Marcus Lalario never used to want keys to his businesses. “I would always end up at one of my bars after hours drinking.” Usually he’d hand them off to a general manager. “Just to remove the temptation.” But after the pandemic’s onset, his new director of operations at Lil Woody’s gave him a set of keys to each of his burger joint’s three standalone locations. He kept them. Lalario, the onetime nightlife entrepreneur, had put his partying days behind him.

The newest key in Lalario’s collection is oversize and brass. It grants him access to a vintage brick building on Occidental Square, the prettiest block in Seattle’s oldest neighborhood. This address spent 10 years as the London Plane—a cafe larder and florist that anchored Pioneer Square’s recovery a decade ago. The pandemic halted that upswing, an undeniable civic success story. Now Lalario’s reopening this light-filled corner space as a combination cafe, clothing store and soon-to-be sneaker emporium called the Hometeam. If all goes well, Lalario will give the area a new kind of hub, not to mention a massive dose of cool. It takes more than a single venue, no matter how culturally astute, to invigorate a neighborhood. But on this spring morning, brown paper still covers the tall windows. Outside, chirping birds and the sound of construction form a soundtrack of choppy optimism.

The Hometeam will be Lalario’s biggest project yet. One that weaves together some major tenets of his unusual career: streetwear, Italian food, and an unerring sense of vibes. An in-house cafe will serve pasta, focaccia sandwiches, and drinks; the retail side of the equation will include a magnificent wall of sneakers and an in-house clothing line.

Lalario greets the electricians and project manager with “what’s up, party people?” In a group that favors sensible construction-site shoes, he sports a special-issue Nike collaboration with the Japanese brand sacai (two soles, two sets of laces, even two swooshes). He has doleful brown eyes and classic features you might expect to find in a vintage photo of a World War II soldier—albeit one growing out a recent bleach job. He got into nail art to keep from biting his nails. The black and gray color scheme matches his medallion, a custom rendering of the Seattle skyline, with diamonds studding the Space Needle. It’s the logo of Lalario’s old record label and promotion company, Under the Needle.

The 46-year-old has an uncanny ability to get in the mix, whether it’s supporting Seattle’s enviable hip-hop scene in the 1990s or by landing a Lil Woody’s location in T-Mobile park (later this year it expands to Tokyo). He’s a funny dichotomy. Plenty of the people who visit his restaurants or wear his shirts wouldn’t recognize his name. But also, somehow, everyone knows him. Over the years, Seattle has reaped the benefits of Lalario’s endless network. He has opened restaurants and stores, and launched streetwear lines. Every one of those businesses has been a collaboration with friends.

“I’ve never done anything on my own,” he says. “It’s always, ‘I have an idea; which one of my friends can I work with?’” This approach might sound limited or provincial, but given the diversity of Lalario’s deep social circle, it weirdly has the opposite effect. His contacts span chefs, airbrush artists, drum and bass DJs, barbers, clothing designers, nonprofits, ice cream makers, and basically anybody who’s ever done something creative in Seattle. He’s our own version of Kevin Bacon, except you don’t need all six degrees. “Usually you hang with your tribe,” says Brian Rauschenbach, a longtime friend and, yes, frequent business partner. “His tribe grows in all directions.”

It’s frankly bizarre that one person has done all of these things: Run a seminal club night before he could legally drink. Managed Band of Horses. Launched multiple clothing brands, including Alive and Well and Can’t Blame the Youth. He got into food almost by accident, but built a roster of places few restaurateurs can match: Fat’s Chicken and Waffles, Ciudad, Mezzanotte, and four (for now) Lil Woody’s locations. Throw in a sock company, Arvin Goods, and a screen printing operation, Midnight Supply Company. And those are just the marquee businesses.

Lalario isn’t a chef, so his name doesn’t resonate like an Ethan Stowell or Renee Erickson. But it’s hard to find another person who has exerted this much influence on the city’s cultural landscape. Any business you open in a city is an act of faith in that place. But his projects exude a particular brand of loyalty. Every club night, every burger joint, is his attempt to give Seattle the same cool stuff other tastemaking cities have. Or to preserve the aspects of the city that drew him in the first place.

