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Shuttered Fenway restaurant could re-open this fall
By adamg on Wed, 05/07/2014 - 8:05am
Symphony 8, 10A Westland Ave., could re-open this fall after renovations, owner Douglas Bacon said yesterday.
Bacon told the Boston Licensing Board that renovations, in particular to the restaurant's storefront, have simply taken longer than he expected, because it's just an old building. Storefront renovation could begin within 30 days, he said.
Bacon was before the board to explain why it shouldn't strip him of the restaurant's liquor license because the restaurant has been closed for more than a year now. He told the board he's painfully aware of the delays, because he's now paid rent for 12 months for an empty space.
The board decides Thursday whether to give Bacon more time to open the restaurant. The board rarely revokes liquor licenses for non-use when owners appear with an explanation.
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Comments
Does anybody know why it
Does anybody know why it closed in the first place - or, to put it another why, why he's been paying rent on an empty space instead of bringing in restaurant revenue?
Bad service + inconsistency
Bad service + inconsistency of food quality = closed once the Symphony and university seasons ended.
Because he's thorough
And he doesn't make knee-jerk decisions. I've worked in his bars for nine years.
SMH
How about the BLB looks into Tonic in Jamaica Plain for non-use of liquor license and revolt that. Doug Bacon is good operator!
Didn't Bacon buy this place
Didn't Bacon buy this place after it closed? I don't think it was his when it went under.
Does it really need to reopen?
Aside from providing folks with jobs, why does it need to re-open? I worked around the corner from it and visited on multiple occasions and nearly every time was a terrible experience.
Symphony 8 was the kind of sub-mediocre,
fake Irish-American pub with prefab Sysco food that Boston already has way too many of. The downstairs bar, Prohibited, had a barely-there speakeasy theme, including a quickly-abandoned gimmick of requiring a password you looked up online for admittance. It was like a bad college bar with a pretentious (liquor company created) specialty cocktail list that none of its bartenders could execute on worth a damn. Neither floor's offerings would be difficult to improve on.
It was the sort of grim, relentlessly bad place that only the Andelmans could get on their knees for in exchange for the right price, and in fact it was featured on the Phantom Gourmet. If you've never heard of it, and those sad old Andelman whores are flogging it, make the obvious logical leap.
So...
you're saying you didn't like it?
To be fair, not every place shown on the Phantom Gourmet is
completely terrible, and the Andelmans have gotten ever-so-slightly more sophisticated about concealing their prostitution. Some shows, they don't even run ads for the same restaurants they've just given on-air tug-jobs to; they wait and run them in the next episode. Once in a while, they include an actually good restaurant that doesn't pay them any graft, say, Coppa, to throw the wary off the scent.
Nine times out of 10, though, it's a straight pay-for-play proposition: buy an ad from us, we'll include you in our Great Ate or some other such chickenheadedness. Become a member of our lobby (the Restaurant and Business Alliance), and we'll weave regular positive mentions of you into the show. Mostly, though, if you don't return Mike "Bobblehead" Andelman's sales calls and be ready to plunk down a little something-something, the Dumb Brothers will pretend you don't exist. It's a pretty sweet racket, whoring is, if you can just exorcise any moral compunctions about it.
Thought I noticed new paper
Thought I noticed new paper up covering the windows when I walked by a couple of weeks ago, figured something was happening to the space.
It wasn't great before it closed, you might not even say it was good, but it wasn't the worst place around to get food and drinks. More options to go to in the neighborhood is always better than less, in my book.
Anybody know what ended up
Anybody know what ended up coming of this? The location is still vacant.