Just off the corner of Mass Ave on Shepard Street, two consecutive French restaurants, Chez Jean and later Chez Henri, flourished for over fifty years.
View of Chez Jean in the 1970s (CHC Collection)
In 1958, Jean-Baptiste Lagouarde, who had been a chef in France, opened his restaurant, Chez Jean, with his wife Madeline. A local newspaper article described the cuisine as “classic French, emphasizing meat and bearnaise sauce,” and the restaurant’s atmosphere as “anything but pretentious. The mix of rough stucco walls and country style paneling, and the long red vinyl benches give the place an air of a bistro in the countryside.” The article went on to praise the duck special consisting of moist slices of duck layered over a bed of stuffing with the sauce made from duck livers on top.
Getting ready for Chez Henri (Lisa O’Connell)
Lagouarde passed away in 1991, and his family continued the restaurant until 1994. Paul O’Connell bought the space and opened Chez Henri, a French restaurant with a Cuban flair. Alongside classic French dishes such as frogs’ legs, menu items included grilled steak with sofrito bordelaise and roasted chicken with lime, achiote, and yuca frita. The “Chez Henri Cuban Sandwich” became a customer favorite. The interior was reworked with brightly colored light fixtures in a crimson and olive dining room. Chez Henri won acclaim over the years, often cited as one of the area’s best restaurants.
View of Chez Henri at night (Lisa O’Connell)Menu from Chez Henri (CHC Collection)Chez Henri appeared in one of Robert B. Parker’s popular Spenser mysteries (Lisa O’Connell)
In 2013, O’Connell closed the restaurant. The space reopened in 2015 as Shepard, but closed a couple years later. The space is now occupied by a restaurant called Luce.
Sources
Cambridge Chronicle, January 7, 1960; April 7, 1988; July 25, 1996.
In honor of June as Candy Month, we look at one of Cambridge’s largest chocolate makers from the early to mid twentieth century. Candy making was a major industry in Cambridge, with over 66 confectionery manufacturers listed in the city directory at its peak in 1946.
View of 400 Main Street in the 1980s
Fred L. Daggett first started his company as a small candy store in Chelsea in 1891. By 1921 he was overseeing manufacturing in seven different buildings throughout the city. In 1925, in order to concentrate production and distribution and to secure more manufacturing area, Daggett built his Cambridge plant at 40 and 50 Ames Street and 400 Main Street. Completed by 1928, the buildings were designed by architect/engineer Mark Linenthal who would later specialize in racetrack and stadium architecture.
Daggett Chocolates acquired other companies, resulting in the production of more than 40 brands of chocolates. By 1930, Daggett employed over 400 people and produced 24,000 boxes of chocolate-coated candies a day. The company sold brands including Daggett, Page & Shaw, Durand, Lowney’s, and Apollo. Daggett not only produced candy, but also the boxes the candy came in. The factory had three separate unions: one for the confectionery workers, one for the box makers, and one for the printers.
The company also had a special fruit department. Daggett owned and operated a strawberry plant in Virginia where strawberries were preserved in sugar to make fillings for their chocolates. Because of this venture, Daggett also had an impact on ice cream and soda fountain business in the area. They supplied thousands of gallons of syrups and crushed fruits to druggists and ice cream manufacturers.
View from corner of Main and Ames Streets
Fred L. Daggett died in 1958. The company continued for only a few more years. In 1961, the company sold the recipes to New England Confectionery Company (NECCO), and sold the buildings to MIT.
Sources:
Cambridge Chronicle, March 27, 1926; October 23, 1958
Joyce Chen (1917-1994) was born on September 12, 1917 in Beijing, China. Born into a wealthy family, she discovered her passion for cooking at a very early age. Her father, a railroad administrator and city executive, hired a family chef that cooked all of their meals. Chen learned about Chinese cuisine simply by watching their chef and other family members cook in their home kitchen. During the Chinese Communist Revolution, Chen and her family moved to the United States. Along with her husband Thomas Chen and their two children Henry and Helen, the family left Shanghai, China in 1949 and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Joyce Chen, image courtesy of Joycechenfoods.com.
While living near Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she frequently met Chinese students that missed the food they’d grown up with. Chen’s children attended Buckingham School and she would often cook food to be served at school events. Her meals quickly became popular among college students and the families at the Buckingham School. This inspired Chen to open her first restaurant in 1958, called “Joyce Chen Restaurant.” At this restaurant, she served both Chinese and American dishes to encourage customers to try new foods. She often served “buffet-style” meals, to allow customers to try samples of everything. She created a menu with both Chinese and English translations of her food and numbered the menu items for easier communication in her restaurants. This made it easier for customers who spoke different languages to order at her restaurant.
Joyce Chen, image courtesy of Joycechenfoods.comJoyce Chen’s first restaurant at 617 Concord Avenue in Cambridge. Courtesy of Joycechenfoods.com
In 1967, Chen opened her second restaurant called “The Joyce Chen Small Eating Place.” That same year, Chen starred in Joyce Chen Cooks, her own cooking show on PBS that aired worldwide. This twenty-six-episode broadcast was filmed in the same studio as famous chef Julia Child’s show, and the two became good friends. Her business empire expanded, and two larger restaurants were built in the Boston area with an architecturally unique restaurant at 390 Rindge Avenue.
Circa 1974 image of Joyce Chen’s Restaurant. Photo from CHC Collections.
The restaurant, believed to have been designed by Allan Ahaknian, was built in 1974 and employed architecture not typical for Cambridge. Partially hidden behind a tall wooden fence to screen noise from the heavily trafficked Rindge Avenue, the structure featured minimal fenestration on the sides but employed large skylights to flood the interior with natural light. The Contemporary/Shed style restaurant was a common stomping ground for residents of Cambridge and beyond. The restaurant was purchased by Just-A-Start and was converted to a child-care facility in 1999. The remainder of the lot was filled with townhomes for moderate-income, first-time homebuyers. In 2005, the structure was demolished for eight additional units of affordable condominium units. As it was not yet 50+ years old, it did not qualify for protection under the Demolition Delay Ordinance.
Circa 1984 image of Joyce Chen’s Restaurant at 390 Rindge Avenue. Image from CHC Collections.
1978 Aerial Image of 390 Rindge Ave.
2018 Aerial image of 390 Rindge Ave. Note: the building has been demolished and replaced with housing.
While her restaurants are all now closed, the impressions of Joyce Chen’s legacy can be seen in almost every Chinese-American restaurant in the country today and in the enduring popularity of “Peking ravioli.” Also, her cookbooks and branded cooking utensils can be found in kitchens all over the world.
Images and some information on Joyce Chen courtesy of joycechenfoods.com
The CHC is proud to present a new GIS Story Map created by our own Sarah Burks, Preservation Planner, available here! This fun Story Map focuses on the long-gone lunch carts and dining cars in Cambridge.
“From the earliest horse-drawn lunch carts to the streamlined stainless steel cars, diners were once plentiful in Cambridge. But where did they all go? Some diners moved into brick and mortar locations and others relocated to other towns. The recent Food Truck trend appears to be a revival of the portable dining car, but they don’t offer the seating and table service of yesterday.”
Take a tour of Cambridge diner photos and share your diner memories with us at histcomm@cambridgema.gov. Have you been to any of these diners?
