For over a decade, we ran a fine dining 50-seat restaurant in central Pennsylvania. Unexpectedly, we were approached by a developer who was working on a 500-acre parcel and wanted to include a 120-seat restaurant. We drew up plans, and everything looked really good. But one day we looked at each other and thought, This is going to be a lot more work. At that point, we had been basically working all year to take one or two weeks off. We spent the first week of January at a different island every year. We thought, This is kind of stupid. We don’t need to work all year to save to go to the Caribbean, we could open a restaurant there and live there.
We did a Google search for “Caribbean restaurant for sale,” and spots in Anguilla and Nevis popped up. We had been to Nevis but thought it might not have the volume of established tourism that we would probably need. We had never been to Anguilla before, but we knew it had a cachet of having a high-end clientele and good restaurants.