Lydia Shire Takes Over the Bar Enza Kitchen in Cambridge
The culinary icon will oversee the Charles Hotel’s Italian restaurant while still running Scampo on Beacon Hill, too.
Lydia Shire, photographed in 2021. / Courtesy photo
Fans of chef and restaurateur Lydia Shire, a matriarch of Boston’s dining scene, can now catch her on both sides of the river. While she’s continuing in her longtime role as chef and co-owner at Scampo inside Beacon Hill’s Liberty Hotel, she’s also joining the team at Italian restaurant Bar Enza inside Cambridge’s Charles Hotel as culinary director.
She’ll “continue to elevate the Bar Enza experience,” per a press release, “oversee[ing] menu additions and put[ting] her signature cooking techniques on it.” No word yet on exactly what that might look like on the menu, but Shire makes a mean lobster pizza—and is a skilled butcher, too. The powerhouse chef has been in the industry since the 1970s, famously co-owned the historic downtown restaurant Locke-Ober in the early aughts, and has mentored countless young chefs over the years.
One of those mentees? Jody Adams, now an iconic Boston chef and restaurateur in her own right. Adams ran Italian restaurant Rialto for nearly two decades—in the space that Bar Enza now inhabits. That Charles Hotel space has stayed with Italian cuisine ever since. After Rialto’s 2016 closure, the Giulia team operated Benedetto in the location for several years but closed during the pandemic. Bar Enza opened in 2021, a collaboration between the Charles Hotel and Lyons Group (which oversees Scampo as well as Sonsie, Rochambeau, and more), with chef Mark Ladner running the kitchen. (The Belmont native rose to culinary stardom in New York City at Del Posto before returning to Boston; these days, he’s back in New York.) Then, Tony Susi—a longtime Boston chef with a penchant for pasta—led Bar Enza for a couple years. And now, it’s Shire’s turn.
In early 2023, Shire was planning a Seaport restaurant at the under-development Seaport Science Center on Congress Street. There have been no updates since the initial announcement, but several people with knowledge of the project have told Boston that it’s on hold for now. With her focus trained on just Scampo and Bar Enza for the moment, we’re excited to see what Shire continues to bring to the table in the sixth decade of her impressive career.
Bar Enza. / Photo by Maria DeNapoli
1 Bennett St. (Charles Hotel), Harvard Square, Cambridge, 617-661-5050, bar-enza.com.
