Walk Centre Street this month and you'll pass at least six businesses that didn't exist eighteen months ago. The easy story to tell about that kind of change is the one every neighborhood eventually tells itself: longtime owners cash out, outside money moves in, rents climb, and the place that used to feel like yours starts to feel like someone else's idea of what your neighborhood should be.
That's not what's happening on Centre Street. Look at who actually applied for these licenses and opened these doors, and a different pattern shows up. Almost none of them are strangers. They're people who already had a foothold here, sometimes literally in the same storefront, before the new sign went up.
A Corridor Full of Recent Dates
Here's what's landed in Jamaica Plain since the start of 2025, roughly in order:
- Gangnam Spice opened in Jackson Square in November 2025, bringing Korean fried chicken and street food to 225 Centre Street under founders Richard Kim and Jiyeon Lee.
- Viza Cafe opened in January 2026 at 114 South Street, serving Colombian coffee and rotating weekly specials.
- Behan Caffe, Ethiopian Cafe, Third Cliff Bakery, and Ula Cafe all received liquor licenses from the Boston Licensing Board in the same March 2026 session, four approvals in a single sitting.
- Beyond Proof opened in April 2026 at 597 Centre Street, Boston's first zero-proof bar.
- Gangnam Spice and a new Mexican restaurant, Abuela's Table at 416 Centre Street in Hyde Square, both picked up full alcohol licenses in July 2026.
- Gori, a Japanese kakigori shaved-ice concept, was announced for 660B Centre Street in May 2026.
- Mr. Drinky, a proposed craft cocktail bar at 606 Centre Street, has held a license since March 2026 but hadn't shown much construction progress as of that same report.
That's a lot of activity for a corridor that used to measure change in decades, not months. The question worth asking isn't just what opened. It's who's behind the counter.
The Same Names Keep Showing Up
Krista Kranyak closed Ten Tables, her farm-to-table restaurant at 597 Centre Street, on December 31, 2025, after 25 years. She'd opened it in 2002 in a space where she'd already been working under chef Tim Partridge's Perdix. Four months later, she reopened the same address as Beyond Proof, a 40-seat, 800-square-foot bar built around zero-proof cocktails and Mediterranean mezze. She's been in the restaurant business for 30 years, much of it in that exact room. This wasn't a new operator taking over a vacated space. It was the same person, in the same building, building a different concept she'd been thinking about for a while.
Michel Soltani has owned the Brendan Behan Pub at 378 Centre Street since 2007, a bar that's anchored Hyde Square since the late 1980s. When he applied for a license to open Behan Caffe next door at 380 Centre Street, approved in March 2026, he wasn't entering the neighborhood. He was expanding sideways into the storefront next to the one he's run for nearly two decades.
Third Cliff Bakery's origin story runs even longer. Baker Meg Crowley started as Rosie the Trike, a cart at the Egleston Farmers' Market, back in 2015. She didn't open a brick-and-mortar location until October 2020, at 3531 Washington Street near the corner of McBride. The beer and wine license she picked up in March 2026 caps eleven years of showing up in the same corner of the neighborhood before asking for anything more than a farmers' market table.
Ula Cafe's owner, Priya Mukhopadhaya, worked at Tres Gatos, one of Centre Street's own restaurants, before opening her own place. She's a JP resident who has explained that she opened because she
"felt the lack of spaces like this"
meaning a cafe that could shift from daytime coffee to an evening wine bar. That's not a gap analysis run by an outside investor. That's someone noticing what her own neighborhood didn't have yet.
Kranyak put it a different way when talking about her new zero-proof cocktails to Boston Magazine, asking why anyone should assume
"we're supposed to be drinking for the taste and not the effect"
a small line that says something bigger about operators who've been doing this long enough to know the difference between a trend and a genuine gap.
Why Now: The License Math
None of this is coincidence. Boston has been distributing 195 zip-code-restricted liquor licenses across ten neighborhoods, including Jamaica Plain, over three calendar years, part of a state and city push to get licenses into neighborhoods that had historically gone without. That's the mechanism behind the March 2026 session that approved four Jamaica Plain licenses at once, and behind the July 2026 approvals for Gangnam Spice and Abuela's Table. The city set the pace. The people applying were mostly already here waiting for the door to open.
The Harder Cases
Not every thread ties off neatly, and a pattern this clean deserves its stress test. Ten Tables closing did initially read like a loss. Jamaica Plain News reported at the time that Kranyak's team framed it as making way for a new venture rather than a retirement, and four months later that turned out to be accurate. The insider pattern held.
Fiore's Bakery is the harder one. Charlie Fiore's building at 55 South Street, home to the bakery since 2004, went up for sale in December 2025 at $2.9 million. The listing includes two residential units, one priced at $749,000 for 1,350 square feet and another at $662,800 for 1,216 square feet, alongside language giving a buyer the option to dissolve the bakery and deliver the space vacant. Nothing has resolved. If Fiore's closes and the replacement is an outside concept with no prior JP connection, this piece's thesis gets a real exception. If the pattern holds the way it has everywhere else on this corridor, whoever takes that space will probably turn out to have a Jamaica Plain address already.
What to Watch Next
Two threads are still open. Mr. Drinky has held its license since March 2026, but the Centre Street storefront it's taking over, previously home to J.C. Fruit Shop and Caramelo Clothing Company, hadn't shown much visible work as of that report. Owner Alan Wong has run cocktail pop-ups across Boston and the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Council backed the concept specifically because the area lacked a comparable spot. A license in hand isn't a bar with a pour.
Gori, the kakigori shop slated for 660B Centre Street, was aiming for a spring opening when it announced its plans back in May, a target that's already come and gone without a confirmed open date as of this writing. It's worth watching simply because that particular storefront has cycled through a number of tenants before, and whether Gori breaks that streak will say something about whether the corridor's momentum extends to every address or just the ones with an insider already behind them.
None of this touches what's kept Centre Street working for people who've lived here for years. City Feed and Supply still anchors the block as the neighborhood's grocery-and-cafe standard. El Oriental de Cuba, Tres Gatos, and Vee Vee still define the stretch that gave JP its food identity in the first place. The Haven, tucked into the historic Haffenreffer Brewery complex, is still the only Scottish restaurant and bar in New England, expanded within that same complex after a 2022 relocation. The new wave isn't replacing any of that. It's filling in dayparts and formats the neighborhood didn't have: a coffee shop that becomes a wine bar at night, a bakery with an evening license, a cocktail bar built around ice rather than volume.
The next time a storefront changes hands on Centre Street, the useful question isn't whether the neighborhood is changing. It's whether the person signing the lease already had a key to somewhere nearby.
If you're watching Jamaica Plain for reasons beyond where to eat this month, John Maxfield has spent three decades reading this neighborhood's patterns, on Centre Street and beyond it. Get in touch when you're ready to talk about what's next.
