Good french fries make good neighbors

Restaurants give communities a sense of togetherness

Diners from the Bibleway Christian Church dig in at Poppa B's. (Wiqan Ang for the Boston Globe/File)

On an icy Thursday night, the people of Ashmont are out. Old and young, black and white, gay and straight, the Dorchester neighborhood's residents have gathered for upscale comfort food and maybe a Dot-tini or two at Ashmont Grill. "How's school?" a bartender asks a regular as she mixes her drink. Friends spot each other and wave from tables across the room. Two men exchange endearments with the hostess as they leave: "Bye, honey!" "Bye, love!"

This weeknight bustle is notable, with restaurants across the city suffering in the recession. But people still need places to gather. Until owner and neighborhood resident Chris Douglass opened Ashmont Grill a few years back, there weren't many in this area. Locals went elsewhere; now the grill draws people from elsewhere here.

Some help revitalize their neighborhoods by joining committees, organizing fund-raisers, volunteering. Others do so - by happenstance or design - by opening restaurants.

"I've lived here for 20 years, for the first five or six in an isolated way, commuting into the city and not really being involved," says Douglass, who recently put his South End restaurant, Icarus, on the market. "As I got to know more of the people, they were all clamoring for a restaurant. It's been a really positive thing for me as a restaurant owner to be here, and for the community."

"Restaurants are really good for business districts," says Evelyn Friedman, chief of housing and director of the department of neighborhood development for the City of Boston. The city helps local eateries open and expand through its Neighborhood Restaurant Initiative, which has worked with Ashmont Grill, Townsend's in Hyde Park, Poppa B's on the Dorchester-Mattapan line, and others.

"They stay open later and enliven the street at night," she says. "They attract positive activity. They're neighborly, in the sense that people from the neighborhood go. They're a good meeting place."

That's one reason Hyde Park residents Michael and Rosaleen Tallon opened Townsend's: to give friends and neighbors a place to go. When they moved to the neighborhood in 1995, Michael Tallon says, "there was nothing here."

The couple operated the Kendall Cafe, a live music venue and restaurant in Cambridge. "We witnessed how the cinema in Kendall Square completely revamped that square nearly overnight," he says. They felt Hyde Park had similar potential, with two historic theaters, the Everett and French's Opera House, which is home to performing arts center Riverside Theatre Works.

They were also inspired by the example of nearby Roslindale: "Prior to Gusto opening, prior to Delfino, prior to Birch Street Bistro, there was nothing except Chinese restaurants. We saw how things changed with the advent of restaurants." Friends in Hyde Park would head there or to Jamaica Plain to eat. "They kind of started the thought process of 'Why don't we do it, why don't we open a restaurant here?' "

Townsend's, a gastropub with Irish culinary leanings and a stone fireplace, has been open since May. Indeed, most of the customers live in the community or along the Milton border. They usually don't make reservations; they just show up. "There's always someone here they know," Tallon says. "Our friend [real estate agent] Pat Tierney likes to call Townsend's Hyde Park's Cheers."

Poppa B's, a soul food restaurant owned by Boyce Slayman Jr., has also become a hub for the neighborhood. On Blue Hill Avenue, it's located near many churches. "Clergy meet here," he says. "Parishioners. Young black professionals. We also have politicians who meet on occasion. People met here to talk about what was going on with Dianne Wilkerson and Chuck Turner" when the two politicians were accused of accepting bribes.

It makes sense that Slayman would wind up at the center of his neighborhood. His father is local community activist and political operative Boyce Slayman Sr. (who was also Wilkerson's campaign manager).

"Growing up, I do recall him making me a volunteer," Slayman says. "I helped out with a lot of campaigns. The social aspect, the social entrepreneurship of it, I think helped shaped my approach" to business.

He went South for school, to Morehouse, but came back to be near his family and his community. "Opening a restaurant in my community, I felt I was filling a void," he says. "It's something I thought was needed in this area. I grew up not too far from where I operate a business now."

Slayman speaks by cellphone from a salon near his house, where he is learning to braid his daughter's hair. He shops at the hardware store up the street. The local businesses support one another, he says. "We try to. We have to. We know how hard it is to run a business in our own community," he says.

Poppa B's is coming up on its third anniversary. Keeping it going is difficult in this economy, but he's committed. "If I were to close tomorrow," he says, "somebody would miss it."

Neighborhoods need restaurants. And if one is good, two is better. "More than a single restaurant, what really turns a neighborhood around are clusters of restaurants, even if it's just a handful," says Aseem Inam, a visiting lecturer at MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. "The point is to create a destination. A restaurant almost always does better if others are nearby. It creates that foot traffic. Studies have shown most people like to be where there are other people. Critical mass is so important psychologically."

Douglass opened a second Ashmont restaurant, Tavolo, last August. The pizza and pasta place hasn't taken off in quite the way Ashmont Grill did, he says, but it has a core group of regulars. And it creates that crucial foot traffic. "One thing for sure is that at night the streets feel safer because there's a lot of activity. There are a lot more eyes on the street coming and going."

The Tallons, too, have opened a second spot in their neighborhood: TC's Coffeehouse, just a few doors down from Townsend's. "Who doesn't want to come down to the village, have coffee, and do some shopping, then maybe a couple of nights later come back and have dinner?" Michael Tallon says. "We have the Riverside Theatre Works, we have [the O'Dwyer] Irish dance school. These things bring people into the village rather than just using it as a way station to commute from or drive through."

Tallon believes Hyde Park can become the kind of destination Inam speaks of, and that business owners like him and Rosaleen can have a hand in changing their neighborhoods for the better.

"I would never believe we are the next coming of the savior and we're going to save Hyde Park ourselves," he says. "We just want to be part of the groundswell bringing it back to what it was."

Devra First can be reached at dfirst@globe.com.