Legal Sea Foods Flagship Sets Sail
June 27, 2011
The biggest and newest restaurant in Boston packs three concepts into a 20,000 sq. ft. space, has 600 seats and a rooftop lounge and offers a catch-and-release trout pound on the main floor. You’d expect some edgy entrepreneurs would be the operators, but this is the flagship of Legal Sea Foods, a Boston institution.
Legal Sea Foods is a family-owned, midsized full-service seafood chain whose 31 operations stretch up and down the Atlantic seaboard from Boston, its home base, to Boca Raton. Its restaurants aren’t flashy, but are solid and steady, in the best sense of those terms. The company has few peers in the seafood segment.
Which is why it’s interesting to see its take on contemporary restaurant operations played out on a prime piece of real estate on Liberty Wharf in Boston’s Seaport District. Legal could have given a few minor tweaks to the proven format that has served the company and its guests so well in so many other locations. But it went in a different direction. Legal Harborside is built on a much bigger scale than other Legal Sea Foods Restaurant, and it definitely has a lot more flash.
Here’s how the company likes to describe it.