"Trust me, I want to lease that space more than anybody else in the world."
That's Thomas Cifrino, talking about a storefront at 596 Massachusetts Avenue that his family has owned for generations. It sits in the middle of Central Square, on a block where three other addresses have opened new kitchens in the past year. Cifrino's problem isn't a picky landlord or a stalled negotiation. The building needs a power transformer strong enough to meet current code, a $500,000 job that would take six to eight months, and he hasn't been able to make the math work with tenants who need to move in now, not next spring.
Walk two doors down and the story flips. At 853 Main Street, in the space that used to hold Tony Maws's Craigie on Main, a restaurant called Fallow Kin opened on October 15 last year and had, within four months, become one of the reservations Boston food writers were fighting over. Around the corner at 567 Massachusetts Avenue, the team behind the longtime cocktail bar Brick & Mortar rebuilt their own space into Acqua & Bocca, an Italian apericena bar built around low-proof drinks and small plates. Both openings sit inside the same few blocks as Cifrino's empty transformer room. Same square, same season, two entirely different outcomes, and the difference has less to do with what Central Square wants and more to do with who owns the building.
What Actually Filled the Block
Fallow Kin is the more instructive story of the two. The kitchen, run by Conor Dennehy and Danielle Ayer of Talulla along with chef Marcos Sanchez, built its identity around not wasting anything: whey gets used to poach fish, smoked cabbage gets turned into broth, and the plan includes donating kitchen surplus to local food security programs. It's the kind of concept that only works if a landlord is willing to let a new tenant gut and rebuild a kitchen that had belonged to one of the city's best-known chefs for over a decade. Someone made that call, and it paid off fast enough that food writers were still covering it in February.
The Central Square Business Improvement District has its own number for how the square is doing, and it's a good one: a January 2025 assessment put first-floor vacancy in the district at under 2 percent after a dozen new leases, five of them restaurants. But that number and the city's own count don't agree. By September 2025, the Harvard Crimson was reporting 19 known vacant storefronts in Central Square specifically, and a Patch story from that same spring flagged that Hilton's Tent City closing would push the count to 20. Two organizations, counting the same three or four blocks, arrived at very different pictures within months of each other. Part of that is footprint (the BID's number covers its own member district, the city's covers a wider commercial zone) and part of it is timing, since new vacancies can open as fast as old ones fill. Either way, the honest read is that Central Square's comeback is real and only partial at once, and depends heavily on which storefronts you're counting.
Central Square BID president Michael Monestime has an explanation for why some of these spaces move fast and others sit for years: ownership. "We have a lot of legacy landowners, not big REIT organizations," he told the Crimson. "We have mom and pop property owners who, you know, they have to collect rent to pay their mortgages." That's Cifrino's situation exactly. He wants a tenant. He doesn't have half a million dollars sitting around for an electrical upgrade, and neither does the small business that might otherwise take the space.
A Square Throwing Its First Night Market
The BID isn't only measuring vacancy, it's also building new reasons for people to be in the square after dark. On September 19, Central Square held its first-ever Night Market at University Park on Sidney Street, a free event built around food trucks, local vendors, live music, and art installations, with a rain date the following Saturday. It's a small thing on paper, but it's a different kind of investment than a restaurant lease. A restaurant opening is one operator betting on a location. A night market is the BID betting on the square as a whole, trying to give people a reason to be there that doesn't depend on any single tenant succeeding or failing.
East Cambridge Isn't Trying to Reinvent Itself
A mile away, on Cambridge Street between Fulkerson and Fifth, the East Cambridge Business Association ran its 17th annual "Smoke This" Rib Fest on September 27, the same weekend this piece was written. The lineup reads like it hasn't needed to change much in years: Althea, Bambara Kitchen & Bar, Catalyst, Dumpling Xuan, Formaggio Kitchen Kendall, Gufo, Lone Star Taco Bar, Oak Bistro, Paperback Tavern, Revival Cafe, Satellite, Scull and Keel Fish House & Spirits, Shy Bird, and State Park, most of them names that have shown up at this event for years running.
What's different about East Cambridge isn't the food, it's who's paying for the party. The sponsor list for Rib Fest includes Alexandria Real Estate Equities, BXP, DivcoWest, BioMed Realty, MIT, and Takeda, the same institutional life-science landlords that own most of the lab and office space in the neighborhood. That's a fundamentally different backer than the mom-and-pop owners Monestime described in Central Square. East Cambridge's restaurant scene doesn't experience the same churn because it isn't propped up by the same kind of small, cash-constrained property owner. It's stitched into a commercial ecosystem built around large biotech tenants who have every incentive to keep ground-floor retail full and functioning, whether or not any one restaurant is the hottest reservation in the city that month. The result is a square that looks static compared to Central's turnover, not because nothing is happening but because the ownership behind it doesn't need anything to change.
The One Empty Storefront Capital Couldn't Fix
Then there's Harvard Square, and specifically the old AMC Loews at 10 Church Street. Gerald Chan bought the property in 2015 and announced plans through his firm Mayhaw LLC to redevelop it into retail and office space along with two movie theaters. Those plans have not moved forward. As of an April 2026 report, it remained the longest-standing retail vacancy in the city. In a written statement included in that April 2026 report, Mayhaw spokesperson Paul Donovan said the firm remains committed to developing the site.
That's a third kind of stalled storefront, and it differs from Cifrino's. His delay comes down to the cost and timeline of an electrical upgrade. At 10 Church Street, the redevelopment announced after the 2015 purchase has not yet come to fruition, and the former cinema's marquee in the middle of Harvard Square has stayed unlit in the meantime. The city's Vacant Storefront Initiative, which since June 2025 has required owners of long-vacant ground-floor spaces to post leasing contact information or "coming soon" signage, has coincided with a 12 percent citywide drop in vacancies between November 2024 and October 2025. Roughly 90 storefronts were still empty as of April 2026, and 10 Church Street was the longest-running of them.
Line these three up and the pattern is less about Cambridge's commercial health overall and more about who's holding the deed. A small family owner without half a million dollars keeps one Central Square corner dark while three of his neighbors fill in around him. A cluster of institutional biotech landlords keeps East Cambridge's restaurant roster steady enough that the same names show up at Rib Fest year after year. And a single owner's redevelopment plan for the square's most visible building, announced after a 2015 purchase, has yet to come to fruition. None of that is a story about a neighborhood trending up or down. It's a story about how differently a block can behave depending on whose name is on the property tax bill.
If you're the kind of person who notices which storefronts change first and wonders why, that's exactly the read Colleen Kelly Homes keeps close watch on across Cambridge and the neighborhoods around it. If you ever want that lens turned toward a specific block or building you're curious about, reach out and we'll walk through it together.
