Acclaimed Chef Lydia Shire Plans New Restaurant for the Seaport
But it's not opening until 2024, so head to Scampo and eat some lobster pizza in the meantime.
Lydia Shire. / Photo courtesy of Scampo
A stalwart of Boston’s culinary scene has something new in store for 2024: James Beard award-winning chef and restaurateur Lydia Shire is opening a restaurant in Boston’s increasingly bustling Seaport District.
Shire appears prominently in any Boston restaurant industry family tree; her career, spanning decades, includes a number of acclaimed restaurants that provided great training for the next generation of notable chefs. (Joanne Chang of Flour Bakery and Myers & Chang, for one, got her start in the kitchen at Biba, Shire’s eclectic Public Garden-adjacent spot that had a storied run from 1989 to 2001.) And there was Shire’s 2001 takeover of downtown’s historical Locke-Ober restaurant, of course—a particularly exciting accomplishment given that the restaurant didn’t even allow women to dine until 1970.
Shire is not ready to reveal too many details yet—she told Boston only that the restaurant would be American when interviewed for a recent feature—but BioMed Realty, a real estate investment trust, announced a bit more information today. For starters, Shire’s fans will have to wait until 2024 for the new spot. It will be located on the ground floor of the forthcoming Seaport Science Center at 601 Congress St., a life sciences and technology development spanning 13 stories and featuring a six-story atrium and an all-season roof deck. While the restaurant will be open to the public, the lucky tenants of the development will have the opportunity to enjoy Shire’s cooking at events in the building, too.
A rendering of the Seaport Science Center’s roof deck, where tenants of the building might enjoy events catered by Shire’s restaurant. / Rendering courtesy of Seaport Science Center
The opening is quite far off, and the restaurant doesn’t even have a name yet, but in the meantime, Shire’s Italian-inspired restaurant, Scampo, continues to draw crowds at Boston’s Liberty Hotel. Head over there while you wait, and be sure to try the lobster pizza, a throwback to Biba.
(Curious to learn more about Shire? Check out this feature from our February 2023 issue for more background on Shire’s stunning career—and that one time she pretended to kill a duck by the swan boats in the Public Garden for a photoshoot—as discussed over a meal with two other Boston restaurant industry powerhouses, Barbara Lynch and Jody Adams.)
Forthcoming restaurant, 601 Congress St., Seaport District, Boston; Scampo, 215 Charles St., Beacon Hill, Boston, 617-536-2100, scampoboston.com.
