Anthony Ackil’s uncle, Faris Ackil, used to cook healthy meals for Ackil and his friend Jon Olinto and advise the boys to “be good.”
On Jan. 12, the friends started trying to share Uncle Faris’ advice with Boston by opening b.good, a new South End restaurant that serves healthy fast food.
Ackil and Olinto have worked Uncle Faris’ culinary philosophy into their menu.
“He used real ingredients — nothing from a can — and didn’t fry anything,” Ackil, a 29-year-old Canton native, said.
b.good hand-grinds 93 percent lean flank steaks for burger patties, bakes chicken breasts coated with Japanese Panko chips to taste like fried chicken and mashes sauted black beans, spinach, onions, mushrooms and red peppers into a paste for veggie burgers.
The French fries are a misnomer — they’re baked in an oven.
Olinto and Ackil make their own barbecue and buffalo sauces, a yogurt-based crumbled blue cheese sauce and salad dressings heavy on vinegar and garlic — all minimizing the preservatives and fat in toppings used at most fast food eateries.
“We’re really focused on the ingredients,” said Olinto, a 27-year-old Milton native. “We take the same foods and use more labor to prepare it in a healthy way.”
“As you go down the line, everything that touches a sandwich is homemade.”
But Ackil said taste is just as important as the nutritional breakdown.
“The first important thing is to offer food that’s better for you that appeals to a broad base of customer,” he said. “A lot of companies that are trying to be healthy alternatives are going too far, like just offering beans and tofu or using chemicals to keep stuff healthy and low-fat.”
According to b.good’s website, the restaurant’s signature burger with caramelized onions, sauted mushrooms and garlicky greens has 14.5 grams of fat, compared to the 43 grams of fat in a Burger King Whopper. A b.good turkey sandwich has 365 calories (Panera Bread’s Sierra turkey sandwich has 950), and b.good’s baked fries pack less than half the fat and calories of McDonald’s fries.
Before starting the restaurant, the co-owners did a year of market research with three focus groups. They canvassed the city, soliciting advice from any restaurant owner that would talk.
“Everyone said, ‘Don’t do it,'” said Olinto, with bags under his eyes that attest to his 16-hour workdays. “But there’s a void in the marketplace for something like this.”
Olinto and Ackil found a half dozen investors, all family and friends, who agreed.
These included John Pepper, co-founder of The Wrap, a chain that also specializes in alternatives to fattening fare. Pepper has helped manage the financial books while Olinto and Ackil fine-tune daily operations.
“They did their homework every step of the way,” said Pepper, a 1991 Dartmouth College graduate currently opening the 10th Wrap restaurant in Hanover, N.H. “When I met them, they had that same passion for what they wanted to do that we did, but without any hands-on experience. The real opportunity for me was to share the mistakes that we had made.”
Olinto and Ackil also entered a partnership with chef Tony Rosenfeld, formerly of Boston’s Anago and L’Espaldier.
Rosenfeld, who masterminded much of the salubrious chow, said b.good isn’t just targeting a niche or trend.
“We don’t want to just get caught up in the whole Atkins craze,” Rosenfeld said. “People’s diets are going to keep changing, and we don’t want to be a place that’s just hopping on a trend.”
As b.good wraps up its first month of business, Olinto said they can finally shift attention to advertising. To that end, the restaurant has established relationships with area gyms like Healthworks, the Boston Sports Club and Fitcorp, inviting trainers in for a free tasting.
The restaurant also held a “name that burger” promotion on its website that drew 650 entries competing for the grand prize of free burgers for life.
Mary Gallagher, a 28-year-old State Street Bank employee, has quickly become a b.good regular.
“I think the food is really good,” she said, enjoyed a barbecue chicken sandwich and noted the accessibility of the owners. “This place is convenient and offers a healthy alternative to junk.”
As spring approaches, the owners hope a steady stream of customers will follow Uncle Faris’s advice and “be good.”
b.good, located at 131 Dartmouth St., is open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., every day.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
