 Restaurants & Shopping · Wednesday Edition Wednesday, September 23, 2026 | The Daily Spotlight · Presented By This spot is open. Reach 8,500+ Bostonians before 7am, in the email they open with coffee. September dates are 75% off — $29.75 a day. | Weather 💨 61° / 54° Mostly sunny and cool, with a northeast wind of 13 to 21 mph gusting as high as 31. Mostly clear tonight, low around 54. Thursday is mostly sunny and 63, with a slight chance of showers Thursday night · full forecast → | The T Today ● RL ● OL ● GL ● BL Green keeps three stops closed: Symphony on the E, and Brandon Hall (through Oct 4) and Dean Road inbound (through Oct 9) on the C. Red, Orange and Blue are normal today. Then the big one starts Saturday: no Green Line trains between North Station and Babcock St, Kenmore or Heath St from Sept 26 through Oct 4 · live status → | Roads Everything on MassDOT’s planned board for Wednesday is after dark, so the daytime lanes are clear. Wednesday night: Route 2 in both directions between Belmont and Lexington, 8pm to 4am; I-95 in Waltham from 9pm; and Route 1A, Route 60 and Beach Street in Revere from 7pm. |
| The number: 9 — years since Cunard Tavern opened in an old woodworking shop on Orleans Street. East Boston’s neighborhood tavern serves its last day on Sunday, September 27. Day 266 of 2026. the story → | ⚾️ Red Sox host Cleveland tonight at Fenway, 7:10 — the middle game of the series, and Boston closes the regular season with six straight at home. The Patriots beat Pittsburgh 20-3 at Gillette on Sunday and are 1-1 · full scoreboard → | 🍽️ Restaurants & Shopping East Boston has four days left with Cunard Tavern It was a quiet week for openings and a loud one for goodbyes: a waterfront gastropub and an 18-year Norwood dining room both named their last night. The one thing moving the other way is a wings institution that looks to be crossing a town line. Then the shopping half goes over the river, to Harvard Square. Closing · East Boston Cunard Tavern, 24 Orleans Street. Last day Sunday, September 27. The tavern opened in the spring of 2017 in a former woodworking shop a block off the harbor, and built its name on globally-minded plates and a serious cocktail list. Its own farewell note, quoted by Boston Restaurant Talk on Monday, does not give a reason, and reads like the room it describes: “a neighborhood bar, a gathering place, a place for first dates and birthday celebrations, Sunday brunches and late nights, beer dinners and trivia nights.” If you have been meaning to go, this is the week. Read more → Opening, reportedly · Watertown Buff’s Pub, 46 Arsenal Street. Buff’s has been arguing the case for its wings from Washington Street in Newton Corner since 1976, and Boston Restaurant Talk reported on Sept. 17 that it appears to be opening a second room a short way north, in the old Belle’s Burgers and Ice Cream space just outside Watertown Square. Worth stating plainly: that report rests on a licensing-board filing and posts from a neighborhood group and a contractor, not on an announcement from the pub, and no opening date has been named. The week’s restaurant news → Closing · Norwood Olivadi Restaurant & Bar, Guild Street. Last night Saturday, October 10. Anthony Delapa opened Olivadi in downtown Norwood in 2008; it looked to have closed for good in 2020 and came back a couple of years later. His family announced the permanent closing on Facebook this week, thanking the town for 18 years, and Boston Restaurant Talk carried it on Monday. Three more weekends if you want a last plate. Read more → Booked solid, for the record Our OpenTable board has not moved off its snapshot from the week of August 14, when Saltie Girl led at 235 bookings and the North End took four of the ten. Read it as a dated record of that week, not as a reading of this one. The full ten →Where to browse · Harvard Square One of America’s great bookstore squares: the Harvard Coop has been the Square’s anchor since 1882, books downstairs and insignia everything upstairs; the Grolier Poetry Book Shop has given a single room over entirely to poetry since 1927; and Harvard Book Store keeps its own used-and-remaindered basement. Records and vintage fill the side streets. It is across the river rather than in Boston, which is the point — it is the one browse worth a Red Line ride, and a breezy 61-degree afternoon is exactly the weather for it. The bookstore list →Markets this week Two on the calendar between now and Sunday, both free to walk through: the Chinatown Farmers Market, regional growers on the Greenway at Chin Park from 9am Saturday, and the SoWa Open Market, makers, vintage and food trucks along Harrison Avenue in the South End, Sunday 11am to 5pm. | The British reggae mainstays bring the catalogue to a room small enough that you can hear the horn section properly. | The painter talks through her layered, collage-driven work on stage with ICA curator Ruth Erickson. Admission to the talk is free. | Two stadium nights, among the largest bookings in the region this fall. Start times are on the Gillette event page, and the Route 1 traffic is the part to plan around. | An afternoon of Chinatown arts and culture on the Greenway, and the farmers market sets up in the same park from 9am — one trip, two reasons. | An invitation-only concours parks a curated field of pre-war and post-war cars around the bandstand, grouped by country of origin, from morning through early afternoon. |
| Local More than 400 flights were delayed and about 70 cancelled at Logan on Monday as of 6pm, per FlightAware, after the FAA put the airport in a ground delay program from 1:30pm. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said an Amtrak construction crew accidentally cut a fiber line in New Jersey, knocking out telecom and pausing flights across the Northeast. Massport said the airport’s 75-day runway construction project, which began Aug. 31, added to it. Per Boston.com. Read more → | Cambridge The ranking, in its 42nd year and covering about 1,700 institutions, put MIT first and Harvard third, with Yale fourth. The write-up singles out MIT’s enrolment of just over 4,500 in 2025 and its eight-to-one student-to-faculty ratio; Harvard also placed second for Best Value. WHDH reported it Tuesday. Read more → | Massachusetts In newly released polling from the MassINC Polling Group for the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, 63 percent rated the state one of the best or above average to live in, unchanged from a year ago, while only 19 percent said the same about overall affordability and 56 percent called it below average or among the worst. The survey of nearly 1,000 residents was taken in June and July. Per CommonWealth Beacon. Read more → | The Dorchester half is a four-storey, 20-unit building at 2062 Dorchester Ave. just up from Gallivan Boulevard, from developers Fernando Dalfior and Brad Cangiamila: studios, one- and two-bedrooms, four of them income-restricted, five below-grade parking spaces against 34 bicycle spaces, and $5,500 to the Boston Transportation Department for bike-share. The Boston Planning Department board approved it on Sept. 17 alongside a Brighton project. Per the Dorchester Reporter. Read more → |
| Forward this to whoever picks the restaurant. One email, every morning at 6:30, and Wednesday is always where to eat and where to browse. Send them here → | Tomorrow: your weekend, planned — four days of picks, and where to eat near them. You are reading Restaurants & Shopping Wednesday, the Wednesday edition of The Daily Boston Brief. ExploreBoston.com is wicked proud to be a local Boston small business. ExploreBoston · 1 Beacon Street, Floor 15, Boston, MA 02108 |
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