As news got out earlier this month that a Texas businessman was hungry to buy McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurants Inc., the 39-year-old Portland chain’s fans grew angry and defensive.
The company’s culture will be lost, they wailed. The commitment to regional food will be forgotten. The “outsider” will ruin a Portland institution.
And yet the only businessmen who put the restaurant chain at risk were its founders, Bill McCormick and Doug Schmick. In taking their private company public for a second time in 2004, the pair willingly gave their business over to others in a mission to expand to as many as 200 restaurants nationwide by 2015.