Is Jason Bond Boston's best-known roving chef?

Boston Globe

2 days ago

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Bond still hopes to open his own urban restaurant. But, for now, he's content to cook in someone else's kitchen.
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Is it psychologically weird to cook for someone else? Do you feel like: 'Wait! I'm Jason Bond!'? Or do you adopt the culture of wherever you're working?
I think it's a blend. I think they hire you for what you bring, and you should do your best to bring that. But at the same time, you know, not everything that I do is appropriate for the environment. The brisket I smoked this morning was inappropriate for Clover a couple years ago.
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One of the things about owning your own restaurants is that you can take suggestions or not. It's your choice. If something crashes and burns, at least it's your own decision. As an employee, you do your best to just make suggestions and use your experience to guide the team.
Did you always want to be a chef?
Well, I always liked cooking and eating. I grew up in Wyoming, and then Kansas after that, and both of my grandmothers had big gardens and preserves and that kind of thing. My grandma raised chickens. I grew up around pies and really good, Midwestern-type cooking.
In college, I was a music major at Kansas State, playing the trombone, and I was positive that I was going to be playing with the Berlin Philharmonic at this point in my life. I was studying music. I was taking German lessons.
I was working in restaurants, just for a job. By the end of college, I was walking around with Harold McGee's 'On Food and Cooking' under my arm. Wherever I went, I had some kind of food book under my arm.
The first restaurant I worked at, a burger place called Vista Drive-In, I got in trouble for trying to tweak how we plated the burger. They're like: 'Stop messing with it!' I enjoyed the tactile and creative part of it as much as you could.
My second job was actually for a group who were all from Los Angeles, and a couple had worked for Wolfgang Puck. They'd all run track at Kansas State and then decided they liked the town, so they opened a place called Lucky Brewgrille. There was a wood-burning pizza oven, which was unheard of back then.
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After college, I packed my Subaru and drove from Manhattan, Kan., out to Essex Junction, Vt., to attend the New England Culinary Institute. I did a straight 24-hour drive and took a wrong turn at the end of the night and ended up on the wrong side of Lake Champlain. I took a beautiful ferry ride across in the morning to Burlington.
You had your own space in Cambridge. You were in Concord for a little bit. What led you to close those spots, and what makes you want to reopen your own restaurant?
Concord just didn't work. I'll chalk that up to another part of my education. It wasn't going to be worth being there, money-wise.
I planned on closing Bondir in Cambridge pre-pandemic. I was doing more and more baking out of Cambridge and selling to different cafés and markets and things like that, kind of wholesale. At the same time, Cambridge had evolved over the years to eventually being only a tasting menu. And that was really fun, but I also missed more bistro-type cooking: informal, larger-format-type cooking that Cambridge was too small to do.
I was looking at different ideas for finding a larger space, where we could have maybe a couple separate rooms to continue doing the tasting menu for the crowd who liked that and expand the bakery operation. Then the pandemic hit, and it was a scramble to stay in business.
During the pandemic, bakery sales certainly helped the business survive, because we were able to expand on that to the point that I actually had to buy new equipment just to be able to produce the volume that we were producing. But it further reinforced the idea that we were just maxing out the physical space.
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I closed to spend time looking for a space, work for some other people, and see what I could learn. It's just been a lot more difficult to get a space where all the parameters work out than I thought it would be, because rents are higher than in 2010. Build-out costs are so much more expensive. It will [happen] eventually.
A plate of Scituate Scallops from Bondir in 2011.
Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff
How has Cambridge changed since you first opened your restaurant versus now?
It seems like there's hardly any independent people like me — just a person running their place. It seems really hard to find outside of a bull market situation. Bondir, for example, had 28 seats. We could probably push it to 35 if we really stretched our seating allowance and hoped the inspectors didn't come by. But it was a small restaurant. You could run it very efficiently. If it was slow and there's a pandemic, you could easily shrink it down, and you didn't have to fire anybody. If it's busy, it's only 35 seats.
Ultimately, Bondir was two people. We started off with seven when we first opened, and things were just cranking. We discovered that there was a sweet spot where we could really do half the sales and make the same profit. Because we could do it with fewer people, we could do it more efficiently. I like the small restaurant idea. To me, it works and makes sense business-wise.
What about the taste of customers? What do people want these days?
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Another reason I wanted to get back out in the world and work for some people was just simply to see what people were ordering and what people were interested in. That was my problem with opening in Concord. I didn't know those people. I knew the Bondir people.
When I was in the developmental phase of my career at fine-dining restaurants, people were interested in a bigger variety of things, maybe; I haven't gotten to travel in a few years.
There seems to be less interest in actually seeking out something or being excited by something that's unfamiliar: even old-school dishes, like veal or lamb sweetbreads.
Are you going to put sweetbreads on your menu?
