Features

Photo Credit: Adam DeTour

By Alexandra Hall
Photographs by Adam DeTour

William Kovel is trying to land a very big fish. That may be a painfully obvious metaphor for the ambitious new restaurant he’s about to open, but at the moment it also happens to be literally true. Ankle-deep in a rush of Narragansett Bay surf, steps from the family home in Rhode Island where he once spent his summers, Kovel’s hooked what he hopes is a striper (“The best for fighting and eating,” he yells over the waves), and it’s yanking his line straight out past a gigantic rock. The usual tug-of-war ensues, until the fish breaks off and swims to freedom. Kovel’s unimpressed. “They usually get a nibble and then come back,” he shrugs, throwing out another cast. “We’ll get him on this one.”

He clearly believes that, and why not? Tenacity—and more specifically, second chances—have been good to him so far. After getting laid off from his job as chef de cuisine at Aujourd’hui two years ago (mere weeks before he was about to get married, no less), he’s now suddenly on the cusp of opening Catalyst, a fine dining restaurant in Kendall Square. “Everyone says it’s a great name for a place in the area, but it wasn’t about that,” he confides later. “It was actually about the impetus I had for personal change. Getting laid off was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Kovel’s boomerang trajectory isn’t a rare case. Suddenly, it seems, a small batch of high-profile chefs are staging forceful comebacks after their previous restaurants fell victim to the recession. There’s Michael Leviton, whose innovative-yet-doomed Persephone at the Achilles Project closed in summer 2009. And Patricia Yeo, who’s been slinging Kurabuta pork pot stickers over at Om Restaurant and Lounge since Ginger Park shuttered in late 2010. Now she’s poised to open Moksa as head chef and partner.

There are more returns in the works: After Rocca suddenly closed last winter, Top Chef’s Tiffani Faison started planning her own spot, Sweet Cheeks, a Southern barbecue joint to open this fall. And seemingly just minutes after his departure from Gargoyles on the Square, Jason Santos (he of Hell’s Kitchen and azure-haired fame) has opened the doors on a restaurant of his own, named for his coif’s hue: Blue Inc.

All these chefs have created places they say better reflect their personalities and visions. And through all that, Kovel, Leviton and Yeo have been notably practical, learning from what didn’t fly or wasn’t profitable at their closed spaces. The commonality? Each of these three chefs has cobbled together similar kinds of restaurants, hedging his or her economic bets with cleverly modular, malleable architectural designs that are more suited to rolling with reality’s financial punches. And above all, they’ve taken the formality down a notch. As Yeo bluntly puts it, “The days of giant restaurants with super high-end prices are gone.”

That’s the thing about second acts: they enable evolution and the fruition of lessons learned. Just ask Leviton about his latest, Area Four—a paean to both minimalist design and maximum farm-to-table-ism. It’s a dynamic formulated for the restaurant’s placement, hard against Kendall Square—a hive of high-spending, food-loving, pretense-wary techfolk. “I wanted something simpler than we had before at Persephone, that wasn’t embellished in any way. This was all about stripping things away. The price points are lower, and the emphasis is on the freshest foods possible and a sense of community.” To that end, he’s preserved Persephone’s breakdown of plates—small, medium and large—all intended for sharing. (No matter what’s in season, pizza and gourmet soft-serve ice cream are always on the menu.) Ditto the tables in the dining room, which stand on tracks so they can be combined as needed, according to the crowd each night.

With venues designed to meet a broad range of customer desires—from seating, to prices, to how to approach a meal—these newcomers can adapt to their needs. The faults of their previous ventures can be dodged, reworked and improved.

“Ginger Park was so overwhelming,” says Yeo. “It was cavernous and so formal. There was an incongruity between the face of it and the food.” She describes her new joint, Moksa, as a pan-Asian gastropub, where nothing will cost more than $15. “No matter what you did at Ginger Park, it always looked empty. Moksa’s going to be so much more fun, with super casual food.”

“Fun” and “casual” are clearly watchwords among this troupe. “I got rid of all the linens on tables,” says Kovel. “I wanted no formality whatsoever. Catalyst will be Aujourd’hui in three steps instead of five.” By which he means that the culinary execution will still happen in the kitchen, but neither the pomp nor the circumstance will be evident in the dining room. If Aujourd’hui was proud to be that special-occasion, once-, twice-, or thrice-in-a-lifetime place, Catalyst is its antithesis. “It’ll be where you get a cocktail and a burger at the bar,” he promises, “or sit down in the dining room and have four or five courses. Or just go to the patio with a bottle of rosé and a cheese plate.”

