Two years after opening as a Korean-infused restaurant in The Port neighborhood in Cambridge, Cloud & Spirits chef Katie Cheung announced in 2023 that the “adventure” was over, and it would pivot to become an event space for special occasions and parties.
Mothership, opened in late 2023 by Liza Shirazi and Steve “Nookie” Postal, said in June that it too was “hitting pause on regular dinner service” in North Cambridge to shift focus and host events.
And Dear Annie, which opened in late 2021 near Porter Square in Cambridge, said July 8 that the wine bar and restaurant will close July 31, reopening in September for “bespoke events (including private events) devoted to the beauty and craft of exceptional wine and hospitality.” The next business at 1741 Massachusetts Ave. is Sisyphus Happy – a reference to a Camus essay and a TikTok meme that alludes to it, based on a questionnaire assessing who’s waitlist-worthy. (Sample question: “At your ideal version of a dinner party, who would you want to be seated next to, and what would you hope to talk about?”)
That’s three restaurants in Cambridge in three years turning to private events, but there are limits as well as benefits to this trend, said Drew Starr, a former restaurant manager who writes about food and is a frequent commenter about industry issues on social media.
“There’s room for some, but not as many as would like to get into the space,” Starr said on a July 13 call. If more restaurant owners expect to take advantage, “there will definitely be an oversupply.”
Starr and Postal agree on the role finances play in making the move. Catering and events take away the daily, high-stakes gambles and guesses that burden owners, chefs and managers. For a restaurant with a $5,000 minimum to close for a night, it might be all too common to close with $2,000. An events model means no nights of spending more than you make.
Finances and frustrations
Money isn’t the whole story, as Dear Annie owner Lauren Friel made clear in announcing her business’ shift.
“This decision isn’t just about cash flow; it’s about my life and what I want out of it. It’s a lot about motherhood – Dear Annie could probably exist in its current form, but it would mean not seeing my kid, and that’s not what I’m interested in right now,” Friel said on social media, while announcing that the next iteration of Dear Annie wouldn’t be on social media. (Her Rebel Rebel natural wine bar and Wild Child wine shop in Somerville will carry on as usual.)
Disappointment over restaurant trends globally and locally is another factor in Friel’s decision, and she pointed to the closing of favorite food businesses while steakhouses and luxury chains proliferate. “The writing is on the wall,” Friel said. With a turn to private events, “we’re getting to choose the parts of this work that bring us joy and let go of the rest. It’s not an easy choice, but it’s the right one.”
For Postal, the turn was based in finances.
While there are homes along Cambridgepark Drive in Mothership’s Alewife neighborhood, the area is mostly office park with three big, empty buildings lacking in workers – the results of an economic malaise for office and lab space once unimaginable for Cambridge. “The restaurant was built specifically for those employees, to give them somewhere to go,” Postal said on a Thursday call. “Right now there’s not enough people to make it work. There’s just not enough traffic to warrant a full-serve restaurant,” though Postal and his landlords look for a resurgence in leases in around three years.
Relying on reputation
Mothership’s restaurant math works if there are 1,200 people seeing it as an alternative to taking the time and risking the traffic to go somewhere else for a meal. It also works for 75 guaranteed diners at a bar mitzvah or family reunion, memorial service or corporate dinner with a set menu and built-in costs for ingredients and staffing. “The day-to-day grind of running a restaurant is really challenging” when even a rainy day can cancel a reservation and kill walk-in traffic, Postal said.
The past few weeks have proven the wisdom of the move. “It’s going well – we got a bunch of weddings and do a lot of baby showers on the weekends,” Postal said.
At the end of the day, Starr said, “every restaurant is is a real estate deal,” but the event-space approach to paying the rent is for places and people who have developed reputations that make their marketing stand out. People such as Postal and Friel have decades worth of client lists and emails and contacts “to say, ‘Hey, I’m around, this is what I’m doing,” Starr said. “Lauren has been one of the top wine people in Boston for 15 or 20 years now. If anyone has the ability to do this and be successful, it would be her.”
Alternatives to events
Almost every restaurant seems to offer catering, and there are many variations on events outside of Cambridge. Dragon Pizza in Somerville’s Davis Square has a party space called the Dragon’s Lair next door; owner Charlie Redd opened it in October 2022 when the India Palace restaurant moved out. Eastern Standard in Boston has turned its Monday nights over to chef pop-ups, Starr noted, and the 18-course, $250 chef’s-choice dinners at 311 Omakase in Boston’s South End are “effectively a private event.” Table, in Boston’s North End, specializes in fixed-price seatings at set times, as few as one a day.
Maple & Ash, which opened in the Seaport in April, may be one of the “crazy expensive steakhouses” that Friel despairs over, but it arrived with her business model baked in, Starr said: “Their entire space is designed so you can have pseudo-private parties.”
The model means “your labor costs plummet. You don’t need to have anyone taking orders. You don’t have to prepare for meals that aren’t going to be ordered. You don’t need to have someone dealing with DoorDash and all that kind of stuff. And you can usually charge a lot more per head,” Starr said.
“If your goal is to maximize the amount of dollars coming in that you then give to staff, running a restaurant is the worst way to do it,” Starr said. “I used to tell people that a food truck is a great way to lose money slowly, so you can prove to to investors that you’re worth giving money to open a restaurant, in which case you can lose money quickly. But that way, you can hopefully move to private events and catering, in which case you can actually make money.”
About The Author
