Legal Sea Foods relocates headquarters, announces innovation center to support e-commerce growth

Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.-based Legal Sea Foods has relocated its headquarters to the Boston Fish Pier and announced its intentions to open a 30,000-square-foot innovation center in early 2024, both of which will bolster Legal’s physical restaurant expansion and its growing e-commerce business.

When PPX Hospitality Brands, which operates the Smith & Wollensky and Strega Italiano restaurant chains, purchased Legal Sea Foods in 2020 from founder Roger Berkowitz, it gained a 75,000-square-foot processing plant in Boston’s Seaport district that was originally designed for large-scale industrial production.

Finding it difficult to adapt the 25-year-old facility into a modern, functional headquarters, Legal looked for solutions within the local industry. 

“The eventual result was a creative deal allowing Legal to relocate part of the company to Boston’s renowned Fish Pier while offering a global seafood company [Stavis Seafoods] the processing space they had been searching for,” the company stated. “Legal and the processor agreed to a facility swap, enabling both parties to continue operations seamlessly, while Legal constructed a cutting-edge facility better suited to its production needs.”

Legal – as well as the Smith & Wollensky and Strega Italiano brands – now occupy refurbished offices on the Boston Fish Pier. The facility is close to vital seafood partners like Boston-based North Coast Seafoods and local fishing vessels, and is steps away from Legal’s flagship restaurant: Legal Harborside.

“Legal’s leadership and support teams are now intimately connected to the source, reflecting the brand’s essence,” the company said. The offices house various departments including accounting, human resources, marketing, IT, purchasing, operations, e-commerce, and retail.

Legal’s quality control center also required refurbishing, and executives “recognized the need for a more modern space that would provide efficiency, speed, and quality assurance of its restaurant products and the introduction of e-commerce,” Legal stated.

To that end, the soon-to-open innovation center in…

Photo courtesy of Legal Sea Foods