The group focuses on experiential dining in high-energy settings
Since 2010, COJE Management Group has been running successful, high-energy restaurants in downtown Boston and the neighboring Seaport District, with cuisines ranging from French to Cuban to Peruvian-Japanese-Chinese, and it’s about to take a stab at Sicilian.
But the food is only one element of what makes a restaurant successful, and COJE chief executive and co-founder Chris Jamison said the key to his company’s success has been putting an equal amount of attention to food, drink, lighting, service, and atmosphere — the sort of experiential dining that’s on everybody’s lips these days.
“We take equal care and consideration to all the different elements that make a restaurant important and successful, in my opinion,” said Jamison, who opened his first restaurant, a festive tacos-and-tequila venue in the city’s Back Bay, in 2010 with an old friend, and current COJE managing partner, Mark Malatesta.
Eight concepts and nine restaurants in, they’re not looking back.
Jamison had been working in real estate, with his only work in restaurants being the typical waiting tables and tending bar that many young people do. But he enjoyed eating in restaurants around the world.
“Then I’d come home and we’d be relegated to what existed in Boston in the late 2000s,” he said.
But Lolita opened with a bang, bringing an energy that Jamison said his hometown lacked. “It was very much a New York-style place. It was unique in Boston in 2010. That’s for sure,” he said.
For one thing, it didn’t have a sign for its first seven months, because Jamison didn’t know they needed a permit to put one up.
“It was a completely unbranded, invisible restaurant,” he said. “And I think that might have helped the allure a little bit. It certainly didn’t hurt.”
Neither did the fact that he hired a competent public relations firm that got them good media placement, nor did the fact that Bostonians like to take their friends to hidden gems they’ve discovered.
“Boston’s a very, very small city,” Jamison said. “Word gets around lightning-quick. It’s a city where people take pride in showing off things that they’ve found to their circle friends … and the experience we offered was so different than anything that existed in Boston at the time, so everyone would go and instantly tell their friends about it.”
Jamison and Malatesta didn’t open their next restaurant until 2015, and it was two years in the making, in part because they wanted to honor the space they were taking over. Previously it was Locke-Ober, a fine-dining landmark that first opened in 1875 and had been run by luminary local restaurateur Lydia Shire from 2001 until it closed in 2012.
“It was a very painstaking process, trying to maintain the character that made Locke-Ober so special, which I think we did, and also layer in new elements of construction that took cues from its history,” Jamison said. The new restaurant was christened Yvonne’s. Jamison describes it as a glamorous, elevated supper club.
“It’s very comfortable, very cozy,” he said. The menu is 21st-century American, with stone-fired pitas, multicultural toasts, shareable items including piri-piri Brussels sprouts, octopus in Thai coconut-galangal sauce, and Moroccan lamb belly, as well as chops, baked oysters, and lobster dumplings with black truffle butter.
Veteran Boston chef Tom Berry was hired for Yvonne’s, and is now the entire group’s culinary director.
“He’s the most talented chef I’ve ever been around,” Jamison said. “The breadth of his ability to cook so many different cuisines, to be creative and authentic in the way that he comes up with menus and dishes, it’s been amazing to watch him work over almost 10 years now.”
Like Berry, most people in management roles at COJE have been developed from within.
“They’ve been promoted from food runners to servers to bartenders to managers,” Jamison said. “We’ve certainly found that investing in culture, and investing in teaching and training, is a much better way to approach [growth] than trying to hire talent from the outside and then assimilate them.”
Ray Tremblay has worked his way up to be head of beverage, and Tim Mahoney is group service director.
Renovating Locke-Ober into Yvonne’s presented the opportunity for the next restaurant: Ruka Resto Bar in The Godfrey Hotel Boston.
“The team that was building the hotel around the corner would swing by Yvonne’s as the finishing touches were being put in,” Jamison said. “There weren’t a lot of people interested in opening restaurants in Downtown Crossing [where Yvonne’s and The Godfrey are located]. It wasn’t one of the hot and appealing neighborhoods.”
So the deal was done, and Ruka, serving Peruvian-Asian food, such as picanha steak with yuzu teriyaki and aji Amarillo ranch sauce, yuca wasabi puffs, and fried calamari with leche de tigre garlic butter, opened a year later and has been going strong ever since.
Then COJE opened a second location of Lolita, followed by Mariel, a Cuban restaurant in Post Office Square less than half a mile away from Yvonne’s.
Jamison said the space dictated the cuisine. “It just felt like Havana,” he said, a bit deteriorated, but with high ceilings. And Underground opened below Mariel. “That was the juxtaposition of the storyline upstairs: If Mariel was a representation of this beautiful way that Havana was in the middle of the 20th Century, Underground was what happened since the revolution. Everyone was pushed underground, and the scene became more down-the-alley hidden speakeasies,” Jamison said.
That was followed by French-Mediterranean concept Coquette, which opened at the Omni Hotel in the Seaport District in late summer 2021. “We opened right out of COVID, so it took a couple of years to find its legs. … But it’s worked out well,” Jamison said.
Soon after, they opened Cocorico, a French-style coffee shop in the Omni.
Next came a nightclub called Caveau (“Very much a high-tech AV dance club”), and Mr. H, a Chinese restaurant with dumplings and noodles that opened in the Seaport District in September.
“People have responded well to it,” Jamison said.
Although a number of COJE’s restaurants operate in hotels, their customers are mostly locals, and that’s by intention.
“What we’ve learned is that hotel restaurants that are most successful are right down the middle. They’re functional and serve a purpose. The restaurants that we create are very experiential and transportive,” Jamison said. “We create spaces that make people feel like they’re not in Boston.”
Hotel guests, by contrast, are usually looking for something representative of Boston itself, and are more likely to go around the corner for lobster or New England clam chowder.
“We’re not trying to make you feel like you’re in Boston. I want to give people an escape from the work that they’re doing, from their day-to-day, from whatever’s on their mind on a Tuesday,” Jamison said. “So we really do try to create these opportunities for them to be somewhere else for an hour or two with us.”
COJE’s next restaurant is under construction now in the same building as Mariel and Underground. It doesn’t have a name yet — that usually comes late in the company’s development process — but they know it’s going to be Sicilian.
“We’re approaching it with a signature twist, I think,” Jamison said. “We’re taking a look at Sicilian cuisine, which is an incredible melting pot of a number of different cultures — North African, Arabic, Middle Eastern, Greek, French. The island’s been conquered 400 times, so there’s so many layers to the cuisine that has developed there.”
Chef Berry’s mission is not simply to focus on the cuisine of Sicily today, but of what Jamison calls its “foundational cuisines.”
“We’re going to do some deep dives into those Middle Eastern, North African, and Mediterranean cuisines and really pull a menu together that speaks to all of that,” Jamison said.
The restaurant will also have an additional element that is trending in larger cities: A members-only club downstairs.
“Our clientele are clamoring for something interesting, unique, and exclusive,” Jamison said.
Although COJE’s portfolio is diverse, its CEO said there are some underlying themes to them all. “Attention goes into every small detail, because we know how much it matters to the longevity of the restaurant,” he said. “Lighting is exceedingly expensive. It’s certainly the most expensive thing that we do. We never cut a corner, and I think that’s one of the things that really differentiates us.”Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]
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