Making all of those options possible depends directly on the design, and adaptive design also happens to make better financial sense than locking diners into a single scenario. On a larger, industry level, it allows restaurants to turn on a dime to become what their patrons require from night to night.

Catalyst’s dining room, for example, will fit 86, plus 40 on its patio, with a bar that seats 26 and a fireplace-anchored lounge that overflows from the bar and converts to private event space should, say, a local biotech or venture capital firm choose to book it.

Yeo’s plan is in parallel. Her dining room can morph into a club venue in a snap. “So if we need another source of income besides dinner service, it’s right there,” she says. Her new kitchen, meanwhile, is just as utilitarian, with a pasta machine and two woks churning out dumplings and udon noodles. “That workspace makes all the difference in the world,” says Yeo. “Because of the size at Ginger Park I needed at least four people to run the kitchen. This way, on a slow night, I only need a couple, so we can be more flexible depending on what’s going on. It means we have to use no more resources than necessary to give people an environment they want.”

On a sweaty, mid-July day, the patio at Area Four is jammed with geeks in muscle shirts and 40-something tech marketers in crisp cotton button-downs and squeaky S&M sandals. On the abutting lawn, groups squat over spreadsheets while MIT students loaf on Adirondacks. The scene looks decidedly more like a campus quad than the business center it actually is.

Directly across the green is a mess of workmen, orange cones, wet pavement and temporary fencing. It’s the
future site of Catalyst, with a facade replete with soaring plate-glass windows evoking the chic of a high-end 
      shopping atrium crossed with the warmth of an airport
      terminal.

It doesn’t matter. The buzzing crowd has clearly already embraced it all: the green, the patio and the promise of the square’s metamorphosis. So, too, have the chefs, whose transformations may have been professionally and industry-driven, but have also been personal.

“It’s terrifying, in a certain way, to start something brand new,” admits Yeo. “I find asking people for money really hard. Venture capitalists want a lot in return. You just put yourself out there and see how the universe responds.” Kovel’s with her. “The hardest thing is going through the fund-raising process. When you start asking people for money, it’s a moment of truth. It was incredibly stressful, and there were a lot of sleepless nights.”

Leviton, at least, had the luxury of having a successful West Newton boîte, Lumière. That might have meant more financial stability while he was launching a new place, but it also means more irons in the fire to worry about now that the flames are stoked. Once again, the lessons learned from his previous restaurant are coming in handy. “Before Persephone closed, it helped me learn to let go of the anxiety of always having to be in two restaurants at once and to be there as much as I can, but know that I’ve put the people I trust in place.”

And of course, discovering what you don’t want can be as important as what you do. “When I moved to Boston from New York to work at Ginger Park, they offered me a partnership,” says Yeo. “It felt like getting married after dating for two hours. But within a few months there, I knew I didn’t want to be involved. I’ve always had a bigger business plan.”

That plan includes, ultimately, replicating Moksa again and again, to build a high-end chain of gastropubs. And even while immersed in her next big opening, she’s also looking past it. “I’m not sure you can ever really get your dream restaurant. You’re always progressing,” she says. “As a chef, you’re always looking to what you’re going to do next.”

Outside of the kitchen, the Narragansett surf is where Kovel is most at home. This is where he spent a season after the unceremonious closing of Aujourd’hui, mulling and writing his business plan for Catalyst. “I basically took the summer off,” he says. “I started thinking, ‘Okay, what do I really want to do most?’” His conclusion: Whatever was next would be about great music, easygoing atmosphere and unpretentious food, not an accumulation of critical stars.

“I figured out that I wanted to create a place where I want to go when I’m out with my wife,” he says. He’s now married to Sarah Kovel, whom he met and worked with at the Four Seasons Hotel Boston. She’s since left the hotel to become director of private events at Catalyst, and is already booking dinner reservations and business events for fall—before the construction on the dining-room floor has even finished.

First, there are fish to catch. “This is the meditation,” he insists. “The peace in the middle of all the excitement.” At the end of his line is an iridescent porgy, shimmering pink and silver. “That’s definitely legal size,” he says. But like any self-respecting catch-and-releaser, he’s in it for the sport. He throws it back, and starts again.