By Grant Welker – Projects Reporter, Boston Business Journal
It’s called a museum, and although it may not meet the traditional idea of what makes for a museum, it certainly treats its subject as worthy of the name: The Museum of Ice Cream is coming to the Seaport.
The chain has signed a lease for 12,300 square feet at 121 Seaport Blvd., according to real estate sources. The location is in the building that includes offices for the firms Alexion Pharmaceuticals and PTC and retail stores for Everlane, Mejuri and Helly Hanson.
The Museum of Ice Cream is slated to open in the late spring or early summer of next year. The company didn’t return a message seeking comment. Bialow Real Estate helped broker the lease.
The company’s locations, which require tickets, include an Instagram-worthy pool of sprinkles — not to worry, they’re not real — as well as, of course, ice cream and milkshakes. Other locations — in Austin, Chicago, Miami, New York and Singapore — have ice cream–themed carnival games, a three-story-high slide, swings and a history of ice cream itself.
In other retail and restaurant news:
- A tapas restaurant will join a notable roster of restaurants on Thompson Place, where the new glass towers of the Seaport meet the old brick warehouses of Fort Point. Boqueria, which opened its first restaurant in New York in 2006, also has locations in Chicago, Nashville, and Washington, D.C., with a West Hartford, Connecticut, spot slated to open this fall. Boqueria will open in phases, starting with dinner on Sept. 12, brunch on Sept. 16 and lunch on Sept. 18. Boqueria will join Dig, bartaco, Trillium Brewing Co., Shake Shack and Caffe Nero at Thompson Place.
- Harvard Square will be getting a new bookstore. Rodney’s Bookstore is opening Friday at 23 Church St. in the storefront that formerly hosted Raven Used Books. The owner Shaw Taylor, named his bookstores after his dog, Rodney. The Cambridge location isn’t his first. The initial Rodney’s opened in 1996 in Hyannis, and others have located at Central Square in Cambridge and in Coolidge Corner in Brookline. “Sometimes people come into the store and ask to speak to Rodney who passed in 1996 after a long life and was a fixture in the Hyannis store,” Taylor said in a statement announcing the opening. “I always say, ‘You can try, I had him for 14 years but he never talked to me!’ However, he continues to live on through the bookstore and through each book we sell that brings adventure, happiness, and insight into people’s lives.”
- Boloco is closing three Boston restaurants, leaving the burrito chain whose name is short for “Boston local company” with just one location in its home city. Boloco closed its Boylston Street location near Massachusetts Avenue on Friday after 26 years in business. Two others, on Boylston Street across from Boston Common and on Congress Street near the Old State House, will close before the end of the year. The leases were coming to an end and Boloco chose not to renew, co-founder John Pepper said in a Facebook post. Only one at Boston Children’s Hospital and another in Concord, New Hampshire, will remain. “I never imagined I’d be making these kinds of announcements,” Pepper said. “I always told people Boloco had a 50-year plan and I meant it. But these past 3 years have been very difficult at Boloco – not so different from street businesses everywhere, many of which have disappeared.”
- Urban Air Adventure Park is soon to open its second Massachusetts location in Brockton at a former Dick’s Sporting Goods. Urban Air locations include mini golf, bumper cars, ropes courses, trampolines, climbing walls, bowling and more. It’ll join a Bellingham location and stand next to Westgate Mall at 435 Westgate Drive. Dick’s left the 53,000-square-foot space Urban Air will take up when it decamped for the mall across the street.
- Another soon-to-come Superette tenant is the women’s clothing and accessory shop Staud, which will add Boston to a roster of locations that otherwise includes only Dallas, Los Angeles and New York, with another on the way in Palm Beach. An opening is slated before the end of the year.
- Cold Harbor Brewing in Westborough has gone from a small storefront in a retail plaza to a far larger space of its own elsewhere in town that includes its own kitchen and restaurant. The new standalone building opened this month with a live entertainment calendar and a menu that includes burgers, sandwiches, pizza and appetizers, as well as a full bar that includes wines and liquors.
- Gufo, a new outpost from the same restaurant group behind SRV Boston and The Salty Pig, has already expanded beyond its core menu and hours to include a daytime cafe and coffee counter — and bocce. Gufo, which is in East Cambridge, has coffee, pastries and sandwiches available for dine-in or takeout, as well as a covered patio and a bocce court that’s available on a first-come, first-served basis for up to 45 minutes.
- The discount retailer Burlington, formerly Burlington Coat Factory, will open in Chelsea this fall. The store at Chelsea Commons off Revere Beach Parkway will join other locations north of Boston, including Peabody, Revere and Somerville. It will bring to 20 the number of Massachusetts locations for the New Jersey–based company.
- Be prepared to see a lot more of 88 Acres’ snack bars at cafes and shops around the area. The company, founded in 2015 and named after the North Brookfield farm where co-founder Nicole Ledoux was raised, has completed construction on a 30,000-square-foot facility in Canton, built by Natick’s Dacon Corp., with allergy-free production space, a research-and-development lab and office space. It’s a world away from 88 Acres’ beginnings out of an apartment kitchen in Dorchester, with six times the production capacity the company used to have.