Harvard Square home of a Painted Burro eatery will make perfect sense: old Border Cafe space
The Border Cafe space on Church Street in Harvard Square will be filled with The Painted Burro, another Mexican restaurant. (Photo: Marc Levy)
The Painted Burro, an upscale Mexican restaurant in Somerville’s Davis Square, is adding its fourth location in a place familiar to fans of the cuisine: the former home of the Border Cafe in Harvard Square.
The opening is expected in the spring, said Denise Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association. She welcomed owner The Alpine Restaurant Group as a “good operator” that would be reviving a long-closed storefront.
The Border Cafe opened in 1987 at 32 Church St. and began expanding quickly inside and outside the state. The lines out the door owners came to expect night after night in Harvard Square grew shorter with the July 2012 closing of the 10 Church St. AMC Loews cinema, though, part of a pall affecting businesses all the way to Brattle Street. It never reopened its doors after a Dec. 1, 2019, fire, and almost a year ago management confirmed the location would never reopen.
The Painted Burro will have to refresh the tatty interiors left by the Border Cafe after a fire closed it in December 2019. (Photo: Marc Levy)
The Painted Burro launched in March 2012 at 219 Elm St., at home with Posto and Rosebud Kitchen, other restaurants run by The Alpine Restaurant Group in Davis Square. It expanded to Boston’s South End in 2017 and to Waltham in February, according to Marc Hurwitz’s Boston Restaurant Talk blog.
Alpine signaled some changes to the outside space on Church Street before the Cambridge Historical Commission on Jan. 6, when it asked permission to change the entrance design, replace some windows, install awnings and new signs and build a patio platform.
Sure, another restaurant there is great. The problem comes when the Harvard Sq Business Association, Harvard Sq Neighborhood association and the public prior to the historical commission meeting were never engaged. The owner said that he was taking his instructions from a Palmer St association which, as far as anyone knows, doesn’t exist. And again, a 40 seat outdoor patio opposite Passims limits the cafe’s ability for outdoor seating. It also creates problems with delivery trucks and the fire department. So who gave them permission? The owner said Harvard which doesn’t own Palmer St. It is a public street.
The Alpine group went before the historical commission because they want to remove all applied ornament from the 1930s and replace it with generic black bands and awnings with stencil. After all, it is an upscale Mexican restaurant.
The issue is not necessarily a new restaurant which is welcomed, but the process of communication or lack there of and how it interferes with on-going ideas to activate Palmer St itself without dominating the effort. This is not OK and is arrogant.
From this article and the comments of “pete” above, I learn that a company applied to a city commission, asking for approval to make changes to a building where it plans to open a restaurant.
It seems like the company is starting the established public process for obtaining the permissions required for opening the restaurant. The established public process generally includes notification to the public and opportunity for the public to comment.
“pete” asserts that because the company did not first engage with unspecified members of “the public” who wish to insert themselves ahead of the established public process, the process is “not OK” and the company is being “arrogant.” It seems to me that the public process is working as it should and pete’s search for arrogance is misplaced.
(I have no affiliation with the restaurant company or any of the other commissions or groups mentioned in the article or comment above.)
I stand corrected in my use of “arrogant”. But if the applicant is from outside Cambridge, it is either up to him or Cambridge officials to at least ask him about stakeholders and community outreach. This is often the case with new businesses that create a new footprint in public realms.