The Zebra Room: Boston's Intimate New Underground Steakhouse

Chris Jamison’s newest Boston restaurant opens April 15, and you get to it through a hidden bookshelf door.

That door leads into the Zebra Room, a 10-table steakhouse tucked beneath Yvonne’s inside the subterranean Library space. Jamison, who runs COJE Management Group, didn’t want another loud room with bottle service energy and a menu built for corporate cards. “We designed this beautiful room [to be] super intimate, elegant, and comfortable, sort of a throwback to the 1970s ‘conversation pit’ vibe,” Jamison said. Dark red banquettes, patterned wallpaper, carpets underfoot. “The whole room is full of fabric.”

The space wasn’t always this. It ran for a stretch as an event room called the Gallery before COJE started asking harder questions about what the square footage could actually do. “Over the last year or so, we kept thinking that there was an opportunity to use the space better,” Jamison said. He’s been watching a global lean toward smaller, more considered dining rooms, and he knows COJE’s existing venues don’t fit that mold. They’re big. The Zebra Room isn’t.

Ten tables puts it in rare company on the Boston dining scene. Intimate restaurant concepts have been picking up steam across major American cities, and locally the comparable example Jamison points to is Bogie’s Place, wedged between the Wig Shop and JM Curley. That’s about it for this scale.

COJE built its name on nightlife-forward rooms. The Zebra Room is something different, and Jamison’s direct about it. “This is a restaurant and dining bar first, a major departure from what we’ve traditionally done,” Jamison said. The company started pointing in this direction with My Girl, a small cocktail lounge that opened in Post Office Square in late 2025. But the Zebra Room goes further. Dinner leads. The drinks and the soundtrack support it, they don’t run it.

The art doesn’t do the steakhouse thing either. Works by Junar Rodriguez, Halim A. Flowers, King Paris, Eser Gündüz, and Francisco Valverde hang against all that bold pattern, giving the place a feel closer to someone’s well-stocked apartment than a Seaport expense account dinner. Boston Magazine has reported that parts of the menu nod to Locke-Ober, the Boston institution that closed in 2012 after more than 130 years in business. That’s serious lineage to pull from.

The personal angle matters here too. Jamison isn’t just chasing a trend in the broader steakhouse scene. He’s working through something. “I’m 42 now, and how do I want to spend my nights?” he said. That’s the question driving the whole concept, and it’s what makes the Zebra Room feel less like a brand extension and more like an actual point of view. It’s got 14 seats at the bar and 10 tables, opens in 2026 after the groundwork laid in 2025, and it’s sitting at an address that’s already one of the more interesting subterranean dining setups in the city.

The bookshelf door swings open April 15. Don’t expect a wait list to stay manageable for long.