From Two Brothers Tavern to Tarragon

Strolling through the town square on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, I stopped in front of a paper sign taped onto the window of a restaurant: Help Wanted—Server. Two Brothers Tavern was one of two bars in Middlebury, a small, idyllic Vermont town sitting at the foothills of the Green Mountains. I felt my own two feet start pulling away from the window, doubting that they would even consider hiring me, a bright-eyed 18-year-old freshman. I began the slow climb back up the hill towards my dorm.

The next weekend, the Tavern's GM Kristin, looking up from the resume I handed her moments ago, decided that she would take a bet on hiring someone with clearly zero restaurant experience, besides a love of good food. With bottomless patience, Kristin and the rest of the team at Two Bros took me in and gave me a deep appreciation for what it really takes to run a restaurant.

Since then, my career took me down a more technical path. As a software engineer at ActBlue, I helped build "simple, easy-to-use software behind millions of campaign donations." But my fond memories at Two Bros never left me. Two Bros taught me that so much happens behind the scenes to make the customers feel at home — from purchasing and prepping fresh ingredients to setting up the Saturday morning Bloody Mary bar. I kept thinking about how much of that same simplicity restaurants could use.

Years later, while at MIT, I met my co-founder Nick, who was a multi-unit restaurant CFO managing 13 forecasting spreadsheets across 13 locations. That's when things clicked. The same behind-the-scenes work I'd witnessed at Two Bros was still being held together by spreadsheets — even at scale.

Today, my team and I at Tarragon support growing restaurants with our AI-native restaurant management system. When we started, we were asking a simple question: what if restaurant teams could be equipped with accurate sales forecasts, without spending hours maintaining Google Sheets?

We're still asking questions. Tarragon works hand-in-hand with chefs, GMs, and finance directors, and those questions have already started becoming reality: Tarragon's machine learning predictions can reach as high as 96% accuracy. Order guides and prep lists build themselves on the spot, based on what each location is actually going to sell. Driven by curiosity, Tarragon walks into restaurants the same way I found my way into Two Brothers — ready to learn, happy to do our small part, and grateful that someone is willing to take a bet on us.