Bissonnette and Oringer Are Planning a Cambridge Restaurant Called Little Donkey

Jamie Bissonnette and Ken Oringer are planning a restaurant called Little Donkey for 505 Massachusetts Ave. in Central Square (across from Phoenix Landing), licensing documents reveal. They're seeking to transfer the full liquor license from Takemura, a Japanese restaurant in Harvard Square, and they're requesting permission to operate between the hours of 8 a.m. and 1 a.m. Sunday through Wednesday and 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. Thursday through Saturday.

If all goes as planned, Little Donkey could seat 60 in the main dining area, 16 at the bar, and 34 in an additional dining area by the bar, as well as 46 on a patio. Bissonnette and Oringer will go before the licensing board on Tuesday, September 8.

The duo now splits time between Boston (Toro, Coppa) and New York City, where there's another location of Toro. Earlier this summer, Oringer told Eater that the two are "always entertaining and looking at things [with regards to possible new restaurants], and you never know."

"We're friends with a lot of developers and realtors, and because we're in Boston, we want to always see what's going on," Bissonnette said at the time. "Whenever there is a new project, somebody might say, 'Hey, come look at this; what do you think we should do?' If we're down that way we might go meet a friend and walk through a construction site that might be a restaurant and say, 'Yeah, this is really cool.'"

"That's how we dream," Oringer said. "We'll walk through a space and say, 'Dude, we got to open up a Sri Lankan momo concept in that one,' or whatever. Then we get excited, we look at spaces, and that's how ideas come to us sometimes too. We'll just feel something sometimes in a space."

No word yet on what they're feeling about this Central Square space, although the name suggests that it probably won't be a Sri Lankan momo concept this time.