Food News
The chef and restaurateur will close both restaurants later this year.
The chef and restaurateur will close both Sweet Cheeks Q and Fool’s Errand later this year. Aram Boghosian
A restaurant that helped transform Fenway’s dining scene is soon ending its long run. Chef and restaurateur Tiffani Faison announced that she’s not renewing the lease for her award-winning restaurant, Sweet Cheeks Q—home of trays of sauce-slathered barbecue meats and fluffy, giant biscuits. The last official night of service is November 24, shortly after the restaurant’s fifteenth anniversary.
“It’s been 15 years, and this is a heartbreaking victory lap for us, and for the city, and for our team,” Faison told Boston.com. “A restaurant staying open for 15 years, full stop, is nearly impossible. So to be able to make it this far, it’s been the honor of my life. This is my first baby, and this is one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make.”
Fool’s Errand, her “adult snack bar,” will close as well, since it shares a liquor license with Sweet Cheeks. Faison is actively looking for a new location for Sweet Cheeks. The restaurant staffs about 45, and Faison is working to move employees to other restaurants within her Big Heart Hospitality restaurant group: Bubble Bath, Charming Gardener, Dive Bar, Tenderoni’s, Tigerbaby, and newcomer, The Temp Agency.
The closure of the spots is another blow to Boston’s dining scene, after lauded independent restaurant Chickadee recently shuttered. Like Faison, chef Colin Lynch, Heather Kennaway Lynch, and Jefferson Macklin recently announced that they are declining to renew the lease on three restaurants within their Traveler Street Hospitality restaurant group—Bar Mezzana, No Relation, and Shore Leave—citing affordability.
“It is cost-prohibitive to have restaurants now,” Faison said. “Right now, we’re paying for fuel charges that are in addition to what we already pay because the Strait of Hormuz is closed and gas is heinously expensive. And we are paying tariffs on things that come from other countries. And then there are things that are just expensive anyway. The price of food has gone up. We pay a fair wage and that is really hard to do.”
A bucket of biscuits at Sweet Cheeks in Boston. – Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe
Sweet Cheeks has racked up a number of blue ribbons, from near and far. Devra First of the Boston Globe dubbed the spot in the shadow of Fenway Park a “home run” shortly after its opening. Boston magazine has consistently named Sweet Cheeks the city’s best barbecue restaurant in its long-running Best of Boston Awards, including this year, with Faison winning twice in the category of best chef, general excellence. Her buttermilk biscuits and crispy buttermilk fried chicken have also been featured on the “Today” show.
The restaurant’s success is tied to Faison’s culinary rise, too. Four years after Sweet Cheeks opened its doors, Faison then branched out with a second restaurant, Tiger Mama, her love-letter to Southeast Asian cuisine. Then came more restaurants and recognition: the James Beard Award nominations—akin to an Oscar nom in the culinary world—the features in the likes of Forbes, a separate career as a competitor, host, and judge on the Food Network. At one point, Faison owned and operated four separate concepts within the Fenway Triangle mixed-use development.
Big Heart currently staffs about 130 employees. Then there are also the intangible successes—the memories, the couples who met and fell in love while working at the restaurant. Some went off to marry and have kids. “The things you can’t know that will come when you open a restaurant have been gifts in spades at Sweet Cheeks,” she said. “It really has been such a special place for so long.”
Not bad for a chef who saw the Fenway neighborhood morph around her, from the site of a “literal dumpster fire,” as she told Eater in 2021, to its current status as a luxury real-estate playground.
The closure of Sweet Cheeks, Fool’s Errand, and other lauded restaurants also begs the question: If these chefs can’t make it, who can?
“I do want to make a point of celebrating what we’ve done in our team, but there is this part of me, obviously, that’s just so frustrated,” she said. “To hear Colin and Heather [Lynch] are closing and Chickadee’s closing, we’re not retiring. None of us are f—ing 70, but this environment is unsustainable for us. Something’s got to be done.”
Faison is hoping that people like Mayor Michelle Wu will hear the frustrations of the city’s small business owners, and consider ways to support them, much like the city has sought to expand affordable housing.
“For every building that’s built with housing in it, there’s a requirement that a certain percentage of that is affordable housing,” Faison said. “Why is that not the same for first- and second-floor retail, for local restaurateurs and local business?”
Faison said watching what’s happening to local businesses in the city is heartbreaking. She’s actively searching for another location for the restaurant, but is keeping other Big Heart developments under wraps for now.
In the meantime, she’s dishing out advice for diners who want their favorite restaurants to stay open: Show up—even on slow nights.
“You have to come on a Monday night,” she said. “You can’t just come in one Saturday every couple of months and expect your favorite restaurants to survive. It’s not gonna work.”
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