Jim Solomon's Kitchen Is His Own Dream Come True

Fourth in a weekly series profiling the chefs and restaurateurs of Brookline.

Jim Solomon has opened some 10 restaurants around the country over the years, but this is the one he's been dreaming about all along.

In fact, Solomon, the owner and chef at the Fireplace Restaurant in Washington, said he first developed the concept as a homework assignment at business school nearly two decades ago. And while the Fireplace doesn't feature the tree-stump chairs and wood-block tables he envisioned as a student, the dishes are more or less the same: basic, timeless recipes informed by centuries of New England tradition and prepared to high standards.

"Because I don't to esoteric chef-driven dishes, I don't feel like I need to come up with new flavors all the time," said Solomon, who added that he usually builds his recipes by starting with good, local ingredients that have been served together for centuries, and do his best to "not screw them up."

A Brookline native who enjoys a remarkable detailed memory, Solomon traces his interest in New England cuisine back to a fourth-grade class project during bicentennial celebrations of the 1970s in Lincoln, MA, where he'd moved with his mom after his parents divorced. He remembers drawing maps of his hometown as it would have been during the Revolutionary War, and recreating Paul Revere's ride in full colonial garb.

"I became so imbibed with this sense of place and I really became fascinate with where I lived," he said. "It was just overwhelming."

After his parents divorced, Solomon would often visit his father in Brookline and spend his time walking to Fenway to watch the Rex Sox at Fenway Park. Though he said he loved the bachelor's life as a kid, he recalls slowly growing ashamed his recently singled father's habit of taking him out to dinner each night instead of cooking at home like a normal family.

So Solomon ordered his father to the grocery store and stocked their cupboards with ingredients. Each night, while procrastinating from homework, he would take them down and play around with them until he though he had dinner.

"If I wanted to cook Italian, I would just take out the herbs and ingredients that would look right," he said.

Solomon eventually worked a few food service jobs as a kid – including a remarkably successful stint handing out fliers for Paco's Tacos after Harvard football games – but he ended up attempting brief careers in politics and then finance before he threw in the towel.

"I found myself day dreaming all the time," he said. "I thought I'd be much happier in the restaurant business."

Solomon, then just 22, said he wanted to learn everything about running a restaurant, so he got a job with one of the most fast-growing restaurants at the time – Pizzaria Uno's. He worked for the chain for about 2 1/2 years as a manager, before snagging a job in the kitchen of a Cajun restaurant in New York, and then as a stand-in chef developing recipes for a new Mexican restaurant in Michigan.

But it was while he was still at Uno's that Solomon began taking a few business classes on the side and wrote a pitch letter for a fictional restaurant very much like the Fireplace. Through the many restaurant jobs he would later hold in the 1990s – including stints at Legal Seafood and Armani's on Newbury Street – Solomon said he was just looking for the right place to open his long-envisioned New England-style restaurant.

"Every job was one step toward the Fireplace," he said.

Solomon was cooking in Waltham and consulting in Cambridge when he overheard that a failing restaurant in Washington Square might be headed toward bankruptcy. He approached the owner about buying the place, and when he was turned down, moved to a nearby apartment and positioned himself to scoop up the property as soon as it came on the market.

When Solomon finally opened the Fireplace in 2001, just a few days before 9/11, it was much he had envisioned all the years before: simple, rustic food very well prepared, but not "chef-driven" or esoteric. Sure, the sauces have become more involved, and the dishes more complex, but Solomon believes says he's still developing recipes that are relatively simple.

And even after nine years at the Fireplace, Solomon is constantly writing new recipes. He creates four season menus each year – he tried six, but it was too much – and creates special promotional menus, including a whole range of dishes inspired by presidents who had some sort of connection to New England.

But one major thing has changed since he first imagined the Fireplace. One of the reasons he wanted to keep things simple, he admits now, is that he wanted the restaurant to be something he could easily replicate, something he could reproduce in town around New England.

But after nine years with his restaurant in Washington Square, that's no longer part of the plan.