Biography theater restaurants boston ma

I was incredibly excited to go to the Empire Garden Restaurant in Boston – in part because the idea of eating in a place that was once a huge, ornate theater is inherently exciting to me, and in part because I thought I had perhaps found a spot that fellow Route 1 Views curator and abandoned theater expert Matt Lambros had not.

I should have known that the odds of visiting a theater Matt hasn’t been to are vanishingly small, and sure enough, the month I visited Empire Garden – December, 2023 – was the same month he was writing an excellent history of the restaurant, which you can read here.

Rather than rehashing the building’s past, I wanted instead to focus on the surreal experience of eating at Empire Garden and review the restaurant itself.

Entering the main seating area at the Empire Garden Restaurant is overwhelming.

The room feels enormous, and the décor is a collision of traditional Chinese paintings and statues j