When the esteemed Michelin Guide included Sarasota for the first time earlier this year, it featured only three local restaurants — and just one received a distinction beyond selected status.
The Michelin Guide has expanded beyond its famed star rating system to also include designations such as Bib Gourmand, which celebrates restaurants "that serve exceptional food at great value."
Lucky 8, which opened in late 2024 in Sarasota's Southside Village and takes inspiration from chef/co-owner Mark Majorie's New Orleans upbringing, earned Sarasota's sole Bib Gourmand award. (Pizza purveyor Tralia and Focaccia Sandwich + Bakery both received Selected, or recommended, status.)
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At Lucky 8, Majorie — who worked as a chef de cuisine at The Roosevelt New Orleans, A Waldorf Astoria Hotel, among other jobs, before moving to Sarasota to help open Veronica Fish and Oyster — serves comfort food favorites such as po'boys and smash burgers, as well as an inventive version of cochon de lait ("suckling pig") that takes inspiration from New Orleans' Vietnamese community.
In a July 22 interview, the Herald-Tribune spoke with Majorie about Lucky 8, his New Orleans upbringing and how it inspired the restaurant, and the impact of Michelin recognition, which continues to draw crowds during the Sarasota area’s typically slow summer season. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How did you find out about the Michelin Bib Gourmand recognition, what was your reaction to it, and how have you seen it affect business?
About five months before the announcement, we received an email just asking for media and pictures and our story. We sent over the pictures and all of our information just in case, obviously — and I didn't tell anybody besides some of my family, but we just moved forward. After that, the ceremony was on May 28 and honestly I was working, I wasn't even going to watch it, but my mom and my sister were blowing my phone up telling me I need to just turn it on. So I'm sitting in the kitchen watching it and the announcement comes over, and you can't even really explain it, just overjoyed, really.
So that was on a Thursday, Friday was business as usual, and then Saturday, May 30, the floodgates opened and it has not stopped since. We're talking people waiting outside for an hour just to get a seat. We're small — we seat about 50 inside, maybe another 20 outside — and it's been packed, it's been completely insane.
When most people think of Michelin, they think of fine dining and the classic star system. How do you feel about them adding recognitions like the Bib Gourmand and expanding the definition of what a Michelin-recognized restaurant can be?
Yeah, so they have tiers, right? You have your classic star rating system and that sets aside the restaurants that are the upper echelon of dining, from service to the building to the bathrooms to everything, and obviously the food is the star. But they also have the Bib Gourmand, which is what we won, and that's excellent food at excellent value, and that's kind of hard to find nowadays. I feel like a lot of places with the economics of it all and trying to have solid food costs, you have to charge what you have to charge. But I really stood on a hill before all of this when we opened this place and said "Look, I want this to be accessible for everyone," not someplace that you go to once a year, someplace that you go twice a week. That was important as a business model for me, and it paid off.
Look, Michelin was never the goal. James Beard, none of that was a goal, we just wanted to make a really cool restaurant. This restaurant's part of my story, it's an homage to my mom and my grandmother's cooking and stuff that I grew up with. Full circle, it just paid off, so we're just being ourselves and we were rewarded for it. It's a validation of your career, I've been cooking 30 years, and this is a defining moment for me. It's a great honor.
As you mentioned, Lucky 8 is very much an homage to your upbringing in New Orleans. What are one or two formative moments or meals in your culinary upbringing?
It's such a food town. None of my family are professional cooks, but everybody's a really good cook. My mom had stuff on the stove every day and all of it's excellent. If I had to pick a death row meal, my mom's gauntlet of dishes is probably the entire thing. That's a defining moment. Sunday dinners at my great-grandmother's, primarily Sicilian, but also with the influences of New Orleans. My mom's side of the family is French-Creole, so all the one-pot dishes — the gumbo, the étouffée, the jambalaya — that's what really stands out.
