Lou’s is announced for Harvard Square space, bringing bands and food from Flatbread crew
By Chloe Jad
Friday, November 22, 2024
The former Beat Brew Hall, seen Friday, is the future site of Lou’s in Cambridge’s Harvard Square. (Photo: Marc Levy)
The storied and serial-tenanted 13 Brattle St. in Harvard Square is expected to welcome Lou’s, a 10,000-square-foot lounge space for cocktails, flatbread and live music, in 2025.
John DiGiovanni, president of Trinity Property Management in Cambridge, announced the lounge’s opening in a press release Wednesday, saying he “aims to create a bar and gathering space that feels familiar and timeless in the square – a neighborhood that he and his family have considered a second home for almost 50 years.”
Formerly home to jazz bar Beat Brasserie (originally known as the Beat Hotel) until September 2018, then reinvented as Beat Brew Hall that month – until the pandemic shuttered and reshuttered the Hall’s doors following an attempted reopening in May 2022 —13 Brattle St. has seen businesses come and go, and even indulged a theater stint with “The Gaaga” phantasmagoria production last summer. The building has been in limbo since Beat Brew Hall closed. Lou’s is next up to make the space work.
The live music could help reinvigorate nightlife in the square. Church Street has The Sinclair performance space and the folk haven Club Passim, and Regattabar brings in jazz acts a few blocks away, but the area is no longer known for live entertainment. (The Comedy Studio recently reopened on John F. Kennedy Street with nightly or twice-nightly bills of comics.) The previous jazzy iterations of 13 Brattle St. by the teams behind The Beehive, Cósmica & Spy Bar in Boston’s South End could seat between 330 and 360 people.
Lou’s will operate in partnership with the team behind Vermont-founded American Flatbread, which boasts locations across New England – including a restaurant paired with Sacco’s candlepin bowling in Somerville’s Davis Square.
The “subterranean space” in Harvard Square is expected to get a makeover by Elder & Ash, an interior design firm in Amesbury, according to the release.
“Experience collectors” Rob Blood and Megan Kennedy, Elder & Ash’s husband-and-wife hotelier designer team, approach design by looking “at the history of the building, the past identities, the current use. We feel that connection to neighborhood, to history and to people; the grit and the beauty, is what fuels a memorable experience,” the firm’s website states.
Cambridge Day reached out to DiGiovanni’s media contact, Mary DiLeo, for information about Lou’s opening.
“We’re not ready to share additional details about Lou’s just yet,” DiLeo wrote in an email.
Information will be announced in the coming months, she said.