On February 11, 2026, Not Your Average Joe's closed its doors on Main Street in Watertown Square. It wasn't a routine closure. A regional director for the chain called it their oldest location, the first Not Your Average Joe's ever opened, gone after decades of Friday nights and birthday dinners in the same spot.
Six months later, on August 19, a different restaurant opened in that exact address. Halva Mediterranean Grill moved in with a wood fired oven, white walls, dark seating, and roughly four times the floor space of the tiny storefront it had outgrown a few blocks away on Mount Auburn Street. Same corner, same square footage that used to hold a national chain's flagship, now filled by a family that had been building its following one small dining room at a time.
That single address tells you something about how Watertown eats right now, and it's not the story you'd expect from a town losing a longtime chain restaurant. The space didn't sit empty. It didn't go to another chain either. It went to a local operator who was ready to bet on a much bigger version of what already worked.
Same Corner, Bigger Ambition
Co-owner Joseph Dagdelen and his partners Sam and Ali Dag had been serving kebabs and mezze out of the former New Yorker Diner space on Mount Auburn Street for nearly three years. When word got out that Not Your Average Joe's was vacating its Main Street building, Halva didn't just take the lease. They took the opportunity to build a version of the restaurant that the old space couldn't hold, one with room for a proper wood fired oven and an expanded menu, while keeping the dishes regulars already knew how to order.
The old Mount Auburn space isn't sitting idle either. It's being reworked into a new Mediterranean breakfast concept from the same ownership group, meaning the same family now has two addresses working in tandem instead of one. That's a different kind of growth than a chain simply swapping a tenant. It's a local business splitting into two operations because demand in Watertown Square outgrew a single storefront.
One Kitchen, Two Restaurants
The more interesting pattern shows up a few blocks away, on Spring Street, in a story that connects two Watertown restaurant families without either of them opening a new building.
For 26 years, Mohsen "Moe" Tehrani and chef Hadi Eghbali ran Molana Restaurant on Spring Street. They sold it in 2025. Rather than step away from the restaurant business, the two longtime partners turned their attention to a different vacancy across town: the former home of Shiraz Persian Restaurant on Bigelow Avenue, which had closed after 16 years in business. In February 2026, Tehrani and Eghbali opened Caspian Persian Cuisine in that space, bringing decades of experience in Persian cooking to a location that had just lost its own longtime tenant. Tehrani has said that staying open through the year, including holidays, matters to him because of students and young people who may not have family nearby.
Meanwhile, the building Tehrani and Eghbali left behind didn't stay empty. Molana's old Spring Street space is now home to Lalibela, an Ethiopian restaurant run by husband and wife team Haile Mekonnen and Emebet Arku. It's popular enough that the Boston Globe ran a feature on it this year, praising the restaurant's warmth over polish and singling out the vegetarian combination platter and the doro wot.
Put the two stories together and you get a clearer picture of how Watertown's independent restaurant scene actually renews itself. It isn't that old restaurants shut down and the buildings sit vacant until someone new figures out the neighborhood. Experienced local operators recycle their own spaces, and the people who vacate one address tend to still be cooking somewhere else in town within months. The churn is real, but it's churn among people who already know Watertown, not a rotating cast of outside chains testing the market.
Arsenal Yards Is Running A Different Playbook
That local recycling pattern is not what's happening on the other side of town. At Arsenal Yards, the mixed use development on the East End along the Charles, the growth story looks almost the opposite.
Wonder, the multi restaurant food hall platform that lets diners order from chef driven menus tied to names like Bobby Flay and José Andrés, opened its Watertown location in March 2026 as part of a rollout of eight locations across Greater Boston and MetroWest. It's not a single restaurant with a single owner working the room. It's a national platform built for scale, and Watertown was one stop on a regional launch calendar.
The rest of Arsenal Yards' recent additions follow the same logic. A Ben & Jerry's is joining the roughly ten other locations the chain already operates across the state. Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh, a fast casual chain with an existing location in Framingham, has also signed on for the development. These are proven concepts being placed into a planned retail environment, which is a completely reasonable way for a shopping center to fill storefronts. It's just a different growth engine than the one running through Watertown Square and East Watertown, where the same handful of restaurant families keep trading buildings and expanding their own footprints instead of importing someone else's brand.
Both things can be true in the same town at the same time. Arsenal Yards is where Watertown imports national dining concepts. Main Street, Spring Street, and Bigelow Avenue are where it keeps recirculating its own.
The Next Three Weekends
If you're trying to plan around all of this, the calendar cooperates. Watertown's annual Faire on the Square takes over Saltonstall Park behind City Hall on Saturday, September 19, from noon to 5 p.m., with more than 100 vendors, a kids' zone, and a bake off competition.
A few things worth building a weekend around before the weather turns:
- Mighty Squirrel's biergarten at Gore Place runs Thursdays from 4 to 9 p.m. and Fridays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., through October, with food available from a rotating food truck
- Arsenal Yards' Fall Falladays turns the River Green and Bond Square into a fall décor scene for one night, with fire pits, hay bales, and proceeds from a talent show benefiting the Watertown Community Foundation
- Halva's new Main Street location is open for the dinners that used to happen at Not Your Average Joe's, just with a different menu and a working wood fired oven
None of these require planning far ahead. They're the kind of low key, close to home options that make a Tuesday or a Saturday in Watertown feel a little different than it did a year ago.
What This Adds Up To
The headline version of this story would be simple: Watertown has a lot of new restaurants. That's true, but it undersells what's actually happening. The town's independent food scene isn't just growing, it's circulating. The same owners who spent decades building one restaurant are reopening bigger, or reinventing themselves in someone else's old space, while the buildings they leave behind get picked up by the next family with something to prove. Arsenal Yards is doing something different and useful in its own right, bringing recognizable names to a corner of town built for exactly that kind of retail. Neither approach cancels the other out. Together they're a decent signal of a town that people, both new arrivals and lifelong owners, keep choosing to invest in.
If you're curious what else has shifted in Watertown lately, from the square to the East End, the team at The Toland Team keeps a close eye on the neighborhood beyond the for sale signs. Reach out any time you want a local read on what's changing in Watertown.
