New Restaurant Ten Tables Opens

Foodies wondering what was going to fill the space of their beloved Craigie Street Bistrot finally have their answer.

A new restaurant, Ten Tables, which aspires to replicate the “dinner party in someone’s home” atmosphere of its original Jamaica Plain incarnation, opened its Cambridge location on Monday night.

After about a year of planning for a new branch, co-owner Krista Kranyak settled on the former space of Craigie Street Bistrot, tucked off Garden St and a quick walk from the Quad.

“I just sort of had a vision,” Kranyak said. “I love this neighborhood.”

Craigie Street Bistrot traded in its name for Craigie on Main, and moved to Central Square in November of last year. The restaurant—which replaced Italian restaurant La Groceria—wanted a larger space and an expanded menu.

The Cambridge branch of Ten Tables has also expanded, trading in the literal ten tables of the seven-year-old Jamaica Plain location for twenty. The menu, with its European-inspired cuisine, has similarly grown from five entrees to seven, and the wine list has doubled in length.

Partly to save money, partly because they did not realize the enormity of the task, Kranyak, along with her chef and sous-chef, renovated the new Cambridge space themselves. Kranyak said the former occupant’s seven year legacy included a lot of “wear and tear.”

“For seven days a week, twelve hours a day, we ripped up the floors, painted the walls, we put in new ceilings,” she said of the renovations, which have left her mostly sleepless for the past week. “My hands are still killing me.”

While the new space is larger and lacks the open kitchen of the Jamaica Plain location, Kranyak aims to keep the experience intimate and personalized, with “the same sort of romantic setting” as the original.

Nico Herregodts, the general manager of Ten Tables, said he switched from Boston’s famous L’Espalier because he wanted to work in a smaller restaurant.

“L’Espalier was a family business when I started in 2000, now it’s really growing,” he said. “I like more the little places.”

Herregodts orchestrated the finer details of the new location, including the choice of bread and table setup.

Opening night went off without a hitch. Regulars of the Jamaica Plain location came, along with new diners.

“I had been doing construction. I was sort of out of my element,” Kranyak said. “When I opened, it was like, this was what I’ve been doing for 20 years.”

—Staff writer Lingbo Li can be reached at lingboli@fas.harvard.edu.