When it's mine? Yes, 100 percent. I'd love to have one at Lou's eventually. I see Lou's like when I started at Beacon Hill Bistro: Go in and start building from zero and start forming a relationship. See who the people are that come in. See what they like. Let them get to know me. See what I'm like, and you sort of start that conversation, and you learn who's interested in different things. Slowly, you can grow the menu and expand and slowly see what excites them or what pisses them off. I think it's more about building a relationship at this point.
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Tell me about Lou's. What are you serving?
The new owners really made a beautiful space. It's a cool, old-school, clubby-type setting, that old dinner-and-a-show-type thing where you might go hear Sinatra singing and you're having a martini and a steak or whatever. Or not a steak. Anyway, I wrote down pages of ideas around food from that era and that style of dining.
Then, I took out the edit pen and figured out how to lighten it up. Harvard Square has students, tourists, people who actually live here. Those are three very different groups, and we want to be a place that welcomes everyone in and has something for them — a reason for them to come in and a reason for them to come back, hopefully, more importantly.
I wanted the menu to reflect all the different people and all the different ways they might use the space as a place in their community. For people visiting, I wanted to be sure that if they were just dropped here and saw the menu, it would give them an experience of actually being in Cambridge in August. The ingredients are of the season. The ingredients are from here. I don't want it to be the same kind of menu you'd have at the airport. I wanted it to be something that actually has context for where we are and when we are. It's fresh and seasonal and, I think, classic American cooking.
How has Harvard Square changed over the years?
It's kind of like Central Square, where I live. The character has changed a lot over the last 20-some years, but also, you're less likely to get stabbed in an alley and that kind of thing. It's good and bad.
There's a Citizens Bank Café or something like that. You've got that kind of thing, versus your Joanne Chang bakery. I've been hearing the same thing about Harvard Square for 20 years, where it's like, 'Oh, it's losing its character.' I wouldn't say that the argument is different now. There are still a few small, weird places, but there are fewer of them, I think. Everything changes. That's life in general. You adapt or move to Kansas or something.
Where do you eat when you're not working?
I've been to Saigon Babylon a couple times recently. It's really fun. I think those guys are amazing. I go to the Plough and Stars a lot. I just love it, and I've been going there as long as I've lived here. Something draws me to it.
What's your go-to order?
The gumbo and a Guinness. If we're going out for a nice dinner, we love going to Spoke or Pammy's. Those are good examples of independent operators who are doing creative things, and I'm super happy to see that they're very busy. But those are the type of places it's harder to find — or maybe there are the same number of creative restaurants as there always has been, but there are just a lot more restaurants in general. That's probably actually what's happening. There are the same number of good restaurants; it's just that there are a lot more restaurants than there used to be.
What restaurants that no longer exist do you really miss?
Oh, man. No. 9 Park back in the old days was incredible. Clio was a lot of fun, just because [Ken Oringer] was doing his very best to push and be creative in a fine-dining format. Hamersley's was such an inspiration, just because you could see [Gordon Hamersley] there every night of the week, working, making sure things were like they should be. It was such a classic Boston restaurant.
I went to Biba so many times when I first moved to Boston. I was a young cook and it blew me away, just the ideas, the feeling of the room, and the different foods [Lydia Shire] would do. Some were elegant, some were funny — just the names, the words she used, the ingredients, and even the service aspect.
The maître d' had a huge impact on me. I remember going in, I was a kid, in a suit that I bought Buck a Pound or something. I walk up the stairs in the dining room, and the maître d''s like, 'So glad you're here!' The idea of saying that to someone in a way that sounds like you actually mean it made a big impact on what I thought you could do with a restaurant: It's simply to make somebody feel really good.
The bar space at Eastern Standard on Oct. 22, 2023.
Nathan Klima for The Boston Globe
What is your take on the new Eastern Standard? Can it recapture the old magic?
It's hard to open a restaurant. It's really hard to open a classic restaurant. Garrett [Harker] is kind of like Gordon Hamersley, where Garrett's there every night, working his ass off. I don't even understand it sometimes, watching him running plates. You own it! You have people to do it.
Like I said with Harvard Square, things change, and you've got to change and adapt, and that's how you continue to grow. Everybody's going to miss the room and the original Eastern Standard that blew everybody away and was such a thing. The new Eastern Standard's got incredible chefs, an incredible bar program. They're really killing it, and they built it out in such a way. It's a beautiful kitchen. It's a beautiful production space. The original Eastern Standard wasn't necessarily built to actually be busy.
I think they're fighting nostalgia, because people went to the old Eastern Standard for so many years, and it's like, oh, man, this place is amazing. The new one only has 14-foot ceilings instead of 30. Sorry, but what are you going to do? You've got to do your best. They take amazing care of people. They're a great restaurant, and even if they did have to change spaces, it's still a great restaurant.
What do you do when you're not working?
I like to cycle. I like to read. I like to work on my business plan. My girlfriend just moved in, so we've been spending a lot of time just sort of moving two adults' worth of furniture around the apartment.
What would you eat for your last meal?
Probably a whole rhubarb pie.
Interview was edited and condensed.
Kara Baskin can be reached at