Josh Ziskin: It’s a place supported by people that live in the area, by regular customers. It’s like ringing someone’s doorbell — it’s not appropriate these days to just stop in and hang out on someone’s couch. Instead, they come here. We have a great core of Brookline residents. They’ll come in at 10, after dinner somewhere else, or after a play, for dessert or a drink, and their servers recognize them and I recognize them. They can just have a bowl of pasta at the bar and watch the [open] kitchen. On a Tuesday, people just want to be comfortable.
Douglas Organ: It’s just a matter of accessibility, of an environment that makes you feel like you belong there, that doesn’t even have any airs about being a fancy place to come. Christine Didiuk: Well, people are getting away from formal dining during the week. They want to go where the staff knows what they like. Just to have someone say, “Here, you might like this,” or, “Give this a taste; this is for your palate.”
Did you set out to have a neighborhood place? If not, how did you start out?
CD: Yes. At that time in my life, I was younger, dating, hanging out with friends, working in the industry. I liked to go to a place and have the bartender know who I was, have the manager know who I was. I lived in South Boston and there were a couple of places like that.
So when we first opened, I hoped to have regulars [like me] who didn’t have time to cook and felt comfortable coming in a couple times a week. They could come in their gym clothes if they went to work out. They could bring their dogs. It was an easy niche, given the density of the condos in the South End. At that time the neighborhood was predominantly gay, and we were probably one of the only restaurants on Shawmut [Avenue]. So we had a lot of gay couples and singles — they’d come alone on Tuesday, then on Saturday bring a date.
DO: You always want to appeal to residents as much as you can, but that’s not as easy as it sounds. I wanted Arbor to be a neighborhood restaurant, but it turned into something quite different. What I actually saw happen was that locals would come to Arbor on a Friday or Saturday night, they would look around and they wouldn’t see their neighbors. They would see people from Newton and Wellesley and Brookline and Chestnut Hill. It created a situation where it wasn’t their restaurant. So they didn’t come in often, but more for a special occasion.
AC: I don’t think that was originally part of any plan. We set out to be a little more cutting edge. When I looked at this space eight years ago, when I was 25, there really wasn’t anything [high-end] yet. Bricco was the first to break into something different, beyond the mom-and-pop kind of cantina, so being a fine-dining restaurant was how we were able to establish our name solidly.
A lot of tourists come through here, so to become a destination for locals, that’s kind of tough. Especially with the older generation, which isn’t our target audience. You have three different clienteles here: the neighborhood people, the tourists, and the destination clientele.