Taking the cochon de lait at Lucky 8 as an example, tell me how you put your own spin on a traditional New Orleans dish.
Yeah, well, you know, New Orleans has a huge Vietnamese population. Growing up, my sister and I, we would always go get some pho. That's a real moment culinarily in my life that just really stands out and I've always had a love for Vietnamese. To tie that in, cochon de lait is obviously sensationalized during festivals, Jazz Fest, where they're doing po'boys and different versions of that. But I really wanted to tie some of that Vietnamese into this, because it is kind of part of my story. So that's how that dish kind of came about.
In addition to those, tell me about the importance of the fundamentals and making sure you get the simple things right — hand-cutting the fries that come with the smash burger, for instance.
Of course. My career started in luxury hotels and fine dining restaurants, so it was very technique-driven, as far as my career goes. Now as you grow as a chef and consider maybe doing your own thing and opening your own business, I always thought that the casual route was the way I wanted to go, without losing all the work that I put in to get where I am. Those techniques are always going to live with me, that's how I cook. So doing it from scratch, everything, we make everything in-house. The hand-cut fries, we do a hundred pounds a day. And our burger's the most popular item, and it's actually been the most popular item since day one. The burger's always kind of been the central idea — if I'm thinking about my restaurant, I always wanted to do this burger. The New Orleans part and my background gave us that niche to stand as one of one, but everybody loves a burger, it's the No. 1 food in America. We knew we had to do that and I had to do it the best we could. So that's kind of what got us there.
When Lucky 8 first opened, it served beer and wine, but now has a liquor license. What are you envisioning in terms of cocktails, which obviously you can do a lot with in terms of New Orleans' history?
Yeah, I mean, when you open a New Orleans restaurant, it kind of lends itself to having bloody marys and Sazeracs. That was always in our mind; obviously, things had to work themselves out and line up for us to get it. It's like I said, the Sazerac, the bloody mary, the Vieux Carré, but we're going to do a really good old fashioned. We kind of opened this up with the classics, so we have like 20 classic cocktails, but eventually we'll go into some signature cocktails and then start doing some specialty stuff. The momentum that we've had through this Michelin thing and then now to get our liquor license, we're really riding a wave this summer and couldn't be more fortunate that it's in the off-season. So it's been a blessing, for sure.
When we were scheduling this interview, one of the things you told me you do is shopping for the restaurant. Can you take me through what a normal day looks like for you?
Yeah, a normal day for me is probably overwhelming for most. I'm the father of 12-year-old twins, so my day starts with them pretty early. But by 7 a.m., I'm hitting Restaurant Depot for most of our stock items. I hit Mama G's for our bread, who's a local baker, she does all of our muffuletta bread and our sourdough and our burger buns. So it's my little path; I'm pretty easy to find from seven in the morning until I hit the door at the restaurant.
To bring it full circle, in addition to getting the Bib Gourmand recognition yourself, you were one of three Sarasota restaurants recognized overall by Michelin. What do you think this means for the Sarasota dining scene at large?
There are guys that've been in town for 30 years kind of paving the way for that: Steve Phelps (of Indigenous), Paul Mattison (of Mattison's), the guys at Michael's on East. Those guys kind of laid the foundation for us. I've been in town for about 10 years, Veronica for about eight years, and I gained a following there. But to be recognized as the first and only Bib Gourmand in Sarasota — and then obviously Tralia and Focaccia are amazing places, for them to get recognized too — it solidifies that Sarasota's on the map from a dining perspective. I think the future's bright for everybody. I think next year, there's a list of places that I can think of that are certainly deserving of those accolades.
If you go
Lucky 8 is at 1812 S. Osprey Ave., Sarasota. For more information, call 941-444-0155 or visit lucky8srq.com.
Email entertainment reporter Jimmy Geurts at jimmy.geurts@heraldtribune.com. Support local journalism by subscribing.
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota’s only Michelin Bib Gourmand chef shares his story | Exclusive
