How to crowdfund a restaurant empire

When award-winning chef Gary Usher was turned down by the bank for a loan to open a second restaurant, he set up a crowdfunding campaign. Now he’s about to launch his fourth restaurantAll restaurants have a coming-of-age moment, the point at which they survive and thrive, or go down fighting. For Gary Usher’s Sticky Walnut, in a two-up two-down house in Hoole, just outside Chester, that moment came in 2013, about 18 months after they had opened. Usher, like any ambitious young chef s