In many Maine towns where most operators are overlooked, the founder of Cowbell built rooms that fill on their own terms. A conversation about instinct, hospitality, and knowing exactly what you’re building.
On any Sunday in autumn, an hour before kickoff, the room at Rock Row is already loud. The video wall is lit, the ticker is running scores and lines, the taps are moving, and the tables have been spoken for since Tuesday. Somewhere in the middle of it stands Alex Markakis, doing what he has done in every room he has ever run: watching the doors.
“When a room fills up an hour before the game even starts, that tells you everything,” Markakis says. “People have a hundred places they could watch from, including their own couch. When they choose your room, week after week, that’s the whole scoreboard for me.”
Markakis is the co-founder of the Cowbell restaurants, the hospitality brand that has spent the past decade quietly rewriting the rules of the American sports bar across southern Maine. Earlier this year, his flagship location at Westbrook’s Rock Row development was named “the best sports bar north of Boston” by prominent New England media outlets, a title that would sit comfortably as a career capstone for most operators. Markakis, a North Shore of Boston kid raised on exactly that standard, treats it as a checkpoint.
“Being recognized as the best sports bar north of Boston, in a market where fans hold you to that standard, hits home for me personally,” he says of the honor.
The Long Way to Maine
The road to Rock Row started on a baseball diamond. Markakis grew up in Boston’s North Shore area, and attended St. John’s Prep before heading to Fairfield University, and then transferred to Saint Joseph’s College of Maine. Baseball runs in the family: his cousin Nick Markakis spent more than a decade in the major leagues, and recently became a Baltimore Orioles Hall of Famer. Alex played college ball at Fairfield and St. Joseph’s and scouted for the Baltimore Orioles after graduating, spending springs at the club’s Sarasota training complex, then served as general manager of the Old Orchard Beach Surge professional baseball club.
It was the ballpark that changed everything. The Surge’s liquor license was held by a local restaurateur named Jim Albert, better known around southern Maine as Jimmy the Greek. Markakis, also Greek, hit it off with the older operator immediately, and a front-office job became a partnership. When the two started building restaurants together, the company name wrote itself: Two Greeks Ventures.
“Jimmy had the liquor license for the ballpark. He’s Greek, I’m Greek, and we just kicked it off,” Markakis says. “He took me under his wing, and everything we’ve built since comes out of that. You never know what opportunity leads to another.”
Reading the Room Before Everyone Else
Their first venture opened on Main Street in downtown Biddeford in the summer of 2016, at a moment when the mill town was still a contrarian bet. “We caught the tip of Biddeford’s gentrification,” Markakis says. “It was all about timing, as anything in life.”
The timing kept proving right. From that first neighborhood restaurant, the group expanded across southern and central Maine, building rooms where staff knew the regulars by name and the regulars kept coming back. Markakis learned early that successful Maine restaurants are built on regulars: rather than Massachusetts runs on volume and Florida runs on vacationers, a Maine room relies on the person who takes the same barstool at eleven in the morning, multiple days a week. He built for that person first. Along the way, Markakis and Albert earned a reputation as civic partners, sponsoring local charities and community events in the towns that hosted them.
“In Massachusetts, you might never see the same customer twice in your life,” he says. “In Maine, I’ll see the same person on the same barstool at eleven in the morning, five days a week. That person is the business. If you take care of the regulars, the regulars take care of you, and everything else follows from there.”
Cowbell 2.0
Rock Row is the fullest expression of where Markakis has taken the concept. Opened in 2023 as a destination-scale evolution he calls Cowbell 2.0, the flagship features a full performance stage, a large-format video wall, a live ticker, a private mezzanine function hall, and a members’ bar built around a liquor locker program Markakis benchmarked not against other sports bars but an idea of The Capital Grille. The kitchens run elevated scratch menus, and the taps pour more than 25 craft beers with Maine brewers front and center.
The flagship carries the recognition, but Markakis is quick to credit the foundation: the original Biddeford and Scarborough rooms remain the heart of the brand, the neighborhood restaurants that taught him what a Cowbell is before Rock Row showed what one could become.
The approach traces back to a philosophy Markakis has held since his earliest rooms: be great at one thing and it will carry you a long way. The discipline shows in the details, from the local bakeries and butchers he has favored since the beginning to buildouts where each location was designed as an upgrade on the last. The wager is that guests rise to the level of the room, and full houses across Scarborough, Biddeford and Westbrook suggest the wager is paying.
“I never accepted that you have to pick between a great bar and a great restaurant,” Markakis says. “Every Cowbell has its own character, but the standard is the same in all of them. If the game is great and the food is an afterthought, you’re a bar. If the food is great and there’s no energy, you’re just another restaurant. We wanted both, every night, and we built the rooms to deliver it.”
What Comes Next
Markakis has been open about his belief that the Rock Row concept can travel. “It allows us to go into other states,” he says, adding that he intends to bring his partner along for the ride.
“We proved the concept in the hardest way possible, in a state that runs on regulars, where you have to earn the same person’s trust five days a week,” he says. “If you can win Maine, you can win anywhere. But whatever comes next, the standard travels with us. I take a lot of pride in everything we do, and that doesn’t change with the zip code.”
Then the doors open, the room fills, and the founder goes back to watching, because in the end that is the whole business: build a room worth gathering in, and the towns will make it their own.
