Bucci’s Italian Scratch Kitchen Named 2026 Heritage Ohio Main Street Business of the Year
Bucci’s Italian Scratch Kitchen in downtown Marion, Ohio has been named Heritage Ohio’s 2026 Main Street Business of the Year, one of the organization’s top statewide Main Street honors.
The award was announced Sept. 30 in Cincinnati during Heritage Ohio’s annual awards ceremony. Earlier this year, Downtown Marion, Inc. Executive Director Allen Wilson nominated Bucci’s and owner Alex Sheridan for the honor. Bucci’s was later selected as one of three finalists from across Ohio before being named the 2026 winner.
DMI recently sat down with Sheridan at Bucci’s Italian Scratch Kitchen in Marion, Ohio, to talk about the award, the restaurant and the people he says made the recognition possible.
That path started long before Bucci’s opened.
Sheridan began investing in Marion real estate around 2011, buying properties that needed substantial work, renovating them and using the equity to finance additional projects. Eventually, his attention turned to South Main Street.
At the time, Sheridan recalled much of the street sitting vacant. He purchased a downtown building with plans to create an event venue and began doing much of the demolition and renovation work himself.
As the project grew, so did the number of people involved.
Casey Hoffman, Sheridan’s longtime collaborator and right-hand person at Bucci’s and The Brickyard, has been involved with the business since Sheridan’s early work developing the event venue.
“She has a lot of value in a lot of my blind spots,” he said of those early conversations.
Sheridan later partnered with developer Luke Henry as the work expanded along South Main Street. Sheridan had already begun contacting neighboring property owners because he believed improvements would have greater impact if development was concentrated rather than scattered throughout downtown.
“You have to build an ecosystem right there and be intentional about who is there,” Sheridan said.
That work eventually included The Brickyard on Main, which opened as an event venue in February 2020.
Then COVID-19 arrived.
The timing could hardly have been worse for a business built around weddings and large gatherings. But The Brickyard survived, and wedding demand surged as restrictions eased.
That demand eventually led Sheridan and his partners to another downtown property. The original plan called for an additional event space upstairs and a restaurant operated by someone else downstairs.
They could not find the right restaurant operator.
So they opened one themselves.
“I had never worked in a restaurant or anything,” Sheridan said.
Bucci’s Italian Scratch Kitchen opened in 2023.
The historic former trolley-station property now contains more than the restaurant itself. The building includes an upstairs event space, the Passenger & Rail pub-style bar at the rear of the restaurant and an outdoor patio and event area. The nearby Brickyard on Main remains part of Sheridan’s larger event operation.
Sheridan also incorporated the building’s railroad history into its design, particularly in Passenger & Rail.
“I feel like people connect,” he said. “They connect and resonate with history.”
Opening Bucci’s was one thing. Making it work was another.
The restaurant faced the same pressures confronting independent restaurants across the country: food costs, labor, staffing and thin margins. Sheridan became increasingly involved in the operation and began examining expenses and changing how the restaurant was run.
But when he talks about the turnaround, Sheridan repeatedly shifts attention away from himself.
He credits Hoffman and the Bucci’s staff with much of what followed.
“The one thing I had that kind of kept me going is that our team by that point, we had a really good team and things were getting significantly better.”
Employees stepped into new responsibilities as the restaurant reorganized, and Sheridan said the strength of that team became one of the reasons he believed Bucci’s could make it.
By 2025, the financial picture had begun to improve.
“From that first month on, we had been profitable every month since,” Sheridan said. “I mean, at first it was $180. I was just over the moon.”
With the restaurant on firmer footing, Bucci’s tried something different.
A traditional brunch had been offered previously but eventually lost momentum. Sheridan and the team reworked the idea into a ticketed sing-along experience.
The first Brunch, Please! sold out.
Video from that event helped sell the next one out in three days.
More dates followed, and attendance grew. The brunches began attracting customers from well beyond Marion.
“We’ve had 43 states,” Sheridan said.
Those visitors also bring traffic into downtown Marion, where they shop, visit other restaurants and businesses and, in some cases, stay overnight.
That broader impact helped make the case for Downtown Marion, Inc.’s nomination.
The Heritage Ohio honor also comes during a year of national recognition for the business. In September, The Brickyard on Main and Bucci’s were named to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 2026 CO—100, recognizing small and midsized businesses from across the country.
But Sheridan is careful about where the credit goes.
For him, the Heritage Ohio award reflects the work of the people who built Bucci’s with him — particularly Hoffman and the employees who stayed, stepped up and helped the restaurant through its most difficult periods.
Without that team, Sheridan says, the success Bucci’s is experiencing today — and the recognition that has followed — would not have been possible.
Bucci’s Italian Scratch Kitchen is located at 320 W. Center St. in downtown Marion, Ohio.
