Leaving No Empty Places

As a South End restaurant closes, group moves to fill the space and keep the buzz going

October 29, 2011|By Erin Ailworth, Globe Staff

The worst kind of neighbor for a restaurant, according to Seth Woods, is a shuttered space. The emptiness has a ripple effect on the block.

“They make you struggle,’’ said Woods, a partner at the Boston restaurant management firm the Aquitaine Group.

That’s one of the reasons Woods and his partners decided to open a fifth South End restaurant this spring in the 5,500-square-foot location vacated by Rocca, an Italian restaurant that closed suddenly in December. The spot is a block from the group’s popular Gaslight Brasserie du Coin.

Having several restaurants in the same neighborhood - and in some cases, on the same street - might seem a risky strategy on the face of it, but it has been a good one for the Aquitaine Group. The addition on Harrison Avenue will not only solidify the firm’s presence in the South End, it will bring work and dollars back into the Boston neighborhood, where there has been a spate of restaurant closings in the last year.

Rocca’s departure was kind of like “a missing tooth,’’ leaving a large gap in the street’s business, said Nick Fedor, executive director of the Washington Gateway Main Street Inc., an area business development organization. “Being such a large and prominent space, it attracts customers from both the neighborhood and the surrounding areas of Boston and the region,’’ Fedor said. Rocca, like Gaslight, was one of the few restaurants in the South End that offered free parking, a perk the Aquitaine Group plans to keep.

Woods and his partners, Jeffrey Gates and Matthew Burns, have started remodeling the Rocca space. Dust hung in the air on a recent morning after a construction crew jackhammered the stone-tile floor. Stairs to the second floor already had been stripped to the metal base and walls bared in preparation for remodeling, which the partners say will be a “significant financial investment.’’

“We’re bringing it down to the canvas, down to the bare bones,’’ said Gates, as he likened the rehab to dating. “The way we look at it, you don’t want to go out with a new girl who is wearing your old girlfriend’s clothes.’’

What is now the Aquitaine Group was founded in 1995 when Woods opened Metropolis Cafe on Tremont Street, serving Mediterranean dishes. The firm’s roster currently boasts half a dozen restaurants, including one in Dedham and another in Chestnut Hill. In the South End alone, its restaurants do about $10 million in sales annually and employ roughly 140 people. The Italian restaurant will add another 60 jobs.

“We feel a responsibility to this neighborhood [and] when we have these restaurants closing in the South End, that’s jobs leaving,’’ Gates said, but “we can get involved and get things done.’’