Lalario has a big heart, a bulldozer’s confidence, and an impeccably subcultured wardrobe. It’s a charisma that can come off as intimidating. Others still see him through the lens of his partying days. So much has changed, though. There’s an infant car seat strapped into the back of his pristine Land Rover Defender. Lalario meditates every morning and shares a multigenerational home with his mother-in-law. But he still approaches new ideas as if he’s still the BMX punk alterna-teen who just liked doing cool shit with his friends. That’s what makes it fun—for him and for us.

A teenage Marcus Lalario actually rode his skateboard through the door and into Easy Street Records for his job interview. He lied about his age because he wasn’t legally old enough to work. At least, that’s how Easy Street owner Matt Vaughan remembers meeting one of his first hires for a short-lived location in Kirkland. “He was this suburban skater kid,” says Vaughan, just 14 years old, though that wouldn’t come out until later. “He was young, but he had this energy and confidence.”

Lalario loved music. “I tried to be a drummer,” he says. “I was horrible at it.” He considered singing, but—in a preview of his career to come—he didn’t like to be the center of attention.

He’s our own version of Kevin Bacon, except you don’t need all six degrees.

He quickly got involved with Vaughan’s side gig, promoting bands. He booked shows, worked security, handled merchandising. He called college radio stations over and over, asking them to play artists and mailed CDs before the era of electronic files. By 16, he was managing bands on his own, driving to Vancouver, British Columbia, for an Econoline Crush show, then getting up for class at Woodinville High School the next morning. He even played varsity soccer. “Honestly, it’s always been that way,” says his younger brother, Alex. “Everywhere I go, my whole life, people always know Marcus.” Their mother, Kathryn, grew up in Seattle, but met their father Edmondo while living in Italy. Edmondo Lalario later emigrated back to Seattle with Kathryn to raise their family. He started an import company and passed down that entrepreneurial hustle to his four kids. The tight-knit Lalarios spoke Italian at their home in Ravenna, then moved to Kirkland.

Vaughan, as it turned out, would be the last real boss Lalario ever had. The moment Lalario graduated, he went straight to Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, immersing himself in the epicenter of nightlife and music at a prolific moment. He soaked up the hip-hop scene. He got really into drum and bass, a hard-charging subset of electronic music. He started managing a DJ collective that included Brian Rauschenbach, a future business partner. Lalario was effective at getting this underdog music style the attention it deserved, remembers Rauschenbach, even at places they hadn’t officially booked. “Sometimes Marcus would just have us show up with records and jump on the turntables,” telling the guy in the DJ booth that his slot was finished.

A male strip club on East Pike, with the excellent name of Mr. Paddywacks, started hosting all-ages nights during the week to make money. Lalario set up his drum and bass nights there, but not long after, the owners told him they were behind on rent and shutting down.

“What’s your back rent?” Lalario recalls asking. “If I pay it, will you give me the lease?” He scraped the cash together between his savings and money from friends (he remembers the total was less than $15,000). Suddenly he was a 19-year-old in possession of his own club. Lalario named the place the Beat Box.

That one audacious move kicked off a decade of projects and promotions so heady and interconnected, you’d need a flowchart and a black light to keep track of it all. The Beat Box later became the War Room. People still talk about this club—about its diverse clientele, its Shepard Fairey murals—even though Lalario and Rauschenbach closed it in 2009. Lalario also founded a hip-hop night called Yo, Son! that became so influential, musicians like Gwen Stefani would visit when they came to town.

One of Lalario’s biggest influences was his partnership with Jonathan Moore, the late Seattle hip-hop legend. “During that timeframe, there was a lot of newness,” remembers Erika Kylea White, a performer who befriended Lalario through Moore, her then-husband. Among the city’s music ecosystem, “There was always an openness to work together, explore something different.”

Partying was, essentially, his livelihood. “I met a lot of people because I always had the really good weed,” Lalario acknowledges. His nickname, Dark Mark, nodded to his nocturnal hours but also his tendency to drink a little too much Old Crow. Friends started calling him Darkalino, then Count Darkalino. “Drinking happened, ecstasy happened.” Other stuff happened. He lost good friends, like Moore, who died of kidney failure in 2017.

