Boston Magazine’s
How does a restaurant survive for decades?
By Sheryl Julian
Picture Boston with the unsightly Central Artery hanging over it, without the flowering gardens along the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, or the towering Zakim Bridge, or the thriving Seaport District. In the late 20th century, the city didn’t look exciting, it wasn’t lively, and nothing much was happening at night.
Into this dreary atmosphere came Hamersley’s Bistro, a small, chic French restaurant that opened in 1987. Chef and co-owner Gordon Hamersley and his wife, Fiona, had to lure the dining public to the South End, where there were few eateries like theirs. Local residents didn’t generally eat out if it wasn’t a special occasion. “Boston was pretty buttoned-up,” says Gordon Hamersley, who ran the bistro for nearly 30 years.
Bostonians went to restaurants the way they did everything else — cautiously. For celebrations or business meetings, they headed to a hotel, or perhaps the stately French establishment Maison Robert in Old City Hall, or Locke-Ober, one of the city’s oldest dining rooms, or Cafe Budapest, Edith Ban’s ode to the food of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The young chefs made dramatic plates with new ingredients — or old ingredients rediscovered and introduced a farm-to-table movement that has become so exaggerated, you half expect the grower to serve your salad. Like their counterparts in other cities, they became celebrities. Eating out was a new lifestyle, hopping from one place to another a recreational activity. Some restaurants were in gentrifying neighborhoods, so part of the dining experience was the adventure of getting there.
Today, even with exorbitant long-term leases and the high cost of opening, new talent is around every corner, which can suck the life out of those gutsy and talented chefs who turned the city’s dining landscape around.
You wouldn’t think a town our size could support the number of steakhouses it does — The Capital Grille, Ruth’s Chris, Morton’s, Smith & Wollensky, and STRIP by Strega among them. Every tourist wants fish, and they can take their pick from Legal Sea Foods (founded in 1968, now in 37 locations) as well as Jasper White’s Summer Shack, Row 34, Atlantic Fish Company, the Daily Catch, Island Creek Oyster Bar, Saltie Girl, and Eventide Oyster Company. New York celebrity chefs have outposts — Bar Boulud Boston from Daniel Boulud, Babbo Pizzeria e Enoteca from Mario Batali (who recently stopped running his restaurant group after sexual misconduct allegations). Boston chefs Ken Oringer and Jamie Bissonnette went in the opposite direction, taking Toro, their Spanish-influenced tapas spot launched in the South End, to New York, then Bangkok and now Dubai. And young chefs are still finding investors to back them.
Boston is a madhouse of eateries and all the online citizen reviews you could ask for. Even with new places opening all the time, favorites that have endured since the 20th century keep customers coming in. Surviving for so long takes grit and a winning formula.
“Twenty years in restaurant years is like dog years,” says Bob Luz, president of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association. Some 30 percent of restaurants in the state close in the first year. A 20-year-old (or older) restaurant, says Luz, “has stayed relevant and reinvested.”
The recipe for long-term success starts at the door, with a host who is genuinely welcoming, not just moving you along (the worst feeling). Classic restaurants have regulars who turn up regardless of the forecast, and those diners aren’t finding new servers every time, because the staff stays in place. And even if most of the menu isn’t cutting-edge, there’s enough new to keep everyone interested. Most ingredients don’t require a Google search, service is attentive, your meat is cooked the way you like it, the bar carries your brand of whiskey, and sommeliers pour you tastes of wines without an eye roll. That alone is worth the price of admission.