Constellation of culinary stars
Pabu part of Hub’s global-celeb-chef boom
Boston has always boasted a bright, tight-knit constellation of talented homegrown chefs. But lately, some big restaurant industry stars are moving into our orbit. On Monday, Pabu Boston at Millennium Tower opened its doors by Downtown Crossing. A sleek sushi bar and high-end izakaya, or Japanese tavern, Pabu Boston is a partnership between two heavyweight chefs: Ken Tominaga, a Tokyo native whose acclaimed Hana Japanese Restaurant has been a northern California dining destination for more than 25 years, and bigwig restaurateur Michael Mina, an award-winning chef with 27 restaurants around the world, sprinkled among glittery destinations such as Dubai, Miami and Las Vegas. Boston's Pabu is the duo's second iteration of their joint concept; a Pabu opened in San Francisco in 2014.
Pabu also comes on the heels of several other ventures recently opened in Boston by city-hopping celeb chefs, which suggests that the Hub, previously short on big global names, is increasingly on the radar of culinary royals growing their empires. Why now?
“Chefs will always follow the product,” said Mina, who said Boston is well-positioned to lure chefs with its accessibility to high-quality ingredients, from New England farm-fresh produce to locally caught seafood. Locality is well-expressed at Boston's Pabu, where the sophisticated 173-seat dining room — swathed in sleek fir timber, paper lanterns and concrete walls hand-painted with apple and cherry trees — serves traditional Japanese cuisine with New England inflections.
Okonomiyaki, a savory pancake, is topped with pork belly, squid and fried oysters or buttered lobster. Miso nabe is a chowder-like dish of whole lobster delivered tableside and mixed into a hot pot of mushrooms and eggs with a lobsterbased stock. And Mina said that steakhouse-hungry-Boston's Pabu is also distinguished from San Francisco's location through its beef program, which serves Japanese Wagyu alongside chops from East Coast American ranchers, paired with local peak-season veggies imbued with Asian flavor.
But besides the bait of strong options for ingredient sourcing, Mina said Boston has always been on his radar for an opening. It's a “magical city,” said Mina, and likely to earn more attention in a day and age when marquee chef names now brand themselves across multiple cities.
“Ten years ago, chefs didn't
have multiple restaurants (the way they do now),” said Mina.
In Boston, Mina follows in the still-fresh footsteps of Mario Batali, the orange Crocs-rocking celeb chef with more than two dozen restaurants around the country. Last year Batali opened Babbo Pizzeria e Enoteca, a pie- and pasta-slinging spot in the Seaport; next month he will also open Eataly, a massive three-floor Italian dining emporium at the Prudential Center. Mina and Batali were both preceded in Boston by French restaurateur Daniel Boulud, a Michelin-starred chef with concepts in such cities as New York, London and Singapore. He opened Bar Boulud in the Back Bay in late 2014.
Before Boulud, other recent attempts by international chef names to enter the Boston market have had underwhelming results. World-renowned French chef Guy Martin chose Boston to open a second location of his Paris restaurant Sensing in 2009; it closed in 2011. Famed Jean-Georges Vongerichten brought his haute cuisine to Boston by opening Market at the W Hotel in 2009; the restaurant closed at the end of 2013. Perhaps the busts were to blame on the food. But maybe it had something to do with Boston's reputation as a tough nut for outsiders to crack. In the dining industry, as in most others, Boston culture can be fiercely protective of its own and disinclined to fawning over even highly lauded interlopers.
If that's been the case, perhaps tides are shifting. Bar Boulud, housed inside Boston's Mandarin Oriental hotel, has been “very well received” and has been doing “double the business” of the luxury hotel's previous restaurant tenant, according to Boulud. Boulud said he visited Boston often before opening his restaurant; he was a close friend of Cambridge's adopted daughter Julia Child, and his daughter attended Tufts University. Boulud credits much of Boston's “international appeal” to the cosmopolitan sensibility imbued by university culture.
Boulud also points out that Boston is breeding its own roster of expansive restaurateurs. For instance, Bostonbased Michael Schlow has recently opened a restaurant in Los Angeles and five spots in Washington, D.C., including secondary outposts of Boston's pan-Latin joint Tico and Wellesley's Italian-oriented Alta Strada. Ken Oringer and Jamie Bissonnette, the duo behind the perpetually buzzing tapas restaurant Toro in Boston's South End, have opened additional iterations of that hot spot in New York City and Bangkok since 2013. A Dubai location is imminent.
“There's a real cross-city exchange, a reciprocity of talent and creativity,” said Boulud of these developments. “I would say that's the strongest sign of a city's culinary success — that it generates stars that can also be successful in other cities.”
That theory would also bode well for Pabu. “I've heard that story from people,” said Tominaga, when asked about Boston's reputation for hesitantly embracing outsiders. So far, though, he said he has encountered an “open minded” community that values camaraderie. Indeed, plenty of local chef luminaries turned out for Pabu's opening party, including Bissonnette, Asian fusion guru and television personality Ming Tsai, and “Top Chef” runner-up Tiffani Faison. Said Tominaga, “We're seeing a lot of love.”