Jack Sy spent years driving Route 9, and until recently, that highway and the Mall were about all he knew of Natick. Then an agent called about a storefront across from St. Patrick Catholic Church, tucked into a new mixed-use building on East Central Street. Sy checked it out, liked what he saw, and is now building Tsuru, a Japanese restaurant with live music on weekends and a full tuna cutting planned for opening night.
He is not the only outsider who just discovered downtown Natick has something going on. In the same stretch of months, a Hopkinton pizza founder, a North Shore restaurateur juggling three concepts under one roof, and a bookstore-and-wine-bar owner with no prior Natick footprint all made the same call, independently, without knowing each other existed. That is the part worth paying attention to. It is not that Natick Center is getting a few new restaurants. It is that four people with no connection to one another looked at the same two or three blocks and decided this was the place to put their money down.
The Pizza Guy Who Picked Natick Over Everywhere Else
Troy Sproul opened his first Blue Square Pizza in Hopkinton in 2022 after leaving a corporate job at Papa John's to get his MBA. A Northborough location followed in July 2025. When it came time to pick a third spot, Sproul chose Natick, and specifically The Block, the new development at 1 South Main Street that Natick Report has described as the town's most eye-catching new architecture.
Blue Square is open now, and it is worth knowing a few things before you go. The listed address is 1 Main Street, but the actual door opens onto Pond Road, a detail that has apparently caught more than one first-time visitor off guard, according to Natick Report's review of the new location. Inside, there are two tables and four seats. This is a whole-pie operation, no slices, built around four regional styles: Detroit, New York, Chicago cracker-thin, and grandma-style squares. A small Detroit pie runs $15. A grandma-style pie with bacon and fig jam runs $36. Most people who stop in end up carrying their order across the street to Natick Common rather than eating on site.
Sproul's decision to bypass other MetroWest towns for Natick, choosing the location closest to Boston out of his three, is itself a signal. He had two profitable shops already. Natick was the upgrade.
One Owner, Three Restaurants, One Building
The bigger bet belongs to Sa Nguyen, who has run Soall Viet Kitchen in Marblehead since 2012 and operates Soall Café at the Cummings Center in Beverly. Nguyen is not opening one restaurant in Natick. She is opening three, all inside The Block.
Nhau is the flagship, a Vietnamese concept built around shared plates and a full bar, with roughly 50 seats. The Natick Select Board voted unanimously on April 29 to approve an all-alcohol license for Nhau LLC, and the restaurant is expected to open in late August or early September, according to Natick Patch's reporting from earlier this month. That puts an opening within the next few weeks.
San Sushi Bar is the second concept. The third, Bún + Bao, focuses on takeout-style Asian street food and will share a pass-through window directly into San Sushi Bar's kitchen, an operational detail that suggests Nguyen is running these three as one coordinated unit rather than three separate businesses that happen to share a landlord.
Nguyen has never operated south of Beverly before. Her entire track record is North Shore. Betting three concepts at once on a town she has no prior footprint in is a different kind of confidence than opening a second location down the street from your first.
The Bookstore Betting on TCAN's Foot Traffic
A few blocks over, Mai Hoang is building something that has nothing to do with restaurants. Epilogue Books & Wine is planned for 21 Summer Street, directly across from TCAN, the Center for Arts in Natick. By day it will run as an independent bookstore. By night, the same space converts into a wine bar. Hoang has said she was drawn to Natick for its sense of community, and that she wants Epilogue to function as a place where people linger rather than pass through.
The location matters here in a way it does not for the restaurants at The Block. Sitting across from TCAN means Epilogue is positioning itself around arts patrons and the Natick Center commuter rail stop rather than lunch-hour foot traffic. It is also filling a specific gap: a long-running wine shop in town closed in 2025, and local observers have pointed to that closure as evidence there was room for a new wine-focused concept, a detail Hoodline picked up from Natick Report's coverage. Hoang is betting on a niche that recently opened up, not one she is creating from scratch.
Epilogue is aiming for late summer 2026, the same rough window as Tsuru. Neither has confirmed an exact date yet, so if you walk past 21 Summer Street or 45 East Central Street this week and see plywood still up, that tracks.
Why Four Unconnected Bets Matter More Than One Big One
Here is the part that would be easy to miss if you only skimmed a list of restaurant names. None of these four people know each other. Sy came from Boston with no Natick history beyond the highway. Sproul was expanding a Hopkinton brand. Nguyen was a North Shore operator with zero presence south of Beverly. Hoang has no prior Natick presence and says she was drawn in purely by the town's feel. They did not coordinate, they did not share investors, and as far as the public record shows, they were not chasing each other into the same market.
When one restaurant opens in a downtown, that is a single decision by a single set of eyes. When four unconnected operators, coming from four different directions, all land on the same two or three blocks within the same year, that is closer to a signal than a coincidence. It suggests something about Natick Center specifically, not just MetroWest generally, that people outside the town are noticing before longtime residents have fully clocked it.
How to Actually Use This Fall
If you already live nearby, here is what is worth tracking over the next several weeks. Blue Square Pizza is open now at The Block, entrance via Pond Road, cash or card, takeout is the easiest path in given the four-seat interior. Nhau should be opening within the next few weeks, given its late August to early September target, with San Sushi Bar and Bún + Bao following on a timeline that has already shifted once. Tsuru is aiming for a late-summer soft opening on East Central Street, with a formal tuna-cutting event to follow once the doors are steady. Epilogue Books & Wine is targeting the same late-summer window across from TCAN.
A reasonable weekend loop right now: start at The Block for a pizza to carry over to Natick Common, walk east toward Summer Street to check on Epilogue's progress, then continue to East Central Street to see how close Tsuru is to its soft opening. Four stops, three still under construction as of this week, one already slicing pies.
Natick Center has talked about a restaurant renaissance for a while now. What is actually happening this fall is more specific than that. It is four people who have never met all deciding, on their own, that this particular stretch of town is where they want to be.
If you are curious what any of this means for property values or timing in Natick, or you just want to talk through what is changing in this town, I would love to hear from you. You can reach out through Emily Farrar any time to set up a conversation.
