Page 8 - BusinessWest November 24, 2025

Morning Glory
Partners Restaurant Celebrates 40 Years of Food, Community
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
Sue and Mark Tansey are partners in both business and
life.
Staff Photo
Mark Tansey didn’t exactly plan his path
into the culinary world.
“My brother kind of pushed me into
the business,” he recalled. “My mother died
when I was 15, and I had to cook at home. I
wanted to go to college, and he goes, ‘why don’t
you go to cooking school?’ So I ended up going
to Johnson & Wales.”
In addition to completing that two-year pro-
gram, Tansey worked at the Monte Carlo in
West Springfield, and later at Hillbrook House
in Westfield, then Springfield Country Club. The
first two of those establishments are long gone,
but his next venture — Partners Restaurant
& Catering in Agawam — is still going strong,
more than 40 years later.
“A woman came to me and said, ‘I have this
little breakfast-lunch place in Agawam, Mark,
if you want to think about it,’” he recalled. That
was 1984, and Partners had been open just a
couple of years when its then-owner wanted to
unload it. Tansey, then just 24 years old, liked
what he saw, secured a $45,000 loan from
Westbank, and started crafting a plan, both culi-
nary and financial.
“I had to learn how to write the financials,
how to figure out, ‘well, if I have one dishwasher
and a cook and a server, how much do I need?’
But then I realized, for the first couple of years,
I was the dishwasher and the cook.”
His first marriage would end in those early
years, and he wound up bonding with his cur-
rent wife (and business partner) of 33 years,
Sue, over food; her family owned Angy’s Tortel-
lini at the time, and she ran a small catering
business.
And now, they’re celebrating four decades
running a restaurant and catering business that
has outlasted challenges ranging from a devas-
tating fire in 2014 to the COVID-19 pandemic
(more on both later), emerging from it all with a
loyal clientele, about 50 employees, and even a
succession plan (the Tanseys’ daughter, Siena, is
deeply involved in the business).
In short, there’s plenty to celebrate, which
they did on Nov. 22 with an admittedly late 40th
anniversary event (the actual milestone was last
year) at the restaurant, where they expected
about 400 people to show up.
The clientele has been multi-generational,
Sue said, but so has the staff.
“We’ve had multiple third-generation family
members working for us. We’ve had the mother,
then their daughter, and now the granddaughter
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NOVEMBER 24, 2025
Business W est