He sounds matter of fact when he says he didn’t think he’d live to see 30. “Let alone 40. Let alone married with a kid.” Teenage Marcus wouldn’t believe where he is now, Lalario muses one afternoon, sitting up on the mezzanine at Hometeam. “Especially the restaurants.”

In 2011, Lalario (and friends) opened a “thinking man’s skate shop” called Alive and Well, and a burger shop on Capitol Hill called Lil Woody’s. He approached both the way he might manage a band. He made sure the merch was attractive and set up endless partnerships: designers, chefs, musicians, even Seattle institutions like Beecher’s or Sub Pop. It worked. Weekly collaboration burgers became events. Customers had to get to Lil Woody’s, stat, in order to sample weekly specials before they were gone. This  approach also immediately circulated the new business within the existing fan base of each local name or institution that did a special burger.

The way Lalario tells it, the inspiration for his next spot, Fat’s Chicken and Waffles, started with a chair. A slatted midcentury chair by local furnituremaker Nick Yoshihara. “I was like fuck, man. That chair is killer.” He had received an overture from a Central District landmark. The longtime home of Catfish Corner, a soul food restaurant that anchored and sustained Seattle’s Black neighborhood for decades, was available to rent. Did Lalario want to open a Lil Woody’s location here?

He did not. It didn’t feel right. But he did have an idea. It began with Erika White, who had left the music industry and was managing restaurants. She attended nearby Garfield High School and grew up eating at this spot even before it became Catfish Corner. Lalario also had a longtime friend, Patrick Dours, a New Orleans native who cooked soul food. And he had memories of that chair (Yoshihara did end up designing the restaurant’s tables and benches).

Most of Lalario’s projects happen this way, singular creations that could only be the product of one guy’s inspiration and deep contacts list. He likes giving partnership stakes to people who feel like the right fit. Some interpret his background status as a way to claim the halo effect of a Black- or woman-owned business when it’s really a white guy running things. “My Blackness makes it a Black-owned restaurant,” says White. “People will say silly stuff.”

Lalario was only supposed to do the marketing for Ciudad, a Georgetown restaurant devised with James Beard Award–winning chef Matt Dillon. Then Dillon got too busy to be involved. Lalario survived that learning curve with enough stamina to open Mezzanotte on the other end of the building, and throw a few parties in the courtyard in between, just for old time’s sake. (The two spots offer no clues to their common ownership.)

In putting these spaces together, Lalario sweats the aesthetic small stuff—vibes, after all, are the result of a hundred minor decisions. His wife, Aiyana Inatsu, recalls the time they drove by Ciudad and Lalario noticed the gray and blue patio chairs were separated rather than interspersed. He had to call the manager to request the colors get shuffled around.

But big picture, he’s surprisingly hands-off. He’s hired several chefs at Ciudad without even tasting their food—“I know pretty quickly whether we’re going to vibe or not.” Mezzanotte carried more emotional weight due to Lalario’s heritage—he spends maybe a month each year visiting his extended family in Turin. “A lot of restaurateurs are really very specific about what they want,” says Jason Stratton, who became Mezzanotte’s chef in 2021. Making food that would please Lalario’s Italian dad is the goal, but Lalario was on board with Stratton’s idea to do a pasta-leaning version of a Japanese omakase.

At Fat’s, he mostly shows when Erika White needs him. She remembers calling him once when she was short-staffed—“bro, I need you to come wash dishes.” She made sure to take a photo of Lalario wearing an apron, working his shift in the dish pit.

Plants. More plants. Lalario was on an unprecedented streak of buying greenery. Each trip to the plant shop in Madison Valley was an excuse to talk to Aiyana Inatsu, who worked there in 2017 as she established her tattoo business, Stickpokers.

“I know now that he’s known by a lot of people,” she says. But at the time, she ran in different circles. “I was totally just in the queer scene.” Inatsu helped him green up the VIP area at the Upstream music festival. She accidentally brought her own date to their first unofficial hangout.

