Underutilized Spaces Are the Next Frontier for Independent Restaurants

Food markets are centuries old, but the modern equivalent is a
customer-driven experience, blending cuisines from around the
world. One incarnation of this is Manifesto Market, which
has two locations in Prague with multiple vendors. Its founder
and CEO, Martin Barry, joined host Barbara Castiglia on The
Main Course.


“I wanted to make a good place to bring people together, using
food and culture as the medium.” -Martin Barry


Barry’s background isn’t in the restaurant business. He started
his career as a landscape architect, building large-scale urban
landscapes for developers. This led him to establish the
nonprofit reSITE. “The concept is about creating a more
sustainable city and better place to live.”


The organization hosts events and works to bring people together,
which led Barry to the idea of modernizing the urban food market
in Prague. “I wanted to make a good place to bring people
together, using food and culture as the medium.”


Manifesto isn’t just a food market. It hosts live free events and
has a mix of offerings from fine dining chefs making their food
more accessible to first-time restauranteurs.


In building Manifesto Market, a gastronomical ecosystem was born.
Barry described, “It’s diverse flavors of the world coming
together and empowering chefs to have the tools they need to
deliver food to customers. It’s creating an environment where
it’s easy for them to operate. We run the operations.”


Those operations include a high reliance on technology to manage
the business side, from automation to communication requests to
data collection. The concept is cashless, so they collect data on
every transaction. Barry said, “We have a high level of data and
generally know what customers like. We have a data scientist on
board to identify patterns and tweak menus. This was very
important in 2020, as we had to retool slightly for delivery to
provide the same culinary experience at home.”