Familiar Take A Good Fit For A Beverly Grand Reopening

BEVERLY, MA — After years of revolving menu items, and the 2020 ordeal of adjusting and surviving through the coronavirus health crisis, Jay Murray is looking forward to a lot more consistency and familiarity when he reopens the Ellis Square Social for the first time in four months on Wednesday.

Murray said the pandemic months were filled with cooking the food he thought he needed to — barbecue — to fulfill the types of orders he thought he would need to rely on — third-party delivery services such as Uber Eats and Grub Hub — to make it through the year of restrictions and uncertainty.

Yet, when one of his cooks required surgery in February, he decided it was a good time to shut down the operation and reassess what worked and what made him happy as a restaurant owner.

"We got by and we kept people employed who wanted to be employed," he reflected of the run from July 2020 to February. "But when you looked at the reviews online, it's not the restaurant I wanted to be."

He said part of the issue with relying so much on the delivery services is relying on those delivery services to bring the personal touch of your dish to someone else's home.

"The restaurant gets blamed for something that might be the driver's fault, or simply traffic," he lamented. "Plus, the commissions they charge. It's kind of lose-lose for a lot of types of restaurants."

So, when he reopens Ellis Square Social the menu will be back to some of the more traditional dishes he used to serve with the goal of appealing to the patrons' desire for consistency over his tendency to want to shake things up every so often.

"I used to change our menu every week," he recalled. "I've learned that people have their favorites and when they go out they are going to order their favorites. A lot of people have their order in their mind before they even walk in the door."

He said one holdover from the barbecue days will be the popular shrimp & grits, while he intends to bring back old favorites like his grilled carrot dish and steamed duck dumplings on at least a semi-permanent basis.

"(The carrots) really pop with people you think would never order grilled carrots," he said. "Now if you like something you know it's not going to disappear in a week."

Murray said he will feed his creative side with specials and seasonal offerings.

Ellis Square Social will reopen Wednesday through Saturday for now, Murray said, because he is in a similar situation to most in the industry of having some difficulty finding help.

"What you are hearing all over is true," he said of the hiring crunch. "In the kitchen it was difficult, but we are fully staffed. We may need a bartender and could definitely some servers."

He said there may be limited seating or a night where there is no outdoor seating dependent on staff levels.

"We don't want people to have a bad experience because we're not staffed for it," he determined.

He said he hopes things will get better in the fall when some people who enjoy eating at the reopened spot decide maybe "this might be a great place to work."

He added that, as a graphic artist, his downtime gave him time to redesign the menu, while he feels his social media posts have helped build a bit of a buzz heading into Wednesday's grand reopening.

"I think there is a lot of curiosity, which is really cool," he said. "People walk by and they've been sticking their heads in recently to see what's going on.

"A lot of people are shouting online that they want us open again."

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(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)