Walk down South Main Street this month and the building at number one looks finished. The brick and multi-color panels are up, the sidewalk work the town and developer spent months coordinating is done, and a barber pole spins outside a storefront that opened its doors this past spring. Two doors down, a pizza counter does brisk takeout business. But three of the storefronts still have paper in the windows, months past when their food was supposed to be on plates.
That gap between what's open and what's still coming isn't random. It's a pattern, and if you live in Natick Center, it tells you something worth knowing about how this stretch of South Main actually fills back in after three years of construction fencing.
The businesses that didn't wait
The building is called The Block, developer Stuart Rothman's project at 1 South Main Street. It replaced a structure destroyed by a 2019 fire, broke ground in 2023, and was still 80 to 90 percent complete as of mid-2025. The tenants who moved in first were the ones with the least to lose from opening while the block around them was still finishing up.
Maverick's Men's Grooming Center became the first business at The Block to actually open, on May 27, 2026, more than two years after the developer broke ground. Owner Carl Cwiok, who also manages Roosters Men's Grooming in Wellesley, brought on Daniel DaSilva as managing barber for the two-chair shop. Cwiok's barber pole had been visible outside the storefront for nearly a year before the shop itself was ready. A barber shop doesn't need evening foot traffic or a liquor license or a kitchen buildout. It needs a chair, a mirror, and regulars who'll drive to a specific person for a haircut regardless of what's next door.
Blue Square Pizza followed within a matter of weeks. The chain had originally hoped to welcome Natick guests in April 2026, and by late June, the Natick location was confirmed open at 1 S Main Street. This is the Hopkinton chain's third location, after Hopkinton itself and Northborough, and it's a takeout-focused operation serving Detroit-style, grandma-style, Chicago cracker-thin, and New York-style pies. Founded in 2022 by Troy Sproul, Blue Square has climbed Pizza Marketplace's Top 100 Movers and Shakers list and won Pizza Today's Startup Pizzeria of the Year in 2023. A pizza counter, like a barber shop, doesn't depend on the block around it feeling complete. People order ahead and pick up.
Burning Wheel Yoga & Fitness rounded out the sequence, with a July 2026 opening in Natick Center. Same logic: a studio with a membership base doesn't need the storefront next to it to be finished.
Three different businesses, all landing within about ten weeks of each other in the late spring and summer of 2026, and all sharing one trait: none of them needed the neighborhood to be at full strength to make money on day one.
The three that are still waiting
The tenants still behind paper are a different kind of business, and that's exactly why they've taken longer.
North Shore restaurateur Sa Nguyen signed on for three concepts at The Block: Nhậu, San Sushi Bar, and Bún + Bao, a takeout-focused Asian street food concept that shares a kitchen with San Sushi Bar through a pass-through window. All three were originally expected to open this spring. In the most recent public update on the trio, reported in January 2026, Nguyen told a Boston restaurant outlet she was experiencing what she called heavy delays, and no new opening date has been announced since.
Full-service restaurants carry a different cost structure than a barber chair or a pizza counter. They need liquor licenses, health inspections, a trained kitchen staff, and enough surrounding activity to fill tables on a Tuesday, not just a Saturday. Rothman said as much back in 2025 while he was still courting tenants for the building, framing the bet in terms of the town twenty minutes east:
"One of the reasons Wellesley has been successful is that the retail and restaurants feed off of each other."
That's the trade the sit-down concepts are making. They're betting the block will be busy enough by the time they open to justify the overhead. The businesses that already opened made no such bet. They didn't need to.
Two blocks over, the same pattern
The Block isn't the only place this is playing out. Two other openings, both outside the building itself, are timing their debuts around the same calculation.
Tsuru, a Japanese restaurant from owner Jack Sy, is taking shape at Stonegate's mixed-use development at 45 East Central Street, across from St. Patrick Catholic Church. It's a bigger commitment than anything at The Block so far, with room for nearly 100 seats, 68 inside and 31 on a patio, live weekend music planned, and a grand opening built around a full tuna cutting. Sy is targeting a late-summer 2026 soft opening, which puts the debut somewhere in the next several weeks from today.
Across from TCAN at 21 Summer Street, Epilogue Books & Wine is solving a specific, long-standing gap rather than just adding another storefront. Owner Mai Hoang secured four licenses at the June 10, 2026 Natick Select Board meeting for a roughly 2,300-square-foot space with 25 seats, split between a 13-seat bar and a 12-seat cafe. The concept is a bookstore by day that becomes a wine bar at night, what Hoang calls a place for people to linger and socialize. David Lavalley, TCAN's executive director emeritus, spoke at that same hearing and encouraged the team to build a formal relationship with the arts center next door. For years, if you saw a show at TCAN, there wasn't much of anywhere good to go afterward. Epilogue is being built to fix that on purpose, with the licenses in hand clearing the way for a fall 2026 opening.
Here's where things stand as of today:
| Business | Status | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Maverick's Men's Grooming Center | Open (May 27, 2026) | 1 South Main St |
| Blue Square Pizza | Open (confirmed by late June 2026) | 1 S Main St |
| Burning Wheel Yoga & Fitness | Open (July 2026) | Natick Center |
| Tsuru | Targeting late-summer 2026 soft opening | 45 East Central St |
| Epilogue Books & Wine | Targeting fall 2026 | 21 Summer St |
| Nhậu, San Sushi Bar, Bún + Bao | Delayed past original spring 2026 target | 1 South Main St (The Block) |
The one thing that hasn't waited for any of this
While all of the above has unfolded, one fixture on the Common hasn't paused for a single permit hearing. The Natick Farmers Market, founded in 1996 by Natick Center Associates, runs every Saturday from 9am to 1pm, year-round, and is a program of the Natick Center Cultural District. From May through September it sets up on the Natick Common itself, then shifts to Common Street in October and moves indoors to the Common Street Spirituality Center from November through April. It's been the steady weekly anchor for this stretch of town through three years of a building sitting half-finished across the street, which is worth remembering the next time a new storefront takes longer than its sign suggested it would.
What this actually means if you live here
If you're deciding where to eat tonight, the answer right now is Blue Square Pizza for a slice, Burning Wheel for a class, or the Farmers Market if it's a Saturday morning. If you're the kind of person who tracks these things, the fall is where it gets interesting: Tsuru's tuna-cutting opening, Epilogue's first night as a wine bar across from a TCAN show, and, eventually, whatever comes of Nguyen's three delayed concepts once the licensing and staffing catch up to the ambition.
The order these businesses opened in isn't a coincidence and it isn't a complaint. It's just how a stalled block actually comes back: the low-commitment tenants go first because they can survive on their own, and the ones betting on the whole street being busy wait until there's a reason to believe it will be.
Natick Center is a few months from finding out if that bet pays off. For now, you know exactly what's actually open, what's close, and what's still on paper, which is more than most roundups of this block can tell you.
If you're watching this corner of Natick change and wondering what it means for property values or timing a move here, that's a longer conversation, and it's the kind Kristen Meleedy has with Natick buyers and sellers every week. Reach out anytime to talk through what a changing Natick Center means for your own plans.
