The former CEO of Legal Sea Foods has returned to the restaurant industry with a counter-service concept at Boston’s airport.
Roger’s Fish Co. opened Tuesday in Terminal A at Logan International. It’s the first restaurant from Roger Berkowitz since he sold Legal in 2020 after 30 years of leading the chain. His father, George, opened the first location in 1950 in Boston.
Berkowitz said the period following the sale was like a sabbatical. It gave him a chance to step back, survey the landscape and decide what he wanted to do next.
The first thing he did was launch an ecommerce site that ships seafood nationwide, also called Roger’s Fish Co., and appoint himself head fishmonger. That spawned a retail line of chowders sold in grocery stores under the same name.
All the while he was mulling over another restaurant. And as he looked at the full-service market, his home for many years, he saw operators struggling to make the economics work.
“People all over were starting to compromise quality because they weren't willing to change their model,” he said. “So that became sort of a challenge to me to try and figure it out.”
He believes he has done that with Roger’s, where he says the food is of full-service quality, but delivered at a reasonable price, and quickly, because its core clientele has a plane to catch.
The menu is made up of seafood staples, including fish and chips, lobster rolls, crab cakes and Roger’s Double Clam Chowder, the top-selling item on the ecommerce site.
A bowl of chowder is $13.95, fish and chips are $23.95, and a lobster roll is $35.95. And customers can get the full New England Experience—a lobster roll, cup of chowder and fries—for $39.95.
Roger’s will be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and will also serve beer, wine and frozen cocktails, which work well in the restaurant’s limited footprint of 700 square feet. Customers order at a counter and can grab a table in the terminal’s annex.
And while debuting a new restaurant in an airport may seem counterintuitive, it was part of the plan for Roger's from the get-go.
Berkowitz has had a lot of success in airports. Legal Sea Foods opened its first airport location, also at Logan, in 1994. It would go on to open three more there and two others in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
“About six months into [the first location], I thought, ‘This is interesting, because people who travel in airports generally have discretionary income, and they have discernible pallets,’" Berkowitz said. "So in many ways, it was the ideal customer for me to go after.”
He also learned that airport consumers may be on the go, but they’re anything but transient. People who fly regularly become loyal customers, he said.
And airports are great for brand-building. “You have so many different people traveling and seeing your location,” he said. “Any given location at the airport is going to get 2 million eyeballs on it in the course of a year.”
In that sense, Roger’s Fish Co. will double as a big billboard for its sister ecommerce and retail businesses.
As for whether the restaurant may expand to other airports or even beyond, Berkowitz said he doesn’t want to get ahead of himself, but in the back of his mind, the answer is yes. Eventually.
“I really am most interested in refining one and making one a top-notch operation,” he said. “And then we'll take a look at other opportunities.”
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