OMG, the sky is falling again!

Recently in Boston, foodies got news that several high-end restaurants including some long-time fixtures/icons were closing their doors this month.
Sure enough, with the news that the first, Aujourd’hui in the Four Seasons Hotel would close its late this month with the space to hence be used for private privates, many began wailing that the sky was falling.
The news was hardly old when word came from high-end operators Christopher Myers, Michael Schlow and Esti Parsons that their seafood concept, Great Bay, in the Hotel Commonwealth would also shutter its doors.
Immediately came more twittering – literally and figuratively – and wailing that the restaurant had ‘failed.’
And just about then, Chris Douglass’s South End “gem,” as Zagat reviewers dubbed it, a dining landmark for more than 30 years, also put out the word of its impending closing.
Well, those who consider themselves in the know about food, restaurants, etc. began ‘kvelling’ even louder. The party was over. The industry was going to hell. OMG!
News of this industry’s death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, is, happily, greatly exaggerated.
Chatting with Michael Schlow recently, he observed that Great Bay was a restaurant that had run its course. The lease was up and the time for closing it was right. Similarly, Chris Douglass, whom we asked the other night whether he planned something new once Icarus closed, declared that while his time will be occupied with his other two, more moderately priced restaurants, “when one door closes, another often opens.”
The foodies forget or fail to remember that nothing stays the same. Concepts come, are beloved, but have their lifespans. They can’t outlive their time. Things change! It’s not, as one chef we know likes to put it, “rocket science.”
Restaurants are children of their times, responding to the needs and demands of their diners. Today’s times, and diners, are looking for value, for good food and welcoming, professional service, at prices that don’t require a bank loan for a daily trip.
Cities such as Boston are seeing not just the closings of those operations whose time has come – and gone – but also the openings of new restaurants. Look no farther than the city’s vibrant dining scene in the South End where a Senegalese woman, Marie-Claude Mendy, has opened the city’s first restaurant serving the cuisine of that faraway land and introducing new flavors of western Africa at prices no steeper than the high teens.
The time has come to realize that Chicken Little was wrong! The sky is not falling. It’s just a brand new day.