Hi all, first post here, I just signed up after reading this thread and thought the people of our community deserve some explanations!! I (foolishly) left The Midland to work at Marco Marco from the week of opening and have now returned to The Mid. For anyone that visited my name's Alex I was (and still am) the 6"6 barman who had to duck under all the beams when he walked around.
ALL of the Marco Marcos have now closed, and have been "taken over" by "cibo"
Cibo signs are now up.
Cibo already have another restaurant in Didsbury. Italian food. http://ciborestaurants.com
I was also led to believe this was the restaurant that took over, HOWEVER it is not, the Didsbury restaurant has a distinct brand identity and logo and the one that has taken over MM is completely different. The sceptic in me, and a lot of former customers wonders about purely a name change with exactly the same people, (no decor change inside, took 3 weeks to change the signs, left the Marco marco sign up for weeks and traded with their signage and menus for a fortnight etc) however I must state that that is pure speculation on my part.
FACT - MM is in liquidation. I have spoken to the liquidators as unfortunately they owe me around £1400 wages. Living with my partner and child this has been a huge hardship for us. I have been treated extremely poorly.
FACT - MM owe a LOT of money...RUMOURED to be in the region of £800,000. That's no extra zeros, eight hundred thousand pounds. I know for a FACT they owe close to £10grand EACH to local businesses Bredbury Catering and Cheshire Fruit and Veg.
I'd like to state that this was NOT a failed restaurant. We may have been quiet on the odd Tuesday afternoon but we had very busy weekends, and I know the kind of money we were making. The problem here is that the money that we were making was going somewhere it shouldn't have been. It wasn't going to staff wages, and it definitely wasn't going to suppliers.
I know you have a policy here not to badmouth businesses or anything like that but I must stress everything here is pure fact and any speculation or rumour has been pointed out. It isn't (wasn't) a local business, it was run by someone with little or no regard to the local community, local businesses and locally living staff. Anyone who met me when I worked there knows I was very passionate about working there, and have had many a conversation with customers since moving back to The Midland. I'm still in negotiation to get my wages back from them and it's been a very stressful time.
The people who work in "Cibo" are all the same as they were at Marco Marco and are a lovely bunch of people, the Manager Jose used to work at Conti in Disley and the rest of them will really look after you if you go down. It's just such a shame that it came to this as I really wanted it to be a huge part of the community in Marple Bridge/Marple/Compstall but it has failed due to poor money management at the top end and no care from top level management. As you can see I have a LOT to say about this so if anyone has any questions or has heard any rumours please feel free to ask!
Sorry about the mammoth post..It is a matter very close to my heart!
Alex
