The platform at Ball Square station is short, 225 feet end to end, with a single island serving both directions of the Green Line's Medford Branch. It opened on December 12, 2022, after years of delay, and for one very loud Monday morning, it was the biggest thing that had happened to this corner of Broadway in years. Bill Galatis, who owns Lyndell's Bakery, told the Boston Globe that his shop "got slammed" that first day, so many new faces coming through that the staff could barely keep up.
That was the promise. Nearly four years later, walk the same stretch of Broadway on a Tuesday night and the thing worth noticing isn't the T stop at all. It's the line forming outside a 34-seat Italian restaurant that didn't exist a year ago, in a storefront that used to sell tacos.
What The Grand Opening Actually Promised
The morning the station opened, the optimism along Broadway was specific and immediate. Tanner Spees, who owns True Grounds coffeehouse and bakery, told the Globe he expected the new stop to help not just his shop but the whole run of stations up the line, Gilman Square included. Somerville resident Dylan Roberts, grabbing coffee at Lyndell's that week, said the convenience of a closer train might bring him through the square more often than he already did. The logic was straightforward: a station brings riders, riders become customers, customers become revenue. Nobody was wrong to expect it. It's just not what happened, at least not right away.
What The Following Year Actually Showed
By the summer of 2023, Cambridge Day went back to check. The answer from business owners was more measured than the opening-day energy suggested. Mike Moccia, who owns Ball Square Café two minutes from the platform, put it plainly: the revenue stayed the same. Heather Gray, who opened Neighborhood Produce in 2021, said the station's arrival did nothing to change the fact that December remained her slowest month. Her read on why was practical rather than pessimistic. The stop opened right as the holidays hit, before the commuting patterns that would eventually bring steady weekday traffic had a chance to settle in.
Neither owner framed this as a failure. Moccia said he expected more customers to show up over time, since the line was still new. Gray said her business had been increasing every month since. But the headline finding held: a transit stop, on its own, was not an engine. It was infrastructure. Whatever came next would have to be built on top of it, by people willing to bet money on the square directly.
The Wave That Actually Arrived
That bet showed up this spring in the form of Olivia's Kitchen, a 34-seat Northern Italian restaurant that opened at 711 Broadway, in the space that used to be Taco Party. The owners, chef Simona Sbano and her husband Stefano Feffin, had spent recent years running an Italian bakery and bistro concept together before selling that business and turning their attention to Somerville. Sbano trained in Turin, and the menu reflects it: housemade pastas, a seafood stew, pork rolls, and a flourless chocolate-almond Caprese served with vanilla gelato. Appetizers and salads run roughly $17 to $27, and the wine list leans almost entirely Italian, eight reds and six whites, several available by the glass.
For months the restaurant served food without alcohol while its liquor license worked through approval. That changed recently, and Olivia's now pours wine and cocktails alongside dinner, Tuesday through Sunday, with weekend brunch added to the rotation. Cambridge Day's review in April described the space as bringing a cosmopolitan feel to a stretch of Broadway better known for old-school delis and diners, and called the opening a signal of where Somerville's restaurant scene is headed given the neighborhood's changes since the Green Line extension arrived.
Down the block, a Vietnamese coffee and banh mi concept called Pound House claimed a storefront at 703 Broadway, another operator choosing this square specifically, on a stretch of Broadway that already had its share of coffee options. Whatever the exact opening timeline, the signing itself is the point. Restaurant and cafe operators are treating Ball Square as a destination worth building for, not just a stop to pass through.
The Old Guard Still Setting The Pace
None of this displaced what was already here, and that matters. Lyndell's Bakery has been on Broadway since 1887, long enough that the arrival of a subway stop barely registers against its own timeline. The rivalry between Sound Bites and Ball Square Café for the neighborhood's breakfast loyalty predates the station by decades and shows no sign of resolving. True Grounds still runs its coffeehouse and bakery under Spees. Neighborhood Produce, now five years into its run under Gray, has become the square's answer to a grocery run without a car. Ball Square Fine Wines anchors the far end of the block, Victor's Deli remains a Somerville mainstay, and The Yak & Yeti keeps Himalayan food in steady rotation for a square that's always served both the Tufts crowd and the longtime residents around it.
What's different now is that the newcomers aren't replacing this lineup. They're filling in around it, adding an evening option where there wasn't one, adding a second coffee identity next to True Grounds instead of competing directly with it.
A Realistic Week In The Square
If you live near Ball Square and haven't updated your routine since the restaurants started arriving, here's a version worth trying:
- Weekday morning coffee at True Grounds or Lyndell's, depending on whether you want a pastry with it
- A produce stop at Neighborhood Produce on your way home, since it's the square's only real answer to a full grocery run without a car
- A weekend breakfast decision between Sound Bites and Ball Square Café, which remains a genuine rivalry rather than a formality
- Dinner reservations at Olivia's Kitchen for date nights or small group meals, since the room seats only 34 plus nine at the bar
- A bottle from Ball Square Fine Wines on the way to any of the above
Why This Matters More Than The Station Did
A train stop measures how many people pass through a place. It says nothing about whether they stop. The Green Line extension gave Ball Square better access to the rest of the city, and that access mattered, but the 2023 reporting made clear it didn't automatically translate into a livelier square. What's translating now is a chef with a specific point of view betting a business on this exact block, and a coffee concept doing the same a few doors down. That's a different kind of signal than ridership counts, and it's the one worth watching if you want to know where a neighborhood is actually headed.
For anyone who already calls Ball Square home, that's the useful takeaway: the square didn't change because the T arrived. It changed because people who could have opened anywhere chose Broadway between Powder House Circle and Magoun Square instead. That's a harder thing to manufacture than a subway stop, and it tends to say more about where a place is going.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this means for a move, whether you're already searching nearby or just keeping an eye on where Somerville is heading next, the Lauren Holleran Team spends as much time walking these blocks as writing about them. Talk to our Cambridge & Somerville experts when you're ready for a conversation grounded in the same detail as this one.
