Flip The Bird Turns Beverly Ties Into North Shore Chicken Delight

BEVERLY, MA — Torie Farnsworth was fresh out of Endicott College's interior design and architecture program in 2008 when she and Beverly High graduate Anthony Marino decided to take a leap of faith and open their first café together.

Fifteen years later, Farnsworth credits a little initial naivete, a whole lot of perseverance, and the willingness to change with the times and people's tastes for helping create the budding North Shore fried chicken empire Flip The Bird.

"We heard all the things about new restaurants having a 5 to 15 percent success rate," she told Patch. "The chances that you are going to succeed are slim and for the first five years you will not make any money. We really didn't believe that until we got into it and found out they were right. There is very little room for error and you are operating on razor thin margins.

"If we had known more before we did it, I don't know if we would have done it. But it's one of those things that once you are in it, you just have to keep going."

Farnsworth and Marino kept Marino's Café going through what she admits were some rocky times for a decade before one particular menu item began to take off and took their partnership in a whole new direction. While she said Marino's Cummings Center location was on the upswing at the time, the fried chicken sandwich was becoming so popular they decided to rebrand with a dedicated "Flip The Bird" location on Cabot Street in Beverly in 2019.

"It was a hard decision to make," she said. "Marino's Café was our baby. You just have to do what makes sense in the moment. You can't hang on to things in the past.

"Flip The Bird made sense. It hit the mark. It was quick. It was good. It was what people wanted. We decided to run with that and opened up more locations as more people wanted it."

Three years later — and through a pandemic that crushed much of the restaurant industry across the country — Flip The Bird has expanded to five North Shore locations, including newer spots in Danvers, Swampscott and now in Salem.

"The ones that we'd already opened were so busy that we were losing customers that we were telling us they can't wait in line," Farnsworth said. "They were telling us we can't wait 45 minutes for your food. We noticed people were going to other places to get what we offered."

But while Flip The Bird has relatively quickly become beloved on the North Shore, word of Marino's fried chicken has gone far and wide.

"They'll drive for it," Farnsworth said. "We hear all the time from people who say we drive from Maine to get our food. Then they won't just order and eat it here. They'll buy $200 worth and drive it home to their families.

"We had one family pick it up and drive all the back to Virginia. They said it was still crispy when they got there."

With the expanded footprint comes an exponentially expanded staff. What used to just be Marino in the back and Farnsworth in the front with some serving help has become a workforce of 150, including marketing manager and fellow Endicott College alumna Leah Phillips.

Phillips, who moved from Connecticut to attend school, worked at the Cummings Center location as a student and then took an internship through Endicott’s renowned internship program doing social media and other promotional work for Flip The Bird.

"All the stuff I couldn't keep up with," Farnsworth said of Phillips' contribution.

Phillips built a professional relationship with Farnsworth and Marino and was offered the marketing position after she graduated in 2021.

"I think the internships were the biggest things," Phillips told Patch. “They helped me network with a whole bunch of people and gain insight on what it was like in the workforce.”

While Farnsworth allows "times were much simpler back then" in the Marino's Café days, she noted that it was also stressful and demanding to have everything fall on them at all times.

With the shift to Flip The Bird, and the expansion of the staff, there is the chance to put systems in place that others can operate, while she keeps an eye on the big picture and Marino keeps coming up with new sauces and menu items that will hit the mark on – and perhaps one day even beyond – the North Shore.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)