"We want to be the place that you go for dinner every week, maybe even twice a week," Deirdre Auld told Boston.com the day after Celine opened at 324 A St. Auld is a partner at Celine and CEO of Coda Restaurant Group, the team behind Salty Pig, SRV, Gufo and Baleia. She said Celine was designed so "it was for the neighborhood."
Three weeks earlier and a few blocks away, Will Beckett, co-founder of the London steakhouse group Hawksmoor, described his new Boston location in nearly the same words. He hopes people see it as "a great neighborhood restaurant."
Two operators of very different size made the same pitch to the same few blocks in the same month. That isn't a coincidence of wording. It shows who Fort Point's new restaurants are counting on, and it lines up with how the city has started treating Seaport hospitality.
Two openings, one audience
Hawksmoor opened September 8 at 15 Necco St. It seats 280, has dark paneled walls and brass, and looks out over Fort Point Channel. Boston is the group's 15th restaurant since Beckett and Huw Gott founded it in London in 2006. The executive chef is Thomas Park, who previously cooked at Saltie Girl. A 280-seat room run by an international group sounds like a destination restaurant. Beckett described it otherwise:
"It doesn't matter whether you go once a year because it's your anniversary or because it's Tuesday and you want to drink a martini and have fries at the bar and watch a game."
The menu supports that. Alongside the charcoal-grilled steaks, there's a Fort Point burger with gooey cheese and spicy mayo, and fish and chips made with beer-battered Massachusetts haddock, mushy peas and fries triple-cooked in beef fat. The schedule supports it more. Hawksmoor's own site lists weekday lunch from noon to 2:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, plus a Sunday roast every week from 11:45 a.m. to 4 p.m. The roast is served to share and comes with beef, beef-dripping potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, greens, cauliflower cheese and bone-marrow gravy. A Sunday afternoon slot is for people who are already nearby on a Sunday.
Celine is smaller in every way. It opened the Monday before Boston.com's September 29 story, in the former Blue Dragon space, which had been empty for a long time. It has 80 seats, exposed brick and turmeric banquettes. Executive chef Joe Cooke grew up in Medford and came from Viale in Cambridge. He drew on Montreal restaurants including Joe Beef, Liverpool House and Rôtisserie La Lune. Expect rotisserie chicken with chanterelles and beef tallow fries, duck confit cassoulet and steak frites. The poutine comes with chicken- and duck-dripping gravy and an extra gravy boat on the side.
Price is where both claims to be a "neighborhood restaurant" can actually be checked. Auld's target is a full meal plus a cocktail or a glass of wine for $50 or less. Hawksmoor's lunch page lists a sample set menu at $45 for two courses or $55 for three, and notes the menu may change. So as of early October 2026, a weekday lunch at the 280-seat steakhouse and a weeknight dinner with a drink at the 80-seat tavern are roughly the same price. That price point is how you get people to come back every week.
The weekend that tests it
The first real test comes October 16–18, when Fort Point Open Studios opens the neighborhood's warehouse studios to the public. More than 110 Fort Point and visiting artists take part. Everything is free and open to all ages, including live music and hands-on workshops. The weekend brings a crowd into the neighborhood on foot, which is the same crowd both restaurants say they're built for.
Lay the schedules side by side and the overlap is close:
| Day | Open Studios | Celine | Hawksmoor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Friday, Oct. 16 | 4–7 p.m. | Dinner 4–11 p.m., bar until midnight | Lunch noon–2:30 p.m., dinner 5–11 p.m. |
| Saturday, Oct. 17 | Noon–6 p.m. | Dinner 4–11 p.m., bar until midnight | Noon–11 p.m. |
| Sunday, Oct. 18 | Noon–6 p.m. | Dinner 4–10 p.m., bar until 11 p.m. | 11:45 a.m.–10 p.m., roast until 4 p.m. |
Celine opens at 4 p.m. every night, the same minute Friday's studio hours begin. Hawksmoor's Sunday roast ends at 4 p.m., two hours before the studios close on Sunday, so a roast fits best before the studio walk, not after it. Hours on both restaurants' sites can change, so check again that week.
The studio stops are close enough that the order you visit them hardly matters. The Fort Point Arts Community lists these:
- The FPAC Art Space at 70A Sleeper Street
- The Artist Building at 300 Summer Street
- 259 A Street
- 249A Street
- The Boston Button Factory
- Midway Artist Studios
- The Eli Lilly Building, first floor
The two A Street stops share a street with Celine at 324 A St. The Art Space on Sleeper Street is also showing "Repeat/Repeat" through November 20, so that stop has two exhibits on the same weekend. FPAC's guidebook and directions page are linked from its Open Studios page.
If the weekend gets rained out or booked up, the Open Studios group exhibition runs longer. It's at Gallery at Atlantic Wharf, 290 Congress St., from October 14 through January 3, 2027, with a reception October 15 from 5 to 7 p.m.
The other side of courting residents
The "neighborhood restaurant" pitch makes more sense next to a decision the Boston Licensing Board made in May. Himmel Hospitality Group plans Le Boulevard, a French-brasserie-style steakhouse with seafood that will replace Hook + Line on Fan Pier Boulevard. The board approved the plan but turned down the proposed 11 p.m. closing time for the outdoor patio and set 10 p.m. instead. Indoors, the 315-seat restaurant will keep hours of 11 a.m. to 2 a.m.
Board Chairwoman Kathleen Joyce agreed with Norm Lind of the Seaport Neighborhood Association that 11 p.m. could be too late for a patio in an area where residents already complain about late-night noise, as Universal Hub reported. Joyce said the issue isn't only decibel readings. Sometimes it's the pitch of someone's voice and "how it bounces off someone's window." The board left Himmel room to come back in six months and ask for a later patio hour if it can run the patio without bothering nearby residents.
Le Boulevard and its companion steakhouse, Bar 23, are reported as 2027 openings. Neither will arrive this fall. The ruling still shows how things work in the Seaport now. The people living in the glass towers have a say in when a restaurant's evening ends. A restaurant that wants those residents at the bar on a Tuesday also has to live next to them on a Saturday. Celine's late bar hours are set at midnight on weekends and 11 p.m. the rest of the week.
What else fills the calendar through winter
Closer to the water, Fireside at The Current runs at 100 Seaport Blvd. through January 31, 2027. It has nine seasonal pop-ups: Elli Parr, It's For Now with Maker Scholar, Morandi, MYKA, NOBULL, The Sweetish Fish, Tiny Chaos Studios, Union Square Donuts, and WNTR by Bobbles & Lace. The Snowport Holiday Market takes over the same address November 6 through December 27, with more than 125 makers plus food and cocktail bars. Opening hours vary by day.
The daytime anchors that opened this summer at Commonwealth Pier, 200 Seaport Blvd., are still a short walk from the channel. The Museum of American Finance opened there July 3 as a free, 5,400-square-foot museum. Salt & Straw, the brand's first Massachusetts shop, is open daily until 11 p.m.
On the Fort Point side, the best weekend to try both new restaurants is October 16–18. Celine's doors open at 4 p.m. that Friday, the same time the studios do.
If you own in Fort Point and wonder how a new weeknight restaurant and an active arts weekend nearby factor into your home's value, Samantha Berdinka can walk you through it block by block. Start with your instant home valuation.
