Metacom Kitchen is Making a Return to Warren
Rick and Susan Allaire are relaunching the restaurant after hearing how much people missed it.
Metacom Kitchen in Warren.
Metacom Kitchen is making a comeback. After announcing its closure and potential sale in the spring of 2024, Chef-owner Rick Allaire took on a new position heading up the kitchen at Scales & Shells in Newport. Now that he’s successfully integrated new menus and staffing at Scales & Shells, he and his wife, Susan, made the decision to bring back Metacom Kitchen in Warren. The restaurant reopens this Thursday, Sept. 18. Reservations are booked for opening day, but availability is listed on Resy.
“For the project in Newport [Scales & Shells], me and my partners went in and we redid the menu, rebuilt the kitchen, and now we have a staff in place, and a very talented chef and sous chef, so they’re doing the day-to-day operation,” Allaire says, adding that this assurance gave him the inspiration to reopen Metacom. “I find Metacom to be a soulful place, and I really connect with it. There’s an energy here, and I’m really excited to be doing it again.”
Allaire says he heard from many people how much they missed his restaurant. While they had offers on the property, he and his wife decided to take it off the market and explore relaunching. “Me and my wife made the decision, and in the spring, we factored in the things that we really need to pay attention to and to fix operationally and structurally with the place,” he says.
The Allaires spent all summer renovating the restaurant. He owns the property so he did some foundation work and repaired the bathrooms, and changed up some operational aspects. “Over the summer, we had a timeline, and put in a new floor, fixed the foundation. There was very little work in the kitchen. It was still in beautiful shape after nine years.”
Once they planned to open back up for September, they reached out to former staff. “A lot of the same staff is very happy to come back, which is really fortunate,” he says.
He and his wife are happy they came to this decision, even though Allaire didn’t originally plan it this way. They plan to open Thursday through Sunday at first, and then add in Mystery Mondays in early October. “After a while, I was like, maybe I just wasn’t finished what I was doing there,” he says. “Maybe separating myself from it was a great thing. I just feel like I have a newfound energy for it.”
They plan to bring back Mystery Mondays, where they serve a new three-course meal each week using ingredients unique to that day. “People like that they sit down and they have no idea what we are going to serve them,” he says. “That’s a luxury to be in that position, to be able to have a place where people are open to that.”
The Monday prix-fixe was always a challenge that Allaire welcomed. “It was a very different vibe that night, like people just wanted to come in and just be entertained by the food,” he says. “And so that was the fun part. Every week, it had to be something different, because we would have the same people sit down every week at the same place.” And they will be back for round two.
322 Metacom Ave., Warren, 401-289-3446, metacom.kitchen
