A crowdfunding story
Source: Jay Wennington en Unsplash How to crowdfund a restaurant empire When award-winning chef Gary Usher was * turned down for a loan to open a second restaurant, he * set up a crowdfunding campaign. Now he 's about to launch his fourth restaurant. All restaurants have a coming-of-age moment, the point at which they survive and thrive , or go down fighting . For Gary Usher’s Sticky Walnut, in a two-up two-down house in Hoole, just outside Chester, that moment came in 2013, about 18 months after they had opened. Usher, like any ambitious young chef * starting out on his own aged 30, had * ploughed every penny he had into Sticky Walnut. He had gone back to Chester to open the restaurant – not far from where he had started out working in pubs – after successful stints in London at Michelin-starred Chez Bruce, and running Gordon Ramsay and Angela Hartnett’s kitchen at the York & Albany. He couldn’t afford to fail . Sticky Walnut had started well. H...