Ask someone who works at Cummings Center what's new to eat in Beverly and they will tell you about the Mediterranean cafe with the seal mural, or maybe the Shaquille O'Neal chicken chain that just moved in a few minutes away. Ask someone who spent Restaurant Week working through Cabot Street and they will bring up the modern Latin kitchen from a "Chopped" finalist, or the farm-to-table spot two doors down. Both people are describing the same city. Neither one has seen the other's restaurant.
That split is not a coincidence of geography. It is the clearest way to understand what is actually happening to dining in Beverly right now. Downtown already had its moment, a wave of chef-driven openings that landed on Cabot and Rantoul Streets back in 2023 and 2024 and are still what most people mean when they say Beverly's food scene took off. The news in 2026 is happening somewhere else entirely, on the office park and highway side of the city, where two very different operators just leased space measured in the thousands of square feet. Knowing which wave you are standing in tells you a lot about how you actually eat on a Tuesday night.
The Office Park Learned to Feed Itself
Cummings Center has spent years adding food service the way any big campus does, one lease at a time. This year it added its biggest tenant yet. Pressed Cafe opened its Beverly location on August 10, taking over the former Acapulcos Mexican Family Restaurant and Cantina space at 900 Cummings Center after that restaurant closed in April. The new spot is not a modest counter operation. It runs more than 10,000 square feet with seating for nearly 150 guests between the dining room and patio, open seven days a week from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. A basement bar called The Cellar, built around a speakeasy concept, is expected to open in the coming weeks.
Pressed Cafe is not a local startup testing the market. It is the chain's twelfth location, part of a company that has grown from a single shop founded in 2014 to a footprint across Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, with two more openings planned before the end of the year. Co-owner Miri Shpindler said the goal with each new location is to fold in something specific to the town.
"When we bring Pressed Cafe to a new town, we bring a bit of that town into Pressed Cafe."
In this case that meant referencing Shoebert, the gray seal who took up residence in the Cummings Center pond in 2022 before wandering to the Beverly Police Department, a detail that only makes sense if you already work on that campus.
Cummings Properties Senior Vice President Steve Drohosky described the location as one with a strong reputation for diverse dining options, and the roster backs that up. Pressed Cafe now joins Early Harvest Diner, Regina Pizzeria, Soall Cafe, Tony's, The Whoo(pie) Wagon, and Grass Market by Grassy Roots, which relocated to Cummings Center after thirteen years running its original, smaller storefront in Wenham. That last move matters. Grassy Roots is not a chain chasing scale. It is a well-liked independent that looked at a walkable downtown-style shop and chose a bigger, drive-to campus location instead.
A few miles away on Dodge Street, the same pattern showed up with a bigger name attached. Big Chicken, the fast-casual concept founded by Shaquille O'Neal, opened a new North Shore location on June 29, about nine months after its previous spot inside the Northshore Mall in Peabody closed. Franchise partners Barry Lattuca, James O'Hanlon, Michael Scibelli, and Martin LaChance run the location through JBMM Hospitality, the same group behind the Big Chicken at Wrentham Premium Outlets. Lattuca framed the move as a natural fit.
"Just minutes from Salem and at the heart of the North Shore."
Big Chicken now operates more than 40 locations across North America. Its decision to leave a mall food court for a freestanding spot on Dodge Street is the same decision Pressed Cafe made and the same one Grassy Roots made: bigger format, easier parking, built for people arriving by car rather than on foot.
Downtown Already Had Its Moment
Walk Cabot and Rantoul Streets and you will understand why so many people already consider Beverly's food scene a settled story. This is where the chef-driven, single-location openings landed a couple of years ago, in storefronts sized for a neighborhood rather than a workforce, and they are still the names locals reach for first.
Qué Mas opened at 114 Rantoul Street in the summer of 2024, in the space that had been home to the restaurant Frank. The kitchen belongs to Alex Pineda, a "Chopped" finalist and the son of Lydia Shire, who runs the well-known Boston restaurant Scampo. Pineda built the menu around South American, Colombian, Mexican, Guatemalan, and Peruvian influences and has described his approach to cooking in blunt terms, saying he wants to be fearless with what he puts in front of people.
A year earlier, in August 2023, chef William Fogarty opened Kitchen Table at 329 Cabot Street, seating 140 and running 24 taps of North Shore craft beer alongside a scratch kitchen built on local ingredients. Both restaurants are still very much part of daily life on Cabot and Rantoul. So is Channel Marker Brewing, a downtown fixture that USA Today named a finalist for its best new breweries in the country, a level of national recognition none of the newer Cummings Center or Dodge Street arrivals have picked up.
None of these openings needed a campus lease or a franchise agreement to get built. They needed a storefront, a chef with a name attached, and a downtown corridor narrow enough to walk in twenty minutes. That is still true today. It is just no longer what is new.
What Restaurant Week Actually Reveals
If you want proof that downtown's wave has already crested and settled into something more like an institution, look at who showed up for this year's Restaurant Week. Beverly Main Streets and the Greater Beverly Chamber of Commerce ran "Eat Your Heart Out Beverly" from August 14 through August 23, with participating businesses offering prix fixe menus at $25 or $35. The list included A&B Burgers, Avocado Pit, Beantrust Coffee Bar, Castle, Corner Butcher Shop, Delphine's, Ellie's Pizza, Flip The Bird, Jolie Tea, La QChara, REV Burger, and SuperSub.
Every one of those names is a downtown storefront business. None of them is a 2026 opening, and none of them operates out of Cummings Center or the Dodge Street corridor. The event that exists specifically to promote Beverly's food scene as a citywide draw pulled its entire roster from a list of businesses that were already fixtures, not from anything new.
Chamber Executive Director Leslie Gould summed up the mood by saying simply that the restaurant scene has exploded and become a foodie's delight. She is describing something real, but it is largely a description of what downtown built in 2023 and 2024. It is not a description of the 10,000 square foot lease that just opened at Cummings Center or the chicken chain that just moved out of a mall food court and onto Dodge Street.
Two Waves, One Zip Code
None of this means downtown is losing ground. It means Beverly's restaurant story has two separate timelines running at once, and most people are only tracking the one closer to their own front door. Cabot and Rantoul Streets had their moment in 2023 and 2024, when Kitchen Table and Qué Mas gave the walkable core its current identity, and that identity has held up well enough to anchor a Restaurant Week roster two years later. The Cummings Center and Dodge Street corridor is having its moment now, in 2026, with a 10,000 square foot Pressed Cafe and a Big Chicken location built for people who are driving in, not walking over.
The useful thing to know, if you live here, is that asking what is new in Beverly gets you a very different answer depending on which corridor you already frequent. The next time someone tells you the restaurant scene has exploded, ask them whether they mean this year or two years ago.
If you are a Beverly homeowner curious about how these kinds of neighborhood shifts tend to connect to property values and buyer interest over time, or if you are simply weighing a move within the North Shore, the Kathleen Murphy Group is always glad to talk through what we're seeing on the ground. Contact us anytime.
