- How a Back Bay bike lane pitted one Boston businessman against Mayor Michelle Wu.
- Market Basket’s culture is “better today” than before the CEO was suspended, some corporate employees say.
- A fraudulent cancer breakthrough became a test for the future president of MIT — and helped usher in a new age of doubt in science.
Roger Berkowitz — he of Legal Sea Foods fame — has two passions: fish and restaurants.
Pandemic losses forced him to sell Legal in 2020, but Berkowitz never quit the fish business. He quickly turned to his next act: Roger’s Fish Co., an online purveyor of flash-frozen fish, live and cooked lobsters, and ready-to-heat meals.
today, he’s poised to return to the restaurant game with Roger’s Fish & Chips, debuting at Logan Airport’s Terminal A in late September or early October.
It’s a modest first step: a 700-square-foot space with a special menu, counter service, and seating shared with Dunkin’, Jimmy John’s, and Buffalo Wild Wings in the terminal’s annex. (A hat tip to Marc Hurwitz of Boston Restaurant Talk, who reported earlier this month that Berkowitz would appear before the Boston Licensing Board for approval of Roger’s Fish & Chips.)
In an interview, Berkowitz described his concept as a “mashup of quick service and speedy casual” designed to deliver high-quality meals with a lean staff (three to five people). He believes the full-service restaurant model — big menus and big staff — is confoundingly hard to make work after steep increases in food prices and wages.
He’s not new to speedy casual. In 2017, he opened Legal Fish Bowl in Kendall Square, offering pre-designed or build-your-own fish-based bowls.
One chain he points to as a model — for its mix of quality and worth — is Pressed Cafe. It serves a Mediterranean-inspired menu of all-day breakfast dishes, sandwiches, salads, bowls, and burgers at 10 locations in eastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire.
“It seems to be the direction of restaurant folks,” he said. “Their popularity would attest to that.”
Along with fish and chips, Berkowitz’s airport eatery will feature fried clams, chowder, lobster bisque, fresh lobster rolls, and “a poor man’s surf and turf” — a hot dog and stuffed clams.
“There will be one or two great wines, one or two unusually good beers, and some frozen drinks, like a margarita,” he said. He’s proud of the margarita formula he came up with in the 1990s that got a thumbs up from none other than Jimmy Buffett.
The average meal will set you back in the “high teens or low 20s,” he said.
For today, Berkowitz is focused on one location.
“I am going to be behind the counter,” he said. “I don’t want anything left to chance. I want to get it right. I am taking this really personally.”
If that sounds like Berkowitz, 73, has something to prove, he does.
Legal Sea Foods — started by his family in 1968 next to their grocery store in Cambridge’s Inman Square — had grown to 33 locations, 3,500 employees, and more than $200 million in annual revenue before COVID shutdowns crushed the industry in early 2020.
Berkowitz permanently closed six locations and eventually reopened 18 larger restaurants. But with revenue at a fraction of pre-pandemic levels, he grudgingly decided the company couldn’t survive on its own.
He sold to PPX Hospitality Group, a private equity-backed restaurant company, in December 2020 — a gut punch.
Berkowitz didn’t sit at home feeling sorry for himself. He rolled out Roger’s Fish Co. in March 2023, seeking to ride the pandemic-powered wave of in-home dining. It sells online, through retail locations including Market Basket, and on QVC.
PPX — which also owns Smith & Wollensky and Strega — has Legal Sea Foods outposts at each of Logan’s terminals. (Legal first landed at the airport in the early 1990s.) Other Terminal A food options include B.Good, Alta Strada, and Fox & Flight.
Berkowitz’s new venture “fits well with our overall mission to showcase the variety of local flavor Boston and New England have to offer,” Rich Davey, chief executive of Massport, which runs the airport, said in a statement.
If Roger’s Fish & Chips is a banger with travelers, the airport may be the first of multiple locations.
“My incentive is to get this one right so I can do more,” Berkowitz said. “I come from a background where one isn’t enough.”
“4o wasn’t just a tool for me. It helped me through anxiety, depression, and some of the darkest periods of my life. It had this warmth and understanding that felt…human.”
— A post on Reddit after OpenAI made its new GPT-5 model its default for users, replacing model 4o.
Worrisome prognosis: UMass Memorial Health is eliminating services ahead of big cuts to Medicaid.
cost pressure: A closely watched measure of US inflation rose in July — a clear sign that businesses are being affected by tariffs — but the increase probably won’t deter the Federal Reserve from lowering interest rates at its next meeting in September.
Green light: A federal judge ruled that a Natick couple harassed by eBay employees in 2019 may proceed to civil trial with a more than $500 million lawsuit against the company and others involved.
She’s back: Taylor Swift announced her 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” her first since completing the record-breaking $2.2 billion Eras Tour.
Meet the new boss: Ali Noorani, former program director at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has been named the next president of the Barr Foundation, succeeding Jim Canales.
— University of Texas’ first-ever leading ranking in the AP’s preseason college football poll. It edged out Penn State.
The big news in Boston luxury real estate circles this summer is Jon Cronin’s decision to give up control of the St. Regis Residences condo tower in the Seaport.
Drawing less attention is the building’s 10,600-square-foot penthouse unit, which has been on the market for a couple of months with an asking cost of $49.5 million — the most expensive residence for sale in all of Massachusetts, according to Realtor.com.
Cronin, a restaurateur-turned-developer, owns the two-story condo and at one point planned to live there.
It features six bedrooms and 8 full baths (and two what were once called “powder rooms”), the listing says, with “a double-height great room, a sculptural curved floating staircase with glass railings, and a grand foyer with an Italian marble radial inlay floor.”
Annual taxes are $420,000 and the monthly condo fee is $22,930.
How much will Cronin get for the place? I spoke with a couple of brokers who specialize in luxury living. Their estimates ranged from $25 million to $39 million.
After Cronin’s pied-à-terre, the priciest home on the market is a Weston mansion listed for $38 million, owned by James Pallotta, the hedge fund manager and a former Celtics co-owner.
📆 On this date in 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act into law.
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Larry Edelman can be reached at larry.edelman@globe.com.
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