Walk east on Broadway past Curtis Street this month and you will pass two properties that used to define Teele Square for opposite reasons. One held a beloved vegan restaurant for more than a decade before it closed in 2023, then sat dark for three years. The other has been a fenced lot of gravel and weeds since a three-alarm fire in 2011. Last month, only one of them changed. The wine bar team that Boston food writers already treat as a sure thing chose to open its next restaurant at 1153 Broadway, on the same stretch of the same street as a hole in the ground that has sat empty for fifteen years and counting. That timing is the story, not the menu.
A Harder Address Than It Looks
The former True Bistro space had a real track record before it went dark. It ran as a serious, chef-driven vegan restaurant for years, which is a difficult format to sustain in a neighborhood built on triple-deckers and bus stops rather than tasting menus. When it closed in 2023, the storefront stayed empty for about three years, until Liars announced it would take the space in the summer of 2026.
Liars took it anyway. The restaurant opened its doors on August 20, 2026, according to Boston Magazine, under the ownership of Mary Kurth, the same person who has run Davis Square's Spoke Wine Bar since 2017. Spoke was named a semifinalist for the 2026 James Beard Award in the Outstanding Bar category earlier this year, one of the more credible signals a small neighborhood operation can get in that industry. Kurth's team did not need a sure thing. They picked the address that had already gone dark once.
Why This Team, This Corner
Liars describes itself on Instagram as the "bigger baby sister" to Spoke, and the physical difference matters here. Spoke is a nine-seat, intimate room; Liars is roughly double that footprint, with a chef's counter overlooking an open kitchen run by Paul Butler, who also cooks at Spoke. The menu leans into dishes built for lingering rather than a quick plate before a movie: elk sirloin wraps, bowls of somen, a wine list built around what the team calls mountain wines, grown on vines above 500 meters elevation. Bar manager Katie Weismann built a cocktail program that includes a rye served with its own squirt gun of water so a drinker can dilute it to taste, which is the kind of detail that tells you the room is not trying to turn tables fast.
None of that is why the opening matters to someone who lives three blocks away. What matters is that an operator with real leverage, an award nod, a proven Davis Square following, and the ability to open almost anywhere in the city chose the specific block that has been light on sit-down dinner options for years, directly across the street from the neighborhood's most visible unresolved problem.
The Fifteen-Year Wait Next Door
The lot at 1154-1164 Broadway, the address Somervillians have called the Pit since it burned in a three-alarm fire on October 29, 2011, sits close enough to Liars that the two properties share a sightline. The fire destroyed a small cluster of businesses, including the restaurant Kee Kar Lau, a nail salon, Hawk Cleaners, and a Somerville police substation, according to the Somerville Times. The roughly 12,700 square foot lot has been fenced and mostly empty ever since.
The timeline since then reads like a case study in how a single parcel can outlast the people trying to develop it.
- 2015: Anuj Pradhan and the 1154 Broadway Realty Trust buy the parcel for $800,000, later recording a $2.5 million second mortgage with East Boston Savings Bank.
- 2018: The Zoning Board of Appeals approves a six-story, 75-room boutique hotel. The approval later expires without construction.
- 2022: Excavation is announced but does not lead to a build.
- 2025: The development team returns with an expanded plan, an eight-story, 99-room hotel with valet parking and restaurants on both the ground and top floors, according to Cambridge Day. The site is zoned for four stories, so the team is seeking two variances to build taller, along with five variances total and two special permits.
- September 30, 2026: The Zoning Board of Appeals takes the project up again, according to Somerville YIMBY, with the meeting held online at 6 p.m.
Frustration with the site has become its own small tradition. In 2024, someone hung a mock banner on the chain-link fence reading "Somerville celebrates 13 years of the Teele Square Rat Playground," a joke the Boston Globe reported was born, in the words of the anonymous neighbor who paid for it, from years of walking past a hole where a building used to be. At a public meeting last year, longtime resident Ronald McCollam said he was excited to see the project moving, telling Cambridge Day that anything would be an improvement over an empty pit. Conor Brennan, who owns the nearby bar PJ Ryan's, has pushed publicly for the city to fast-track the site, arguing that Ward 7's own residents and business owners share responsibility if it stays stalled another year.
What One Open Door Says About the Other
A restaurant opening and a zoning hearing are not usually the same story, but the geography here forces the comparison. Liars did not wait for the Pit to resolve before signing a lease across the street from it. That is worth reading as information rather than coincidence. An operator with a James Beard nod and a proven following in Davis Square does enough due diligence before committing to a second location that a fenced construction eyesore next door would show up in the decision. It did not stop the deal.
The Pit's fifteen-year stall has never really been about whether Teele Square can support new investment. Liars is proof that it can. The record on the Pit shows a hotel approved in 2018 that did not reach construction, and a larger proposal now working through a four-story zoning limit that requires variances. Those are two different problems, and conflating them has made the neighborhood's slow corner look weaker than the foot traffic actually suggests.
What Changes on Broadway This Fall
The practical shift for anyone who lives between Powder House Square and the Davis Square line is a wider dinner radius. Teele Square has functioned for a few years as the square you pass through on the way to a restaurant somewhere else, either back toward Davis or up toward Ball Square. A larger, chef-driven room with a wine list and a full bar changes that math for the block immediately around Curtis and Broadway, whether or not the Pit ever becomes the hotel its owners have now proposed twice.
The Zoning Board of Appeals meeting on September 30 is public and held online, and it is the first real test of whether this version of the hotel proposal moves further than the 2018 plan did. If it clears the height variances, the fence around 1154-1164 Broadway may finally come down for construction rather than for another round of renderings. If it stalls again, Teele Square will still have a restaurant worth walking to, which is more than it had this time last year.
For anyone tracking how these small shifts in a single block eventually show up in what a Somerville property is worth, The Encompass Group follows this kind of change closely across Somerville's squares. If you want a read on what's happening on your own block, schedule a consultation.
