If you've been waiting to eat tacos inside the old train station on Union Street, you're still waiting. Newton's Board of License Commissioners voted 3-0 back on June 16 to approve liquor, common victualler, and entertainment licenses for Lockheart, the Wellesley restaurant taking over the 1800s station building next to the Newton Centre Green Line stop. That was about ten weeks ago. As of the most recent reporting from Fig City News, the state's Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission still hadn't issued the license, and the restaurant still hadn't opened.
Meanwhile, several other places have quietly started serving food this year with almost none of the attention Lockheart has gotten. That gap between what got covered and what actually opened is the real story in Newton's village centers this year, and it's worth walking through carefully if you live in or near one of them.
What Opened While Everyone Watched the Train Station
While the station sat dark and the permits worked their way through the system, a handful of other spots just started operating.
- Moments Cafe held its grand opening on August 7 at 1284 Washington Street in West Newton, after a soft opening the week before. It's a specialty coffee and ceremonial Japanese matcha shop that also bakes pastries daily.
- The Biltmore Tavern reopened July 27 at 1205 Chestnut Street in Newton Upper Falls, under the team behind Needham's Blue on Highland, with co-owners Scott Drago and Adam Patti, executive chef Francisco Contrera, and mixologist Junior Oliviera running the kitchen and bar. It had been closed for renovation since early February.
- Amarin of Thailand reopened in Newtonville at 313 Walnut Street back in January, after 36 years on Wellesley's Central Street. Worth noting separately: Thai Amarin, a similarly named restaurant at 287 Centre Street in Newton Corner, closed in June along with the Japanese kitchen operating inside the same space. Different business, same neighborhood, easy to mix up if you're going off memory.
- Something Sweet opened above Rosenfeld Bagel at 1280 Centre Street in Newton Centre, selling nostalgic and Swedish candy and hosting birthday parties in the space.
- The Wonder food hall at 170 Needham Street has now been running for five months, since its March 19 opening. It packs 29 restaurant concepts, from Thai to Indian to Mediterranean, into a single kitchen operation the company calls an infinite kitchen.
None of these generated the months of permit-tracking and licensing-hearing coverage that Lockheart did. They just opened.
The Station, the License, and the Ten-Week Wait
The Lockheart project has a real story behind the wait. The station building at 70 Union Street sat empty since Jamie's on Union closed in 2022, roughly four years of a landmark storefront going dark next to one of Newton Centre's busiest transit stops. A company managed by Anthony Killough bought the building for about $2 million in September 2025. Interior work started in early 2024 with a demolition permit, followed by a restaurant fit-out that ran around $1.2 million, and a fire-protection system acceptance test in June 2026, typically one of the last steps before a restaurant can open.
The plans call for 86 seats inside, 9 more outside, and a takeout window facing the Green, a detail that matters because it's expected to pull foot traffic from the playground side of the block toward the Union Street side once it's running. Hours sought go as late as 1 a.m. on weeknights and Saturdays.
But the license approval on June 16 wasn't the finish line. Contacted by Fig City News in mid-August, the applicants' attorney said the restaurant is still waiting on the state's sign-off.
"A matter of days," the attorney said, "a few weeks hopefully."
That's the kind of estimate that's been offered before on this project, and the ten weeks since the license vote are a useful gut check against it.
Lockheart isn't the only high-profile project running behind its own timeline. CircleBack Kitchen & Bar, an all-day restaurant from longtime restaurateur Roger Zeghibe taking the former Hopsters space at 292 Centre Street in Newton Corner, was originally slated to debut in early January. Zeghibe has more than 35 years in the business and already runs Porttown Public House, Beantown Pub, and The Hub Pub in downtown Boston. As of the most recent public reporting in July, CircleBack still hadn't opened, more than six months past that original target.
Two of the year's most anticipated projects, both still not serving food as of the latest word we have. That's not a coincidence worth ignoring if you've been planning an evening around either one.
A Plaza on Borrowed Time
The same pattern of longer-than-expected timelines shows up a few blocks away, in a very different kind of project.
The Newton Centre Pilot Plaza converted about 7,000 square feet of the Langley Lot, the parking area just off the Green, into a seating and gathering space, removing 24 parking spots in the process. It opened in the summer of 2025 after a contentious planning process. Business owners said they'd learned about the project through a mayoral newsletter rather than direct outreach, and some pushed back hard. Farmstead Table owner Ericka Harindranath put it plainly at the time.
"It does seem to be a little less of a collaborative effort," she said.
Not every business owner saw it that way. Jinny's Pizzeria owner Lydia Reichert supported the project from early on, arguing it would keep people in the area even if it didn't necessarily draw new ones.
The disagreement didn't end with the plaza's opening. In January of this year, Newton's Public Safety and Transportation Committee voted 6-2 to shorten the trial period, moving the planned end date from October 31, 2026 up to May 31. The full City Council reversed that at its March 2 meeting and restored the original October end date, meaning the plaza has now run through an entire second summer on its original schedule. Anne Kane, who oversees the landscaping around Newton Centre, described what she'd watched happen there.
"This is a wonderful addition to the community," she said, pointing to families using the space and people picking up takeout to eat on-site.
What that means for anyone in Newton Centre right now: the plaza's current trial runs out at the end of October, about ten weeks from now, and there's no public decision yet on what happens after that. If you've been meaning to use it, this fall is your test drive before the city decides whether it stays.
What the Turnover Numbers Actually Say
It's tempting to read all of this as a restaurant boom, but the citywide numbers tell a more measured story. Fig City News's own dining directory lists 186 places to eat across Newton as of this month, up from 160 in December. The outlet is upfront that most of that jump comes from better data collection rather than new business, including roughly two dozen chain locations the directory hadn't previously tracked.
Counting like for like, 2026 has brought at least 12 genuine openings and reopenings against nine closings, a net gain of three. Of the current 186 spots, 115, or about six in ten, are independently owned rather than chains. That's the actual shape of the year: modest net growth, still majority-independent, with a few high-profile projects generating outsized attention relative to their still-uncertain opening dates.
What's Left on the Calendar
For anyone planning the next couple of months around the villages, a few fixed dates are worth knowing:
- The Newton Farmers' Market runs Saturdays through October 31, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., at 352 Lowell Avenue outside Newton North High School.
- Newtonville Village Day happens Sunday, September 20, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Walnut Street, with 75 craft and vendor booths, food from area restaurants, and train rides for kids.
- The Pilot Plaza's current trial period closes out at the end of October, with its future beyond that still unsettled.
None of that depends on whether Lockheart or CircleBack ever opens their doors. The villages have a rhythm that runs independent of any single restaurant's timeline, which is worth remembering the next time a permit filing gets more coverage than an actual grand opening.
If you're weighing what any of this means for where you want to be in Newton, whether that's a quieter stretch near Newton Upper Falls or a walk-to-everything spot off the Green, Michelle Roloff tracks this kind of on-the-ground detail as part of how she reads a neighborhood's trajectory, not just its listing prices. Schedule a private strategy session if you'd like to talk through what a specific block or building really looks like day to day before you make a move.
