shifts are now just par for the
course. Martin and his co-owners, Kelly and Nikki Quinn and
Martin’s wife, Emily, have all had to act quickly, decisively and
with intention in order to keep things afloat.
“You have to be able to diversify and pivot, to recognize
that we have to do something different if we are going to
survive,” he explained.
And pivot they did. Shortly after the shutdown it was
announced that the state of Iowa would relax their liquor laws
to allow drinking establishments to sell pre-batched and togo
cocktails. This presented a new revenue opportunity for
The Marquee and others with similar business models in
town.
“We’d been doing these Ultimate Bloody Mary’s with our
house mix since we opened in 2017. Probably around fall
of 2019 is when we did our first MitchSlap (Bloody Mary
Mix), and then the shut-down happened and we were really
looking for a source of revenue, we had nothing coming in,”
says Martin.