- [Mark] In those days, you'd drive under the porte-cochere, door opens for you, there's somebody greeting you by the fire.

- [Brian] Take your coat, and you come sit down, and you have space and beauty, and live piano music, and candlelit dinner, and a very considerate and thoughtful multi-course meal.

- [Mark] It's like this safe place to have that moment you were hoping to have, right?

Like her birthday, that anniversary, that night before the C-section, your grandma's holiday meal, she's 88 and a half or 112.

Like those nights that you think about, that you look forward to, and that you know are gonna hallmark this moment in time.

I think about being a kid in this room, where we used to have all of our staff meetings, when the staff was small enough to fit in this room.

And just like listening in, and eating, you know, tidbits of leftover teriyaki for family meal, and just thinking like, whoa.

- This was a second home to us.

This restaurant opened in 1950, and it was built by our grandfather, Peter Canlis.

- [Mark] Canlis, one year.

(chuckles) Like 69 years later.

I could go through these books forever.

On every page you see these families that built Seattle, literally.

Here are the Nordstroms, the Newells.

On March 5th, 1955, they did 215 people in the dining room.

We still can't pull that off.

- [Brian] We inherited this.

- [Mark] We inherited the opportunity to purchase this.

- [Brian] Yes.

- [Mark] Which is a remarkable privilege.

- [Brian] From our parents who did that same thing from their parents.

We're actually fourth generation restaurateurs.

We had to figure out, are we gonna run our parents' restaurant, that was a beloved institution in this town?

Or are we gonna make it our own and try to evolve it?

And as you're driving into the future, you know, the windshield is this big, and the rear view mirror is this big.

And we think that's about the right ratio.

And I think a lot of Seattle wanted us to have a much larger rear view mirror.

- And living in the tension, is a really tricky thing to do, right?

It's hard not, it's very easy to get pulled in one direction, or to fold another direction.

It's very easy to go to the extremes.

It's really hard to live in the tension of yesterday and tomorrow.

Great dining lies ahead of us in ways that maybe we could not have gotten to without this really hard season we've been through.

- [Brian] We saw the writing on the wall.

- [Mark] We had friends in China.

Who dined in a, - [Brian] who owned restaurants.

- [Mark] Yeah.

- [Brian] Who said, get ready.

- [Mark] Yeah, this is no joke.

This is like the real deal.

- This is coming for you.

And when the first cases showed up in Kirkland, there was this realization of, you know, Seattle is the next Wuhan.

It's here first.

- [Mark] I feel like we worked our entire lives to fill up a reservation book in so many ways.

And then in one meeting we just said, we're gonna call all those people, and tell them not to come in.

- It's for fine-dining which means, whether our dining room has 25 people in it, or a hundred people in it, it takes almost the same amount of staff to pull off that experience.

So at 25% capacity, we go to business.

So we were forced to be creative.

We shut down our dining room for the first time in 69 years, at the time.

And we opened a burger stand.

- [Mark] You just have a go.

You just try.

And if it doesn't work, well then you die trying, but you don't give up, like you don't give up.

- And some of the ideas worked, some of 'em didn't.

The bagel shed was awesome, but that didn't work either.

Delivering dinners was a huge hit.

And we started doing, at one point, a thousand dinners a night, right?

We had this piano livestream every night, and then we did the stupid slash awesome bingo show.

That turned into the drive in theater, CSA delivery service, followed by the Crab Shack.

- [Mark] We just got like seven tons of sand and stuck a boat on it.

- [Brian] Followed by Canlis Community College.

And now the Canlis Yurt Village.

- [Mark] No, it hasn't been profitable, but it's been awesome.

- [Brian] Welcome, I'm Brian Canlis.

We ask that you wear your masks anytime you're not in your yurt.

The servers will do their best to limit interaction and not get all in your business.

We love you.

It's nothing against you, but you're not gonna get the full, hardcore service experience, but you'll get our hardcore hearts the whole time.

- Great.

- [Brian] I promise.

- [Mark] How do we do these things that are so different?

That's not different at all.

We were doing in the parking lot, the same thing we do in our fine-dining restaurant.

And maybe it wasn't the intentionality around ironing wrinkles out of your linen or polishing glass.

The point is to inspire all people to turn toward one another.

How do we literally stay as a community, turned toward one another, amidst the brokenness, and the pain, and the hurt, and the suffering.

Specifically in the restaurant business, I think our industry has so much to gain, and to learn from the stripping away, this sort of devastating season.

And we're looking forward to pouring the same amount of energy we just did into 11 crazy ideas, into one 70 year old restaurant.

I would hate to waste this moment.

I would hate to try to go back to normal, as if normal was perfect, and without its flaws and its broken parts.

It wasn't perfect before we shut this thing down.

And now we have this opportunity to build it back.

- I hope that COVID is gonna be a reset for dining in this entire country, back towards that.

Away from, like we've all missed being around the table together.

I've longed for our full dining room of people laughing, and drinking, and talking.

That's what matters.

Not some perfect tweezer food scallop.

- [Mark] To the six of us dining in a yurt, in a pandemic.

Food is the universal invitation.

It is the ultimate common ground.

I don't care who you are on this planet, and so that, that lights us up.