The paper sign taped inside the window at 1046 Beacon Street has said "opening soon at this establishment" for well over a year now. It went up not long after the Busy Bee's longtime owners, the Christakis family, closed the diner in September 2024 after 57 years of seafood platters and bottomless coffee. The family behind Brookline Lunch, a longtime Cambridge diner, took over the lease in June 2025 with plans to bring the Busy Bee back. As of late September 2026, a Boston Magazine report describes the reopening as close.
Farther along Beacon Street, at 1627 in Washington Square, a different restaurant opened without a sign in the window promising a date. It just showed up on October 10, 2025, started serving wood-grilled steaks and Colombian arepas, and kept serving them. In less than two weeks, that restaurant will quietly cross its first year in business. Capricho has been serving dinner in the former La Voile space ever since.
The Diner Everyone Is Still Waiting On
The Busy Bee wasn't just another breakfast spot. Peter and Frances Christakis ran it from 1967 until September 2024, and when it closed, the family said they were negotiating with a prospective tenant rather than shutting the space for good. That tenant turned out to be the family behind Brookline Lunch, the cash-only Central Square diner in Cambridge that has been open since 1937. They signed on for the Beacon Street space in June 2025, with Mushhoor Abu-Rubieh, one of the sons, planning to run it after a decade away from the restaurant business.
The new owners initially planned to bring the Brookline Lunch name across the river. They later decided to keep the Busy Bee name. Meanwhile, the sign in the window kept describing a restaurant that, technically, hadn't reopened yet.
When the family first announced the move in June 2025, Mushhoor said he expected to open within three or four months, which would have put the diner back in business by that fall. That target slipped, as restaurant openings often do. By March 2026, coverage of the original Cambridge location's decision to start accepting credit cards for the first time in its 89-year history mentioned an updated timeline for the Beacon Street spot: late April or early May. The spring window passed without an opening as well. A Boston Magazine piece from September 25, 2026, still describes Mushhoor as "about to open" the reborn Busy Bee, which puts the reopening about a year past its very first estimate and just past the two-year mark since the griddle went cold.
None of this makes the family's approach wrong. Reopening a diner that a neighborhood already loved, under the name it already knew, while keeping the old counter and the old look, is a slower project than filling an empty storefront with something new. But it does mean that for two years running, the most-anticipated restaurant news on this stretch of Beacon Street has been a restaurant that residents still cannot walk into.
The Restaurant Nobody Was Watching For
Capricho Colombian Steakhouse didn't carry that kind of hometown weight when it moved into 1627 Beacon Street. The space had been La Voile, a French restaurant that had held the lease since 2015 before it closed in April 2025 when that ten-year term ran out. There was no half-century of memory attached to the address, no name residents felt strongly about preserving. Capricho's owner-manager, Vanessa Ynes Dorta Lopez, filed the paperwork, built out 3,576 square feet with seating for 121, and opened the doors that October, just six months after La Voile's lease ended.
Chef Andrés Gómez runs a menu built around wood-fired cuts, chimichurri, and Colombian staples like arepas and tamarind glazes, and the restaurant has settled into a steady rhythm of dinner service and weekend brunch. It didn't need a sign promising a future date, because it moved straight from lease to build-out to open sign in about half a year.
The two restaurants ran on different clocks. Capricho went from a vacated space to an open dining room in about six months. The Busy Bee is the return of a name with 57 years on Beacon Street, and the family has said it wants to keep the old diner look, which is a more careful project than filling a storefront with something new.
What Hasn't Moved While the Corner Changes
Not every business on this stretch is mid-transition. Athan's Bakery has operated out of 1621 Beacon Street, a building that dates to 1898, since 1999, and it remains one of the square's most consistent daytime draws for pastries and coffee. A few blocks over on Washington Street, the Washington Square Tavern keeps its own late hours, and the wider run of Beacon Street restaurants around it, including The Abbey, La Morra, OTTO, the Publick House, Orinoco, Stoked Wood Fired Pizza Co., and Bar Vlaha, forms the steady core that residents built their routines around long before either the diner or the steakhouse became a story.
That contrast is useful. It shows that Washington Square's commercial turnover isn't happening across the board. It is happening lease by lease, on whatever schedule the specific tenant and landlord land on, while the surrounding businesses continue on their own separate, unrelated clocks. The same pattern shows up in smaller form nearby, where two Dunkin' locations, one at 1020 Commonwealth Avenue and another at 1316 Beacon Street in Coolidge Corner, are adding Jimmy John's counters inside the existing stores rather than opening freestanding locations. Even the chain expansion here is happening inside storefronts that already exist, on a timeline set by each individual franchise rather than by any broader building boom.
Two Clocks, One Street
The useful thing to understand about Washington Square right now isn't which restaurant is better or which name deserves more loyalty. It's that a single short stretch of Beacon Street is currently running two entirely different speeds of change at once, and the Busy Bee's reopening is the slower of the two. Capricho is nearly through its first year. The Busy Bee's reopening is still pending about two years after the diner closed.
When the Busy Bee's doors open, the diner's name will be back on Beacon Street, and Capricho will have been serving dinner in Washington Square for close to a year.
The "opening soon" sign at 1046 Beacon Street is still in the window, and the Busy Bee name is the one that will be on the door.
The Kennedy Lynch Team works Beacon Street and the rest of Brookline closely enough to notice when a storefront's timeline says more about the neighborhood than the storefront itself. If you're weighing a move into Washington Square or anywhere nearby and want a read on what's actually changing block by block, request a complimentary market consultation and we'll walk you through it.
