end of Boston Market

[calimac]

Passing regrets at the disappearance - at least in many areas of the US, and possibly nationwide - of the fast-casual restaurant chain Boston Market, once a regular custom of mine.

I discovered Boston Chicken, as it was known then, in 1994 when I attended Readercon in Worcester, Massachusetts. There were few places to eat in Worcester, at least that I could find, but just across the city line was an outlet of Boston Chicken, which kept me fed during the convention.

Soon afterwards, its outlets began to appear out here in California: this was one of three times that a chicken chain from elsewhere has followed me home. The first was El Pollo Loco from L.A.; the third was Popeyes, which I found in Florida. El Pollo Loco grills its chicken; Popeyes is fried; but Boston Market was rotisserie. It is the only chicken chain I've found that could consistently deliver tender breast meat. The chicken was always good, and the side dishes were palatable, but that's all they were good at. The sauces they'd occasionally concoct and offer to drape over the chicken never added anything except messiness, and their attempt to expand into ribs was a complete disaster. Just stick to the original chicken.

I went there often as the number of outlets expanded, until it became as ubiquitous as Popeyes is here today; but gradually the number of outlets decreased, and I only went when I was near one and needed a quick meal. Last weekend I found one closed with a lock fastening the door. A little research revealed that a new and fiscally incompetent owner had been failing to pay suppliers and even the rent, and swaths of the chain across the country had been closing down. Their web site claimed only three open outlets in the whole of the state; one was nearby, and I found it as closed as the rest, with a sheriff's confiscatory notice stuck to the door. Apparently they really had not been paying the rent.

So I guess it's gone, probably permanently.

Comments

[athenais]

Gosh, I believe I only ate at a Boston Market once when I was actually in Boston. I didn't know it'd expanded to California. Good rotisserie chicken is hard to find up on my end of the peninsula.

[calimac]

Good rotisserie chicken is hard to find, period. The stuff they sell at supermarkets is mostly pretty miserable.

But, ironically, your end of the Peninsula was a good place to go. One of the last surviving Boston Markets in the area - in fact the one I was dismayed to find locked up on Saturday - was on Gellert, off Hickey and just south of Serramonte.

[ethelmay]

I think I was at that Readercon. I worked at the American Antiquarian Society at the time and there was a Boston Chicken down the street.

[athenais]

Oh I missed it, I never think of eating up that way. It's not all that far from me, but it's not anyplace I normally go unless to Serramonte itself.

[calimac]

I think I found it by looking up locations on their web site after the one in my neighborhood closed. It was handy for popping off of 280 on drives up to the City when I couldn't take the time for a meal where I was going.

[calimac]

That was the Readercon where Le Guin was GoH, which is why I made the effort to attend.

I know the AAS. They photographed every book, pamphlet, and broadside published in the US between 1801 and 1819 (based on the Shaw & Shoemaker bibliography), most of which they had, and published them as a microcard set. I was part of the team at Stanford that catalogued all the individual items in the 1980s.

I think, however, that my Boston Chicken was just outside the city limits, probably in Shrewsbury. That's what I could find: Worcester itself seemed to be empty, at least the parts of it I explored.

[supergee]

We used to get meals at Boston Market, and we miss it.

[ethelmay]

I thought I remembered being at a Readercon while pregnant (I definitely went to two different Readercons in Worcester when I lived there), and that's the only possible one, but it was early July and the twins were born in late July - can I really have been that pregnant? But if that's the case I was not terribly active. Perhaps I only went to part of it. I might be conflating it with memories of a non-sf event I attended during my other pregnancy. I would have thought I would remember Ursula Le Guin, but I did see her in Seattle on another occasion and may have conflated those memories.

For some reason nobody could explain, those of us who worked at AAS tended not to use a "the" in front of AAS, though we did before the spelled-out version. (There is of course no real right or wrong about the matter.) I am a little peeved that such a silly detail sticks in my mind, and not things I should like to remember more.