From fast to fine
Hot restaurants, tasty events, and the buzz on Boston's dining scene
BY LOUISA KASDON
Only a chef-owner as gutsy and farsighted as Steve Johnson — formerly of the Blue Room — would look at Central Square’s old Burger King space and see a potential site for a fine-tuned urban bistro. Until last spring, the site had all the hallmarks of mid-Cambridge grunge: a seedy Mass Ave storefront and even seedier patrons. No more. Johnson is well under way with a new project, the Rendezvous at Central Square, a near-100-seat bar and restaurant that will showcase his elegant, earthy European palate. If construction continues apace, the new restaurant will open sometime in early October and serve dinner seven nights a week. It will have a full liquor license, a big bar for eating and drinking, a communal table, and a menu rooted in Johnson’s French culinary background. We’re talking real restaurant, with an atrium, bright skylights, banquettes, trained waitstaff, and prices from the low $20s on up. With this one new restaurant, Central Square could be on the cusp of a neighborhood reinvention.
For decades, Central Square has been the multi-ethnic ridge of Cambridge, slightly tawdry and joyously funky, but lost in a zone just beyond Harvard’s reach and not quite in the crook of MIT’s arm. It’s home to a fair number of pubs and bars, lots of Indian and Asian budget eateries, and the Middle East and Phoenix Landing. Other than to visit Central Kitchen, however, no suburban gourmet has ever looked up from his or her newspaper and said, "Hey, honey, let’s go see what’s new in Central Square."
That could change very soon, and Rendezvous could be the catalyst. Although it’s still a construction site, the new space’s bones are emerging — and the bones are good. It’s a big space, airy and crisp, like Eastern Standard in Kenmore Square. One side will feature banquettes for fours and sixes; the central area will have traditional dining tables. The front window will house a big communal table for all those cozy Cantabrigians who like to dine en masse. The bar will serve liquor, of course, but Johnson emphasizes that it’s to be a dining space where people can drink, rather than a drinking space where people can eat. "This is a restaurant with a bar, not a late-night place," he says. "We’ll be done with dinner by 11 and mopping up the floors by midnight. Central Square has enough bars."
Although he wasn’t in a hurry — after all, there was a lot of good sport fishing from his boat in Bristol, Rhode Island — Johnson had been seeking a new location since he left the Blue Room more than two years ago. He’d casually considered every space and potential concept from Boston to coastal Rhode Island. But Johnson always had a hankering to work close to his home near Central Square. One day last April, after looking at restaurants for two years, he was walking down Mass Ave and saw a for-lease sign in the window of the former Burger King. "I’d looked at every space in the city by then, worked with all the usual suspects, the realtors and landlords," Johnson recalls. "And here I was just ambling by and saw a phone number to call." The process has been fast by anybody’s standards, less than six months from beginning to end — including getting the blessing of the neighborhood association, often the most difficult part of opening a new restaurant in Cambridge.
The Central Square Business Association is overjoyed by Rendezvous’s impending arrival. It’s been hoping for a wave of gentrification in Central Square, but one that would re-invigorate the area without erasing its ethnic complexity. It invested in new parking lots (three public lots are within a block of the new restaurant), installed sidewalk benches, and improved the streetlights. Central Square merchants had been unhappy for years that the old BK was owned and operated by an absentee landlord, out of touch with the kind of clientele his franchise was attracting. Recently, a new owner bought the building; he hopes to turn the property into a source of neighborhood pride, and has been diligently working with Johnson to make sure his new tenant has everything he needs to succeed — most importantly, a full liquor license. At the Licensing Commission hearing, Johnson got the green light from the city with no muss or fuss.
Of course, it’s a gutsy move. The site is definitely not an "A" location. Only a chef of Johnson’s reach and reputation could turn an old Burger King into a destination that will woo the kind of diners who go to the South End, but only because all the bistros there have valet parking. On the other hand, Mass Ave has an appealing, almost Parisian grittiness, what with the Middle East next door and the scads of interesting characters who make the scenery more interesting than in Newton.
Johnson has hired as his chef Deepak Kaul, who cooked with him for three years at the Blue Room before moving to San Francisco to cook at Jardinière, a restaurant very much in the tradition of Alice Waters & Co. The GM at Rendezvous is Nicole Bernier, another Blue Room alum. "It’s great to work with people I know well," Johnson says. "It feels like a Blue Room reunion." The menu at Rendezvous will be more French than fusion, and will have fewer Asian influences than the Blue Room during Johnson’s tenure.
Urban storefronts are like dominoes: when one store changes hands, it sets a chain in motion. A new chichi bistro like Rendezvous may be the key domino to regenerate Central Square. If it could happen in Kenmore Square, it can happen anywhere.
* * *i wonder what the person who wrote this is like. i wonder if they know what happens when a neighborhood goes through gentrification. i wonder if they know that central square is good as it is - that something that might be good for one neighborhood is most definitely not good for a different one, because they are inherently different. i would really like to know if she thinks anyone who lives in central square and loves it would ever use the phrase "chichi bistro" in a positive manner.
