You're always going to have someone who likes one restaurant over another. You're always going to have your detractors. How have the reviews been? Over the year I'd say that the reviews have been really strong. It should be that we're replacing it because it's a better dish and ultimately the guest will have a better experience.
It shouldn't be that we're replacing it for replacement's sake, or change's sake.
If we're going to replace a dish, we have to be replacing it with something that's better. We're pretty rigorous about how a dish gets on the menu. How did the menu change over the year? There's 53 dishes on the menu, some of them just weren't popular and they were taken off and other ones just no longer fit or a product wasn't available, and we continue to try to develop dishes as the season gets on. I will say we had this one night early on where I thought "are we doing something wrong?" Because it seemed like it was taking us forever to get drinks out of the service bar, and then when we went to do the report we realized we had made 600 margaritas that night, so I really couldn't fault them for being slow. How was the opening? The opening couldn't have gone better. I like to run the restaurants and cook in the restaurants, building them is the hard part. Because it's difficult and it's not what I do for a living. Often with construction you can pull your hair out. The project came in on budget and on time, which is always nice. We thought that if we left the operational zones in basically the same spot that we would save some money over the long run, but the reality was that everything was so old that we had to do all new stuff. How was the build? The space was antiquated: that restaurant had been there for 20 years. There we're really strict about the Italian dishes and our job is to perfectly recreate what we learned in Italy without interfering too much. As a counterexample, the complete opposite is at Via Matta. When you got to Mexico and you'll see tacos de lengua or tacos de cabeza that are made out of the entire braised head of a cow: we don't have anything like that. How so? So nothing at Tico attempts to be authentic. Also I wanted to take some of the techniques and flavor profiles that I had learned in visiting these countries and spin them in a different way than they'd done before. It just makes us happy and it sort of balances the end of the day. Your palate's tired after you taste food all day long, and most chefs will tell you what they really want is a cold beer or a stiff drink and acid, salt and chilies. Why this kind of food? As a chef, what I'm usually looking for especially after work is a nice gentle balance of acid, salt, and chilies. They were able to see the images, smell it, hear the music and taste the food, and it made the design process really fun for everybody and really smooth and easy.
#Tico boston ma portable
It had the images posted around the conference room, I had a portable iPod player with samples of the music I wanted to play in the restaurant, and I brought four portable burners and cooked everybody dinner with food that I thought would be emblematic of what we would be serving in this restaurant. What about the design? I had all of these images that I had pulled over the years, and we went into our architect's office. When the property that was the Cottonwood Cafe became available I happened to be introduced to the gentleman who does the leasing by a mutual friend, and pretty quickly the deal was struck and we realized it was perfect. This was a restaurant that I sort of had in my imagination that was based on trips that I taken throughout my lifetime, to places like Spain and Mexico and South America. How did this project come together? Tico was something that I was looking to do for quite some time. Here's the story of Tico's first year as told by Michael: Esquire included Tico on its list of the Best New Restaurants in 2011, calling the Back Bay establishment "a big room of mismatched tables and a bar stocked with 124 different tequilas." In April, Schlow plans to add Happy's Bar and Kitchen to the mix. This time last year, Michael Schlow added Tico to his roster of restaurants, which already included Radius, Alta Strada and Via Matta.
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