Walk down Main Street this week and you'll pass at least three storefronts that changed hands sometime in the last year. If you've lived in Watertown through 2025 and into this fall, you've probably clocked each one as it happened: a sign taped to a window, a familiar name gone, a small pang of loss for whatever you used to order there. It's the kind of thing you notice on your way to the farmers market or the pharmacy and then forget about until the next one happens.
Here's what's easy to miss if you only track the closures one at a time: almost none of these places actually left town. They moved a few blocks, split into two, or reopened under a different name with the same people running the kitchen. Watertown Square isn't emptying out this year. It's rearranging itself in place, and the rearranging tells you more about how the neighborhood works than any single opening or closing does.
Halva Didn't Close, It Expanded
Halva Mediterranean Grill has spent the past two years building a following out of the former New Yorker Diner space at 39 Mount Auburn Street, where the family-owned Turkish restaurant opened in 2024. This year, owners Joseph, Sam, and Ali Dag confirmed the restaurant is relocating to a larger space nearby: the former Not Your Average Joe's spot on Main Street in Watertown Square. That's a real upgrade in square footage for a place that built its regulars on the 3 Mezze Sampler, the Chicken Shish Wrap, and a walnut baklava people specifically ask for by name.
The part that matters for anyone who assumes a vacated storefront means a business folded: the Mount Auburn location isn't going dark. The Dag family is turning their original space into a new Mediterranean breakfast concept, keeping both addresses under the same ownership. When the move was announced in April, the timeline given was three to five months out, pending permits and renovations, which puts the new Main Street location's opening somewhere in this general window. If you've been driving past a shuttered awning on Mount Auburn wondering what happened, the honest answer is nothing happened. The same family just decided one restaurant wasn't enough.
What Actually Happened to Molana
The more interesting case is on Spring Street, where Molana Restaurant ran for 26 years before its owners, Mohsen "Moe" Tehrani and chef Hadi Eghbali, sold the business earlier in 2025. On paper, that's a closure. In practice, it produced two restaurants instead of zero.
The Spring Street space itself didn't sit empty. It became Lalibela, an Ethiopian restaurant from husband-and-wife team Haile Mekonnen and Emebet Arku, who moved from Ethiopia to Cambridge nineteen years earlier and spent time scouting locations in Arlington, Brookline, and Cambridge before settling on the Watertown storefront. The restaurant opened in August 2025 with a cozy, incense-filled dining room downstairs and an event space upstairs, and by this spring it had earned a Boston Globe review calling out the vegetarian combination platter and a slow-simmered doro wot. The Globe later folded Lalibela into its A-to-Z guide of the area's essential restaurants, the kind of citywide recognition a 26-year institution like Molana never quite got outside its own neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Tehrani and Eghbali didn't retire. They opened Caspian Persian Cuisine in East Watertown in February 2026, taking over the former Shiraz Persian Restaurant space at 72 Bigelow Avenue, itself vacant since Shiraz closed in September 2025 after sixteen years in business. Caspian's menu leans into the kind of Persian cooking Tehrani and Eghbali have spent decades refining: classic kebabs, daily stews, lamb neck, and a rotating lineup of weekend specials, served daily including holidays.
So a restaurant that ran for a quarter century under one roof turned into two restaurants under two roofs, three-quarters of a mile apart, run by four different people who all still live and work in this town. If you were a Molana regular who assumed your options shrank to zero, you actually have two new places to try, not none.
The Pattern, Not Just the Places
Neither of these stories is really about restaurants closing. They're about a neighborhood where the people running its small businesses tend to stay, even when the sign out front changes. That's worth knowing if you live here, because it means the "closed" notice you see taped to a window is telling you less than you think. Ask around before you write a place off. The Dag family is still cooking, just with twice the address. Tehrani and Eghbali are still cooking too, just down the street from where Molana used to be, and Lalibela wouldn't exist without the vacancy they left behind.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall
The same continuity shows up in the town's event calendar, where the big annual fixtures are returning with additions rather than replacements.
| Event | When | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Faire on the Square | Saturday, September 19, 2026, noon to 5 p.m. | Saltonstall Park, behind City Hall |
| Watertown Farmers' Market | Wednesdays through October 21, 2:30 to 6:30 p.m. (6 p.m. starting in October) | Saltonstall Park |
| Mighty Squirrel Biergarten | Thursdays 4 to 9 p.m., Fridays through Sundays 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., through October | The Farm at Gore Place |
| Coolidge Square sidewalk work | September 14 through 18 | Mt. Auburn Street, Templeton Parkway to Irma Avenue and Lloyd Road |
The Faire on the Square is Watertown's long-running fall welcome, with more than 100 vendors setting up in Saltonstall Park alongside a Kid's Adventure Zone and a bake-off competition. What's new this year is a Oktoberfest Biergarten hosted by Mighty Squirrel Brewing, added to a format that's otherwise stayed the same for years. It's the same move as Halva and Caspian on a civic scale: keep what worked, add to it rather than replace it.
The farmers market is in its 13th season at the same Saltonstall Park location, running its usual Wednesday schedule until it wraps for the year on October 21. If you've been meaning to get there before the season ends, the clock is now measured in weeks, not months.
Separately from the Faire, Mighty Squirrel also runs a biergarten at the Farm at Gore Place, a partnership that started this spring and continues on its Thursday-through-Sunday schedule into October. It's easy to conflate the two Mighty Squirrel activations since they share a name and a season, but they're different locations with different hours, so check which one you're headed to before you make plans.
If you're walking or driving through Coolidge Square this week, expect sidewalk construction along Mt. Auburn Street from Templeton Parkway to Irma Avenue and Lloyd Road, with drainage work happening near East Bates Road at the same time. It's a short-term disruption, but worth knowing about before you route your commute through there.
And if you've eaten at Chulo Restaurant recently, some of what you spent this month is going toward flood relief in Nepal, where the restaurant has been directing a portion of September proceeds.
The Short Version
Nothing in Watertown Square disappeared this year so much as it redistributed. The Dag family runs two spaces instead of one. Molana's old owners and its old address both kept going, just as two separate restaurants under new names. The Faire on the Square kept its format and added a biergarten. None of this required anything to close for good. It just required people willing to reopen a few doors down.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks a neighborhood by paying attention to who's still standing behind the counter, that continuity is the real story here, more than any single opening. Masterman Elek Group spends its time doing the same kind of close, block-by-block watching in Watertown and the towns around it. If you ever want to talk through what's happening on your own street, schedule a consultation to discuss your home.
