A look back at Michela’s, Kendall Square’s first destination restaurant
Michela Larson reflects on her eponymous establishment and the people who dined there, including Edwin Land, Steve Jobs, and Joe Kennedy II
Michela Larson remembers well the two men who came in to Salon Rouge, the little restaurant she co-operated inside the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston’s Longwood area.
“Frankly, they looked like a couple of thugs,” she recalls, a far cry from her usual clientele of doctors and brainy researchers. “I thought, ‘What are they doing here?’”
It turned out they were real estate developers from Boston’s Congress Group. It was mid-1983. The men had heard about Larson’s trendy restaurant from various news accounts: It had gotten a lot of press for bringing creative, high-quality dishes such as Quen nelles of Sole with Chive Butter and Pork Persillade to an academic setting. They wanted her to open a restaurant on the ground floor of a building they were refurbishing — the historic Carter Ink building at 245 First St. in Kendall Square.
Larson was intrigued. She’d been on the hunt to open her own place, which she imagined as “a beautiful northern Italian restaurant, but with an earthy feel to it.” She agreed to a visit and arrived wearing high heels.
“It was a dump. There was debris everywhere,” she remembers. “The atrium was just a seriously big mud hole. One of them had to actually carry me over into the building.”
But that hardly mattered to Larson. “There was this gorgeous building behind all that. It was so solid and fabulous.” The ground-floor space where a restaurant would be featured stately columns rising to the ceiling and “beautiful ink stains” on the floor. She had no problem envisioning a spectacular restaurant. “I absolutely loved that space.”
And so was born the first destination restaurant in Kendall Square: the eponymous Michela’s. There hasn’t been anything like it in the square since.
Larson raised $1 million to get it going — a big figure for a restaurant in those days. Workers had to go through 14 inches of reinforced concrete to get the plumbing in. Her designer was Sandra Fairbank, who along with her architect husband, Toby, operated Cambridge-based Fairbank Design. They went to marble yards outside Boston for a bar top and built a state-of-theart kitchen with a double-deck pizza and bread oven. Early on, students from the Art Institute of Boston were hired to paint a gigantic 10,000 lira note on the back wall. It was later replaced by a whimsical painting of an Italian countryside.
Michela’s opened in late 1985. Larson envisioned a restaurant that served “elegant food, but also beautiful regular food that you could eat every day.” The main dining room was open for lunch and dinner, with a carefully selected wine list that centered on Italian wines but also included hard-to-find vintages from France, California, and other regions. A takeout shop sold sandwiches, salads, pizza, coffee, and breakfast pastries as well as bread, desserts, olive oil, and other condiments. In 1988, for dinner only, she added The Caffe in the atrium next to the restaurant to serve hearty Italian comfort food like baked pastas in a more casual, lowerpriced environment than the main dining room.
The kitchen staff was trailblazing — and helped put Boston on the culinary map. Larson’s first chef was Todd English. One successor was Jody Adams. Suzanne Goin worked as a line cook. Barbara Lynch became head chef for the Caffe, her “first major gig,” says Larson. All went on to storied careers — and all won James Beard awards while opening a slew of wellknown restaurants. For the last few years, her manager was Christopher Myers, who became another renowned Boston-area restaurateur.
“It was an incubator for these guys. We were doing innovative stuff — as was the whole neighborhood,” Larson says.
And what a clientele. Lotus had moved into the area about a year earlier, just a couple blocks down First Street. Thinking Machines had taken over the top two floors of the Carter Ink building earlier in 1984 — and would soon gobble up a lot more, along with the tower next door. She realized early on that Thinking Machines had people working round the clock. “We would serve them food anytime until we closed the kitchen for the night and bring it to them,” she recalls. “They also needed a lot of gummy bears, so we made sure we had them.”
Edwin Land’s Rowland Institute sat across the street, on the river. Land became a regular — always preferring a table in the middle of the dining room “so he could see everything,” Larson relates. “Any time I went over to his table to speak to him, there would always be an interesting question. … So I always felt like I had to be ready for a real conversation, and that was thrilling,” she previously told the Globe. (One day Steve Jobs visited, and spotted the Polaroid founder. “He came up to me and said, ‘My god, that’s my hero,’” Larson says. “‘Can you introduce me?’” She did, but only after checking with Land first that it was all right.)
At some point, Joe Kennedy II opened a campaign office in the building: He would serve in Congress from 1987-1999. He loved to order prosciutto sandwiches, always pronouncing it “pro-skew-toe.” Aerosmith bandmembers would come in from time to time: Their manager’s office was in the Athenaeum building across the street. Bono and U2 arrived one night in a limousine. Julia Child was a regular, as was Robert Parker, author of the Spenser detective novels. But perhaps Larson’s favorite experience was when Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward attended a benefit for the American Repertory Theater that was held at the restaurant.
“He loved our bread, absolutely loved it — so we made him a couple dozen rolls and delivered them to him at the Copley Plaza,” she says.
There were some challenges associated with being in Kendall Square. One big one was that the area was constantly under construction, and roads that were open one day would be blocked the next. “We never knew what was going to be torn up,” Larson says. There was no GPS in those days, and no e-mail list to stay in touch with customers. But she did collect fax numbers from her regulars. “If I had your fax number, I would send a daily map to you as to how to get to the restaurant.”
Michela’s stayed open nearly a decade, until 1994, when for personal reasons Larson decided to close. She, Adams, and Karen Haskell would soon go into partnership to form Rialto, a celebrated restaurant in the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square that Adams took over completely many years later, and then finally closed in 2016. On the heels of Michela’s, another acclaimed restaurant, Salamander, opened in the same space.
Larson opened several other restaurants, though she is semiretired and not currently managing any. She remains a board member of Community Servings, a Jamaica Plain-based nonprofit she helped found in 1990 that provides nutritional, medically tailored meals to Massachusetts residents managing critical or chronic illnesses. She also helped create and launch Mod Espresso, an upscale coffee bar that opened in 2019 inside Boston furniture design company Modern Relik.
Looking back, she was especially proud of Michela’s. “It was a fabulous, wonderful time, and an amazing time to do something like a restaurant in that area — because there was literally nothing,” she says. “I loved being a part of a group of companies where we were breaking new ground. We were kind of the pioneers down there.”
‘It was a fabulous, wonderful time... I loved being a part of a group of companies where we were breaking new ground. We were kind of the pioneers down there.’
MICHELA LARSON