Boston Magazine | How to Fix the Restaurant Industry

The city's restaurant scene has never looked better from the dining room, but behind kitchen doors, the industry is struggling with thin margins, labor shortages, and a culture of burnout. To survive, today’s top chefs are reinventing everything—and their solutions might just save it all.

By ERIKA ADAMS

The Problem: The Barriers Never End

So you want to open a restaurant in Boston? It’s notoriously difficult, and we’re not just talking about the staggering cost to nab one of the city’s handful of liquor licenses. (Although, yeah, that can run you upward of $400,000.) Chefs who are well versed in putting together a winning menu are also tasked with all the operational headaches that come with restaurant ownership, from managing staff to juggling building upkeep. And then, once you finally get the place open, how do you get people in the door? The path to each new restaurant in Boston is less like a ribbon-cutting and more like a dizzying obstacle course that every prospective owner is forced to run.

Solution 2: Let Someone Else Buy the Liquor License -Alyssa Mikiko DiPasquale Owner, the Koji Club

“First and foremost, we have a licensing agreement instead of a formal lease at the Charles River Speedway. We were really lucky that we were one of the first in those little horse stalls to get a licensing agreement, and we are one of the lucky people who are able to manage the liquor license that is on the property. Otherwise, we would not have been able to open in the city of Boston, period.

I really like the structure of our landlord at the Speedway owning the liquor license, and us having a management agreement with them. I hope that in future projects, these big guns that have lots of money would own the license and have a management agreement. There are giant national landlords opening things in the city of Boston right now, who have both the money and the power. If you’re in partnership with one of those types of landlords, then maybe you don’t have to go to the back of the line to get something open.”