A recent Union Leader review of the new spot at 49 Range Road tells a small, telling story. Two diners sit down, order drinks, and ask for the herb-roasted haddock. Sold out the night before. They pivot to the broccoli rabe eggrolls. Also gone, because the kitchen had already stopped restocking ingredients ahead of a menu relaunch. It reads like an off night for a new restaurant still finding its footing.
Except the restaurant isn't new, not exactly. The building used to hold Old School Bar & Grill, a name longtime Windham residents will recognize from years of Friday nights and after-work stops. It closed for renovation, and what reopened is called Becks Public House. That part, most people already know if they've driven past 49 Range Road this year. What most people don't know, because the reviewer himself only found it by accident while researching the story, is that Becks isn't a standalone reinvention. It's one half of a pair.
The Sibling Nobody Mentions Upfront
Buried in that same Union Leader piece is the detail that makes this worth writing about: Becks is the sister restaurant to Figaro's Martini Bar and Kitchen, also in Windham, which the same review column had already covered and praised back in late May. The writer only stumbled onto the connection through a social media search while drafting the Becks review. If a food writer doing dedicated research on the restaurant missed the link on a first pass, most residents ordering takeout from one place have no idea the other exists under the same ownership.
That matters because it changes what "new restaurant in Windham" actually means this year. It isn't one operator testing the market with one concept. It's a single group that took a familiar bar-and-grill footprint and split it into two purpose-built spaces instead of one compromise. Figaro's got the smaller, more deliberately designed room. Becks got the volume: a retail-style building off Route 111A with room to spare and a patio that, by the reviewer's account, still had a crowd enjoying live music on the day he visited.
Two Different Nights Out, Not Two Competitors
Treating Becks and Figaro's as rivals misses the point of why a single ownership group would open both. They're built for different nights.
Becks leans into scale and noise in the good sense. The bar sits centralized with plenty of seats and screens, the natural light near the patio door makes it the brightest part of the room, and the booths have enough space between them that conversation doesn't compete with the next table over. The menu prices reflect a place meant for groups and casual decisions: snacks in the $15 to $18 range, sandwiches and salads from $10 to $23, and mains stretching from $25 up to $49 for the 12-ounce New York strip. The wild mushroom risotto at $29 got specific praise in the review for staying mushroom-forward without turning muddy, a detail that matters if you've been burned by a risotto that oversalts to compensate for flavor. The Wagyu burger at $23 didn't fare as well in that same review, coming across dry and under-seasoned, which is a useful thing to know before you order it on a first visit.
Figaro's, by contrast, is the room the reviewer said he'd go back to first: smaller, more thoughtfully laid out, better suited to a quieter dinner than a game-day crowd. If Becks is where you bring six people for wings and a Sunday afternoon on the patio, Figaro's reads as the pick for a reservation you actually planned around, not one you made on the way out the door.
Neither read is a knock on the other. They're doing different jobs for the same town, which is presumably the idea.
Fitting Into an Actual Windham Saturday
Becks' own marketing leans into something specific to this town rather than generic pub branding. Its location page asks whether you've worked up a thirst after exploring the trails at Deer Leap, Town Forest, or Fosters Pond, and pitches itself as the stop after that kind of afternoon. Whether or not that copy was written with a particular hiker in mind, it's an accurate read of how a lot of Windham weekends actually go: an hour or two outside, then somewhere close by to sit down.
That's a different kind of local knowledge than knowing the menu. It's knowing that Route 111A puts you within a few minutes of both the trailheads and the bar, so a loop through Town Forest doesn't require driving into Salem or Derry to end the day with a drink. Windham has usually meant packing up the car for dinner somewhere else. This year, for the first time in a while, two new sit-down options exist inside town limits without much of a drive at all.
What Didn't Change
For everything that's different about the space, Becks' own description of itself hasn't drifted far from what Old School represented for years: a place with a mellow atmosphere, a full menu, and room for families, sports fans, and neighborhood regulars alike. The building shed one name and gained a patio and a more curated drink list, but the pitch is still "come as you are," not a reinvention aimed at pulling in a different crowd from Boston or Salem. That continuity is probably why longtime regulars have kept showing up rather than treating the rebrand as a reason to find somewhere else.
The gluten-free side of the menu is worth a specific mention too. Reviews on food-allergy-focused sites point to a dedicated fryer and clearly marked gluten-free items, including a gluten-free bun for sandwiches that one celiac reviewer noted held together well, which isn't always the case. That's a small operational detail, but it's the kind of thing that decides whether a place becomes a regular stop for someone managing a dietary restriction or a one-time visit.
Why This Is the Kind of Change Worth Noticing
None of this is really about restaurants in isolation. It's about how a town's day-to-day options shift in ways that don't show up on a map or a listing until someone who lives there writes it down. A building that sat under one name for years now runs two concepts under common ownership, aimed at two different occasions, both within walking distance of trails residents already use. That's the kind of texture that tells you a place is still changing in small, livable ways, not just growing in the abstract sense that shows up in a market report.
If you're the kind of Windham resident who tracks these shifts because you like knowing your town, you already understand why a detail like the Becks-Figaro's connection matters more than another generic "new restaurant" writeup. It's proof the place keeps adjusting to how people actually spend their Saturdays here, not just to what the last spot in that building used to serve.
If you're weighing whether a town like this, with its trail network minutes from a new patio and its restaurants quietly connected in ways worth knowing, fits your next move, the DiPietro Group team lives in these details because we live in this town. Take a look at our Windham neighborhood guide or read more about how locals actually spend a weekend here, and when you're ready to talk about what a home search in this market looks like, schedule a free buyer or seller consultation with someone who already knows which patio to recommend.
