Downsized Cafe Continues to Serve

The cavernous cafeteria in the former Alcatel-Lucent production plant in North Andover, MA, is now home to a much more modest, but apparently successful, onsite dining operation, reports the Eagle-Tribune. Called Luci’s, the small café serves mostly the few hundred people working in the complex, now called Osgoood Landing.

It is operated by three women with plenty of restaurant and catering experience, and they have put that experience to use in formulating a menu offering healthy versions of traditional dishes like chicken pot pie, pizza, quiche and soups. There is also a salad bar and organic snacks.

Taking up only about a third of the 18,000-sq.ft. former cafeteria space, where once 12,000 Alcatel-Lucent workers working three shifts dined, Luci’s serves about a hundred meals daily. Helping make the café economically viable, at least for now, is a very low rent, which the landlord is willing to extend in order to have onsite dining available for the businesses that lease space in Osgood Landing.