two men standing in restaurant
Chefs Wyatt Evans and Ian Gray
Planning to still open this year, Jester Concept's version of the legendary Butcher & the Boar will open in the Basset Creek building soon with a familiar name helming the kitchen.
Chef Ian Gray has been named as Chef de Cuisine of the forthcoming spot.
I met up with Gray and Wyatt Evans, the Culinary Director of Jester, at PS Steak to chat about the new gig. I think I hadn't seen Gray since he helped launch Kieran's Kitchen (which Dara loooooved), but of course I remember his own gastropub, The Gray House on Lyndale, and his food truck the Curious Goat, both long gone.
Gray recently had a third kid and decided it was time to get back in the game. "After getting Kieran's through COVID for a few months, I decided to take a little time," Gray told me. "I worked out at Riverbend Farms for about a month helping Greg Reynolds. He'll put you to work. Then I worked with Wild Minds on their food truck for the brewery before getting on board with Danny del Prado. My first day with Martina was basically the day they fully opened back up. But this June I started talking with Wyatt and having done all this smoking with the Curious Goat, I was really interested in this project. So here I am."
What's it going to be like trying to bring back B&TB, a place and a menu with a lot of history? "Clearly we'll be pulling back those greatest hits, you know, the long rib, a selection of the sausages, some of the sides. Certainly trying to honor those recipes, but I'd love to promote more salads, some new sides doing more with local food and changing it up a little bit instead of just kind of relying on the beer battered fries."
Evans added, "We understand that we're reviving and reinvesting in a brand that already existed. So there's a lot that is going to pull weight for that. Things that Ian mentioned, bringing back things that we fondly remember like the double cut Berkshire shop or the wood grill oysters and parmesan butter, because there's a sense of nostalgia and memory involved in that. People are going to come to Butcher because they remember having a good time, so there's an obligation for us to not just satisfy those memories, but exceed those expectations. And there's also a portion of it where we want it to be a Jester concepts restaurant, right? Ian and I have been talking about the importance of changing things seasonally, not full menu refreshes, but maybe we'll put some new entrees on there that have some different seasonal influences. And a lot is going to be dictated to by what the guests are responding to you know, people are eating differently than they were two three years ago."
The space is fully under construction, and the team is busy building out the beer garden in front which will face the new green space created from the former parking lot. The team has big shoes to fill, and they'll have to come out swinging to differentiate this Butcher & the Boar from the Butcher's Tale version which opened in the original location. Stay tuned!