Despite his expansive network, “Small talk isn’t my specialty,” says Lalario. He’d spent the past decade building businesses, “but I was floating through it all.” Around age 40 he got more into spirituality. He self-deprecates about “all that woo-woo shit I’m into now,” but recounts a trip to a temple in India that opened his eyes to the possibilities of a bigger force helping to shape his path. Back home, he was moving away from partying and “‘whatever happens, happens’ type shit.”

A streak of achievements like Lalario’s comes with a surplus of would-be sycophants, but Inatsu wasn’t easily impressed. She also called him out on jokes that caused unintended harm, or instances when he tolerated that behavior in friends. “There’s a carefreeness that you can have being a white male in America,” she says. “And I just don’t have that experience being a queer Asian woman.”

This past March, Inatsu gave birth to their son, Kiyoshi Mars. Lalario recently realized he happened to go for 30 days without having a drink; Inatsu immediately reminded him of her own, much longer stretch of sobriety that came with being pregnant. “She’s sonned me and stunted on me and continues to teach me the ways,” says Lalario. His tone is more than a little admiring.

After 40 years of being largely single, Lalario now shares a home with Inatsu, their son, and his mother-in-law. It’s his own stateside version of those annual visits to Italy. In Seattle, Lalario had few relatives beyond his nuclear family. Those trips showed him what it felt like to be surrounded by kin. When he arrives, aunts, uncles, and cousins inevitably turn out for long meals, “just course after course after course,” says Steve Spalding, a friend from growing up who has accompanied Lalario on his travels. “Having places for people to gather and having community is really important to him. He’s always been geared that way.”

String music wafts from one side of Occidental Mall, only to collide with beats bouncing from the sound system at the Hometeam. The First Thursday art walk is in full swing. On this hot July evening, Seattle has thrown back its shoulders, ready to host its first MLB All-Star Game since 2001. The official festivities start tomorrow, but the neighborhood’s brick sidewalks are already busy. Lalario’s haabit of being in the mix continues: This is the Hometeam’s opening night party.

Inside, a diverse crowd sports more than a few Ken Griffey, Jr. jerseys. Others wear the Hometeam’s new black and white pinstripe model. The crew of the in-house cafe, Darkalino’s, puts out tray after tray of focaccia sandwiches. Drinks in hand, people lounge on a vintage set of bleachers, beneath a lit-up gymnasium scoreboard.

That’s what Lalario envisioned, when he reshaped the London Plane’s dreamy white aura into this muscular black-and-brick color scheme. A place where people can take meetings or hang out—with a bowl of pasta, an espresso, a negroni—and maybe soak up some sneakerhead culture while they’re at it. Right now the shoe wall functions as a display case for some coveted Nike cleats worn by the likes of Ichiro, Griffey, Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, and Alex Rodriguez during games. Come January, it will hold actual shoes for sale.

Suddenly he was a 19-year-old in possession of his own club.

Lalario monitored a handful of blocks in Pioneer Square for nearly four years, looking for a place big enough to do food, clothes, and events. “Pioneer Square’s always been one of the coolest parts of Seattle and it was getting a bad rap,” says Lalario. “It just felt kind of underserved for my community and my people.” If he fills this place with artists, athletes, and people too influential to be referred to as influencers, it stands to reason the rest of us will show up there too, soon enough.

Aiyana Inatsu and baby Kiyoshi scoot through the crowd, pausing as people exclaim over Kiyoshi’s magnificently chubby legs. Brian Rauschenbach talks with friends; chef Melissa Miranda bounds in to give Lalario an enormous hug. Erika White mugs for a video. Lalario’s partners in the business are here, of course. Ben Kirschner became a sneakerhead celebrity during his time designing at Nike. Dustin Winegardner met Lalario back at his drum and bass nights; the two are also partners in a sock company, Arvin Goods. Lalario, per usual, functioned as the connective tissue. You may not see him, but a place as distinct as this wouldn’t exist without him.

The cafe’s name, Darkalino’s, only tracks for people who knew Lalario during the Dark Mark days (there’s a “Dark Marg” margarita on the cocktail menu). It’s the first time Lalario’s inserted any part of himself into the identity of his business. “It’s Italian, but it’s not your classic Italian name. It’s kind of funny.” He decided to go for it. He always liked the moniker, but maybe it was time to change the connotation. “I just needed to be Marcus Lalario for a minute.”