Mola Mekonant spends part of his week portioning out roughly 375 pounds of hummus, one sandwich, one kebab, one grain bowl at a time. He's not the official owner of the Cypress Street kitchen where he does this yet. He took over as general manager back in June, and he's working toward buying the place outright. But he's already decided what he'll call it once the paperwork clears: Mola, his own first name, which means "satisfied" in Amharic. On the wall behind the register, photographs of his mother and grandmother watch the dining room. His plan is to fill the rest of that wall with photos of the regulars, so the room eventually looks like family.
That's not a grand opening. That's someone deciding to put his name on a business he already runs, inside a room that already knows him.
A short walk away, on Harvard Street in Brookline Village, Nick Lisotto reopened Sorriso Market at the end of August, in the same storefront at 27 Harvard Street where he first opened the shop back in December 2020. The market had closed last year. What came back is narrower in scope, built around a more specialized selection of European wines, and according to Brookline.News' reporting on the relaunch, aimed less at stocking every bottle possible and more at building something closer to a regular's clubhouse.
Two different corners of the same town. Two owners who already knew what they were building before they built it a second time.
The Street Everyone Else Is Watching
If you've been reading about Brookline's restaurant scene this summer, you've probably already heard about the northern stretch of Harvard Street near Coolidge Corner. Wonder, the delivery company's hybrid food hall concept, is moving into the storefront next to Congregation Kehillath Israel, and Arwa Yemeni Coffee has been angling for the late-night crowd near the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Those are real stories, and worth knowing if that's your end of the neighborhood. They're also the ones that have already been written up, block by block, on more than one site this season.
The quieter version of Brookline's 2026 food story is happening a few blocks south, around Cypress Street and Brookline Village, and it looks different in one specific way. It isn't outside capital arriving. It's the same people coming back to the same addresses, on their own terms.
A Restaurant Becoming Its Owner's Name
Za'Tar opened on Cypress Street as a Mediterranean restaurant last year, then began keeping kosher about ten months in, after the previous owner noticed how much demand there was from Brookline's Jewish community and from regulars driving in from Brighton and Newton. The spot built a following on that combination: falafel, shawarma, schnitzel, and a hummus program serious enough to earn its own reviews.
Mekonant grew up between Ethiopia and Israel, studied animation and design, and ended up in restaurant work almost by accident. He's kept most of what made the original menu work but pared it down and layered in his own recipes, folding his hummus into sandwiches, spooning it over kebabs, tossing it with mushrooms and fried onions in a grain bowl. He wants every regular eventually pictured on that wall, so the room feels less like a restaurant and more like a family kitchen.
That's a different kind of change than a new lease going up on a vacant storefront. It's an employee becoming an owner, in the same room, with the same customers, deciding what the place should mean once it's officially his.
The Wine Shop That Came Back Sharper
The first version of Sorriso Market opened in December 2020, when Lisotto, a chef and certified sommelier, put his own philosophy on the door in spirit if not on the sign. Sorriso is Italian for smile, a word Lisotto has tattooed on his wrist alongside his late father's ashes, a private tribute that shaped the whole project. The original shop stocked more than 1,300 labels, a side room he called his wine cellar with bottles reaching back to the 1800s, house-milled pasta made from grains he ground himself, and a rotating gallery of paintings by wine artist Thomas Arvid.
That version closed last year. What reopened at the same Harvard Street address in late August is smaller in scope but sharper in focus, built around a more specialized selection of European wines rather than a thousand-plus label catalog. Brookline.News, which covers the town's restaurant and retail scene closely, described the relaunch as a shift toward building community around the shop rather than simply expanding inventory. For an owner who once measured his shop's ambition in bottle count, choosing to narrow instead of grow is its own kind of statement about what a neighborhood wine shop is actually for.
What Else Is Turning Over Around Them
Neither Mekonant nor Lisotto is rebuilding in a vacuum. The same stretch of Brookline Village and the Commonwealth Avenue corridor has gone through a full season of smaller moves, some brand new, some simply changing hands:
- Junbi Matcha & Tea opened in July on Harvard Avenue in Brookline Village, bringing a ceremonial matcha and specialty tea menu to a corridor that didn't have one.
- So Kitchen, the Thai restaurant on Cypress Street, rebranded as Chaba Cafe, keeping the curries and noodles under a new name.
- KaoJiu, the Chinese barbecue spot at 406 Harvard Street, closed, and town licensing filings show a soup shop called Yu Yue is set to take the space with a full liquor license.
- Shahs Halal Food, a New York-based chain with existing Boston locations in Back Bay and near Beacon Hill, filed to open a 25-seat shawarma and kebab spot at 830 Commonwealth Avenue.
- Bingtanghulu, serving the candied fruit skewers of the same name, is approved to move into the former BE Pasta Bar space at 1026 Commonwealth Avenue.
Most of that is ordinary churn, the kind any commercial strip goes through in a busy year. What sets Mekonant and Lisotto apart is that neither of them is part of that churn. They're not new tenants filling empty storefronts left by someone else's exit. They're people with existing history in these exact buildings, choosing to rebuild rather than move on or sell.
Why The Distinction Actually Matters
A national company signing a lease on Harvard Street tells you something about site selection and delivery economics. An owner reopening the shop he closed the year before, with a tighter wine list and less floor space devoted to inventory, tells you something else: that he thinks the neighborhood still wants what he's selling, just in a more considered form. A general manager renaming a restaurant after himself before he's even finished buying it tells you he's already decided this is where he's staying.
That kind of continuity doesn't show up in a commercial leasing report. It shows up in who still knows your order, who remembers your kid's name, who's been mixing your hummus or pouring your wine long enough that a year of being closed didn't erase the relationship. Brookline Village and the blocks around Cypress Street aren't seeing a wave of outside investment this fall. They're getting a couple of people who already belonged there, choosing to stay put.
If you live nearby, that's worth knowing before the next headline about Harvard Street pulls your attention back toward Coolidge Corner. The more interesting version of this story isn't happening where the cameras already are.
Brookline keeps rewriting itself block by block, and the people who notice first are usually the ones already walking those blocks every week. The team at M|E Collective pays attention to these same corners because we live and work in them too, and we're always glad to talk through what a particular block is actually like day to day. If that's useful to you, Book an Appointment anytime.
