On the same stretch of Harvard Street where Bess's Cafe recently locked its doors for good, a Florida-based caviar company was quietly filing paperwork with the town. According to licensing documents reported by Brookline.News, Marky's Caviar is preparing a storefront at 420 Harvard Street, right next to the existing Tatte, pairing a retail counter for caviar and other gourmet goods with a cafe pouring champagne, wine and vodka. A short walk away, PLNT Burger is finally opening its Coolidge Corner location after a wait long enough that regulars had stopped checking.
If you've lived in Brookline this summer and gotten the sense that the neighborhood is shedding businesses faster than it can replace them, you're reading the signal backward. The closures are real. So is the caviar bar. Both are happening for the same reason.
The closures everyone's been asking about
Over the past several weeks, four local businesses in Brookline have closed, enough to prompt a dedicated piece from Brookline.News asking whether the town's small business scene is in real trouble. The reporting found something less dramatic than the headline implied. Business owners and advocates interviewed largely described the closures as unrelated events, each with its own cause, even as they agreed the losses had exposed real pressure points: rising operating costs, higher commercial rents, shifting consumer habits and an aging generation of owners looking to step back.
Greg Reibman, president and CEO of the Charles River Regional Chamber, which added Brookline to its territory this past April, put it plainly to the paper: every business that closed has its own story, and no single explanation covers all four. That's a useful correction if you've been assuming a domino effect. It's also not the most interesting part of the story.
What the puzzle shop owner has already seen happen twice
David Leschinsky owns Eureka! Puzzles & Games in Coolidge Corner, and he's watched this exact pattern before. He told Brookline.News that "destination businesses" like his can survive on their own, but they thrive only when they sit inside a supporting ecosystem of other places people actually want to visit. What worries him isn't any single closure. It's the composition of the block.
Leschinsky has watched Coolidge Corner cycle through a string of copycat concepts over the years. First it was frozen yogurt shops. Then ice cream parlors. Then nail salons. Now it's barber shops. Each wave follows the same arc: an idea that looks like a sure thing draws a rush of entrepreneurs, and the neighborhood simply can't support that many nearly identical storefronts at once. Some fail. That's not decline. That's a commercial district doing exactly what a saturated, walkable, high-foot-traffic corner does when a concept gets overbuilt.
Read against that history, this summer's closures look less like the start of a slide and more like the same churn Coolidge Corner has absorbed for years, just with a caviar bar and a vegan burger chain filling the gaps this time instead of another frozen yogurt shop.
What's actually changing on the ground
| Recently closed | Recently opened or opening |
|---|---|
| Bess's Cafe | Marky's Caviar (420 Harvard St, next to Tatte) |
| Three additional local businesses cited in recent reporting | PLNT Burger, Coolidge Corner location |
The pattern in that table is the whole point. National and regional concepts with capital behind them (a caviar retailer with locations across New York and Florida, a fast-casual vegan burger chain) are moving in at the same moment small independents are stepping back. That's not a neighborhood in retreat. It's a commercial corridor still attractive enough to draw outside investment even while it loses local operators to costs those operators didn't set.
The rent math nobody says out loud
Tom Coppi, who owns The Picture Place in Coolidge Corner, offered Brookline.News a more optimistic read than most. Aside from a three-month closure at the start of the pandemic, he said business has been about the same since he took over the shop in 2015, in part because framing is the kind of need that doesn't go away. But even Coppi, who calls himself insulated, was blunt about what's changed underneath him. He said it was easier to open a business in the 1970s and '80s because rent and income were in better balance, and when asked whether he could afford to start The Picture Place today if he weren't already established, he wasn't sure he could.
That's the mechanism worth sitting with. Coolidge Corner isn't losing customers. It's pricing out the kind of first-time, undercapitalized entrepreneur who once could have opened a shop like Bess's Cafe, while remaining exactly attractive enough to pull in businesses with outside funding lined up before they sign a lease. The neighborhood is getting more competitive to enter, not less desirable to be in.
What's worth walking over for right now
None of this means the corner's food scene has gone quiet while it sorts itself out. Esmai's, the Coolidge Corner spot at 1306 Beacon Street, spent years as the neighborhood's Hops & Scotch before longtime Brookline restaurant owner David teamed up with events manager Mai to reimagine the space. It now runs a 45-seat roof deck, an unusual amenity for this stretch of Beacon Street, with a menu that ranges from bulgogi empanadas to banh mi. The roof takes reservations for parties of six or more and turns 21-and-up after 6 p.m., though brunch stays open to everyone.
A few minutes away, Prairie Fire takes over its adjacent parking lot each summer and turns it into a wood-fired beer garden, according to bostonchefs.com's 2026 outdoor dining guide, with shaded picnic tables and a full menu of food and beer. Outdoor dining season in Boston runs short. This is close to the last stretch of it.
If your evenings run more toward conversation than cocktails, Brookline Booksmith at 279 Harvard Street has an "Aging Well with Cannabis" talk with Peter Grinspoon and Jay Wexler on the calendar for August 19 at 7 p.m., one of the small, oddly specific events that make the shop a fixture on this block regardless of what's happening in the storefronts around it.
Mark the calendar for the end of September
Brookline Day, the town's annual street festival, returns to Coolidge Corner on Sunday, September 27, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., according to the Brookline Recreation Department. Vendors, food, games and the rest of the usual lineup will fill the same blocks currently absorbing a caviar bar, a burger chain, and the empty space where Bess's Cafe used to be. It's as good a gauge as any of whether the corner's underlying pull is still there. Given everything above, it almost certainly is.
The point
Four businesses closing in the same stretch of weeks reads like a warning sign if you only look at the closures. Look at what's replacing them and the story flips. Coolidge Corner isn't struggling to hold on to customers. It's struggling to stay affordable for the kind of independent owner who built its character in the first place, even as national concepts keep deciding this is exactly where they want to be. That's a different problem than decline, and it's one that shows up in property values and commercial rents long before it shows up in a headline.
If you're already living in Brookline and wondering what that kind of sustained commercial demand means for your own property, or you're weighing whether this is the neighborhood where you want to plant yourself next, Gathers Realty Group tracks these shifts as part of daily work in Newton, Chestnut Hill and the wider Boston market. Schedule a free consultation with Jamal Gathers or Roselle Rosenberg to talk through what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what the headlines suggest.
