A staple of Harvard Square’s restaurant scene for decades is for sale.
A listing on The Boston Restaurant Group website for the 2,200-square-foot, 72-seat Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage is asking $475,000 for the business. The eatery, which has been run by the same family since it opened in 1960, has no liquor license but has between $1.27 million and $2 million in sales every year.
The restaurant is famous for frappes as thick as concrete and a rotating list of menu items that mock prominent national and local figures, like the “Jarrett Stidham,” named after the current Patriots quarterback and advertised as a “poor man’s Tom Brady” or the former “Dick Cheney” burger, a bacon cheeseburger making light of the former vice president’s several heart attacks.
In an interview Eater Boston, owner Bill Bartley said the sale is motivated by a desire to retire and not by the coronavirus pandemic. He will only sell to a buyer willing to continue the business in its current form, he told the website.