5 best restaurant openings and dining updates (Sept. 18, 2025)

5 best restaurant openings and dining updates (Sept. 18, 2025)




Food

Stay up to date on the best new restaurants, recent openings, and the biggest dining updates across Greater Boston’s food scene.

89 Charles
89 Charles, a new cocktail bar in Beacon Hill, opens in September. Courtesy of 89 Charles

It’s a good time to be a Greater Boston diner in 2025, with exciting and diverse restaurant openings occurring all over the metro area. 

Each week, Boston.com will highlight the restaurant openings worth knowing about across the Greater Boston region. Some spots will already be open, while others are set to debut soon or later this year. At least one featured restaurant will always be a bonus item — either a pop-up, a collaboration, or event at area restaurants.

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What’s new in Greater Boston restaurant openings this week

89 Charles interior.

89 Charles

Beacon Hill is getting a 12-seat cocktail bar and 30-seat lounge, where reimagined classics and seasonally-driven beverages from bar manager Dave Irwin (previously at Zurito, Row 34, and Porto) are the focal point of the concept. The current menu includes riffs on an old fashioned that use tallow-washed whiskey, or cocktails that promise “Autumn in a glass” in combining bourbon, maple, yellow chartreuse, allspice, vanilla, and citrus. For food, 89 Charles offers a small menu of small plates, including Kaluga caviar on latkes, a shaved fennel caesar salad, and a French dip sandwich. 

Opening date: Sept. 20, 2025

89 Charles St., Beacon Hill

Pizza from Crisp by Stats. – Hub Hall

Crisp by Stats

After the quiet closure of APIZZA left Hub Hall without a pizza option, Southie bar Stats (with a second location that opened in Hub Hall earlier this year) did six weeks of testing pie recipes to fill that gap. “Anything goes on a pizza,” according to the press release, which is why the menu includes pies topped with buffalo tenders, steak and cheese, and hot honey chicken. 

Open now (September 2025)

80 Causeway St., West End

Gato Exotico

CambridgeSide is getting another local restaurant under its roof amid its period of revamping the mall space, with a playful Mexican concept from the team behind Harvard Square tiki bar Wusong Road. Expect a menu of regional Mexican specialties like mole negro, cochinita pibil slow roasted in banana leaves, and shareable street food. Craft cocktails will focus on using mezcal and tequila with tropical juices, all in a space that’s a nod to 1990s mall culture. 

Opening date: Late 2025

100 Cambridgeside Place, Cambridge

Re:Bar

From the team behind the pet-friendly Park 9 Dog Bar comes quite the departure in concept. Re:Bar will offer drinks, of course, like craft beer and classic cocktails paired with small bar bites. But it also will offer interactive gaming, like axe-throwing and darts.

Opening date: November 2025

73 Norman St., Everett

George Sebastakis prepares drinks at Hecate, an underground speakeasy in Boston. (Carlin Stiehl for The Boston Globe)

Bonus: Proof & Motive bar crawl

If you like Halloween, whodunit games, and/or some of the city’s best cocktail programs, this month-long event may be your ticket to get into the spooky season spirit early. Starting this week and running until Oct. 31, head to Yvonne’s, Spoke Wine Bar, Offsuit, The Wig Shop, Darling, Backbar, Tall Order, Merai, Birds of Paradise, and Hecate where you can order a “mystery cocktail” that offers clues to solving the mysterious death of fictional hospitality mogul Tom Laffer. 

Event date: Sept. 17-Oct. 31

Multiple locations

Profile image for Katelyn Umholtz

Katelyn Umholtz

Food and Restaurant Reporter

Katelyn Umholtz covers food and restaurants for Boston.com. Katelyn is also the author of The Dish, a weekly food newsletter.



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