Boloco's Last Restaurant Gets Reprieve

Boloco, the Boston-born burrito chain, has won a short reprieve for its last restaurant: the location at 50 Congress St. downtown will stay open through at least Oct. 16 instead of closing on Sept. 25, founder and owner John Pepper told customers in an email reported by the Boston Business Journal on Sunday, Sept. 27.

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The building’s new owner granted the extra three weeks, according to the BBJ, and has encouraged the company to keep looking for a new home. “Nothing’s final,” Pepper wrote, saying the owner urged Boloco to “continue quietly working on” a new location.

Why Boloco’s 50 Congress St. Restaurant Was Closing

Boloco announced in July that its final restaurant would close because the building had been sold for conversion to apartments. Plans approved by the city’s Planning Board in May call for 169 residential units at 50 Congress St., 34 of them affordable, according to The Boston Globe. The plans include a ground-floor commercial space, potentially a restaurant or similar neighborhood-serving use.

Developer Patrick Mahoney told the Globe in July that Boloco’s lease was an “interim tenancy” structured around a previous developer’s plan for an office tower, that the conversion “requires the building empty,” and that leasing the new retail space is “a couple of years out.” When that time comes, he said, he wants “an independent local operator—coffee in the morning, somewhere to eat at night.”

From Regional Chain to a Single Downtown Counter

Pepper cofounded the chain as Under Wraps in 1997, with a first shop across from Berklee College of Music, and it later became Boloco, short for Boston Local Company, according to the Globe and Boston.com. At its height it had 22 locations, including some in Rhode Island, Maryland and Washington, D.C. It had shrunk to about eight restaurants by 2020, Boston.com reported, and Congress Street became the last one after Pepper sold the Hanover, N.H., store to new owners. Pepper bought the struggling chain back in 2015, the BBJ noted. The downtown store itself had already outlived one closing date: it was set to shut in 2023 before a last-minute lease renegotiation bought it three more years.

Our Take: What Boloco’s Reprieve Says About Downtown Boston

This section is analysis and opinion from The Boston Report.

Three extra weeks is not a rescue, but it is a useful signal. Boston needs its office-to-residential conversions to work—downtown has too much empty office space and too few homes—and the trade-offs are now visible at street level. A conversion can make a block busier at night, yet it can also push out the very local operators that make a neighborhood feel lived-in during the long construction gap. Distress in the downtown office market, from conversions like this one to the pending foreclosure auction at 100 Summer Street, is reshaping which businesses survive there.

The better outcome would be for Boloco to land somewhere nearby rather than disappear. Its customer base—office workers, students and downtown residents—is exactly who the city is trying to attract with conversions and new housing funding such as the Boston Housing Accelerator Fund. City Hall and landlords with empty ground-floor space have an interest in keeping homegrown brands in the core; a short-term pop-up or a smaller counter could bridge the years until spaces like 50 Congress are ready for retail again. For now, fans have until at least Oct. 16.

Sources

Boston Business Journal (bizjournals.com)
The Boston Globe (bostonglobe.com)
Boston.com (boston.com)

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Boloco Last Restaurant Gets Reprieve at 50 Congress St.