Today’s Restaurant Openings, a Fierce Southie Saga, and More Updates to Start the Day

Seafood Bowls and Cannoli

Two opening reminders for today:

• Legal Fish Bowl opens today inside of the Kendall Square Legal Sea Foods (355 Main St.) with fast-casual, customizable seafood bowls; check out the menu here. It’s open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. This location will serve as a test for the concept, and if it’s well-received, the company might eventually open standalone Legal Fish Bowls.
• North End classic Mike’s Pastry — which also has a fairly new location in Harvard Square — expands to Somerville’s Assembly Row today; find it on the ground floor of the Partners building and eat tons of cannoli. (It opened at 8 a.m., so you can go right now if you’d like. Somerville mayor Joe Curtatone will be there at 11:15 a.m. for a ribbon-cutting ceremony.)

A Southie Is Not a Person

Restaurateur Barbara Lynch has been profiled by just about every publication in the last few weeks thanks to the release of her memoir, Out of Line. One such profile appeared in the New York Times, causing a stir among Bostonians thanks to the second sentence, which originally referred to Lynch as “a fierce Southie, a local term for this neighborhood and the people who built it.” As local writer Luke O’Neil tweeted, “That’s...not a thing.” Globe reporter Dan Adams explained to Julia Moskin, the author of the Times piece, that “Southie” refers just to the neighborhood, not the people, but she doubled down: “The controversy rages on,” tweeted Moskin. “I asked B Lynch herself — she said 'f* yes I'm a Southie' and that was good enough for us.”

Not so, said Lynch to the Globe, via a spokesperson. “I didn’t use the term,” she said, “but if we did start calling ourselves ‘Southies,’ I’d be proud to be one.” Eventually, the Times story was edited (but still implies that Lynch used the term): “The chef is a fierce daughter of Southie, a nickname for this neighborhood (and, she said, an old local term for the people who built it that’s rarely, if ever, used today).” A phrase from later in the piece — “still curses like an old-school Southie” — was also changed; it now reads “still curses like a longshoreman, but without the Southie accent.”

As the Globe also notes, the Times once tried to call South Boston SoBo.

In other Lynch news, she is included in the just-released TIME list of the “100 most influential people in the world.”

The Not-So-Glamorous Life of the Chef-Owner

The Boston Globe’s Kara Baskin delves into how tough it can be for chef-owners to make a living. “So how do they do it,” she writes, “when the average chef-owner salary in Boston is roughly $80,000, say industry insiders — and when many new chef-owners don’t take a salary at all, despite working 80-hour weeks? And when restaurant rents can climb to $100-plus per square foot in prime locations?” Baskin talks to Commonwealth chef-owner Steve “Nookie” Postal, Jeff Fournier of the now-closed 51 Lincoln and Waban Kitchen, Bondir’s Jason Bond, and others about the realities, financial and beyond, of opening restaurants.

That’s Not Food

A man trying to evade his bar bill at Eastie’s Taco Mex ended up biting a police officer in the arm when the officer arrived to help convince the man pay, reports Universal Hub. Today, the restaurant has to go before the licensing board to discuss whether there’s anything the restaurant could have done to prevent the incident. A BPD sergeant who was at the scene described the man as “extremely intoxicated...very, very drunk.”

Got a news tip for the Eater Boston team? Email boston@eater.com.