BEECH

A room shaped from the operating core

The room gets its shape from decisions made before the first plate reaches the pass. Michael Schlow, chef and managing partner at BEECH in Jamestown, works with the long view of a cook who has opened, closed, revised, and reopened restaurants across several markets. His craft has often lived in Italian structure, direct flavors, clear timing, and a room that knows what it is trying to be. At BEECH, that experience meets the former Simpatico address on Narragansett Avenue, a Jamestown gathering place with enough local memory that its remake had to carry weight without turning nostalgic. The restaurant came into its present form after an eight-member investment group of Jamestown locals bought the former Simpatico location and reworked it as an all-seasons restaurant. Schlow is named here as chef and managing partner, inside the operating core of the place, shaping the kitchen, room, and identity. The restaurant opened in 2021 in the venue record, and the rebrand to BEECH followed in 2023 after renovation. That sequence matters because the craft here is also in changing a familiar local address without sanding off its use as a neighborhood room.

Modern New England without excess explanation

The kitchen works in a Modern New England coastal register, with seafood close to the center and an à la carte format rather than a fixed procession. The restaurant’s public language stays broad, so the exact bench-side mechanics of the menu are not laid out dish by dish. What is clear is the method of positioning: local sourcing, a curated wine program, and a modern kitchen built for a room that has to serve both regular dinners and milestone tables. Schlow’s career gives that frame a particular kind of pressure. He came through early work in New York City and Long Island, then through Boston restaurants including Café Louis, Radius, Via Matta, Tico, and Doretta Taverna and Raw Bar, before adding addresses in New Hampshire, Washington, DC, Michigan, Maryland, and Massachusetts. The list reads less like a résumé than a record of service systems learned at scale. At BEECH, those systems have to narrow into the island rhythm: seafood, coastal weather, a neighborhood that knows the old name, and a dining room that cannot rely on novelty for long.

The patio and the pass

The room at 13 Narragansett Avenue carries the doubled life of a coastal restaurant: summer air on the patio garden, winter comfort inside. The renovation turned the former Simpatico into a year-round house, with several indoor rooms and an outdoor garden that has become part of how people use the place. BEECH can hold 200 guests across those spaces, a scale large enough for celebrations but still tied to the feeling of a local table. The pass has to answer that range. On one night, the work may be a quiet dinner in the dining room; on another, the same kitchen has to carry a birthday, an anniversary, or a table that has come back because the address already belongs to their own history. The restaurant’s tone is comfortable rather than formal, conversational rather than hushed. That matters in a room built on return.

A local address remade for the long run

BEECH was voted the number one restaurant in Rhode Island for 2024 by the Rhode Island Hospitality Association, an award attached to this house, not borrowed from Schlow’s earlier rooms. It sits beside his James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef, Northeast in 2000, a separate mark in a career that has moved through many kitchens. At BEECH, the question is whether a renovated island address can keep feeling local after the paint dries. For now, the answer is in the garden, the dining room, and the name on Narragansett Avenue: BEECH.