A distinctive miniature castle in Central Square is getting a new purpose: to fortify entrepreneurs before they open restaurants in their own storefronts.
By spring the 420-square-foot white structure at 25 Central Square should have its first yearlong restaurant residency, said Michael Monestime, president of the Central Square Business Improvement District. The Tower, as it’s being called, was a stop along the path of Destination: Central, the organization’s annual meeting Thursday.
The 90-year-old structure served until 2019 as Moody’s Falafel Palace, suffered from Covid as Aleppo Palace and in 2024 was announced as the Chateau Blanc Cafe under restaurant owner Mohammed Seffo. In April, he left his business home of 23 years, telling CBS News that the three-year construction across the street at Carl Barron Plaza had left him bankrupt.
With plaza mostly open – the area around an improved bus stop remains fenced off – the Monestime’s organization hoped to put the space to good use. The Bid has hired JTA Architects to fit out the space and build out the kitchen.
“It’s a great opportunity to cultivate and launch the next food operators. Think commissary kitchen, think launchpad,” Monestime said. He identified the ideal operators as “someone who’s catering, someone who might have had a food truck but they lost the food truck, someone who wants to graduate from a a food cart.”
They’ll have a full year in the space to experience the seasonal ebb and flow of foot traffic and experiment with menus and business models before graduating to hopefully find their own brick-and-mortar space in the city, Monestime said. (“f you’re a super operator, maybe that’s extended,” he said.) There will be rent subsidized by the Bid. “It is small enough to contain big ideas in a way that the price point is not prohibitive for us,” Monestime said.
The castle has been licensed in the past to fit as many as 16 people, but Monestime doesn’t foresee sit-down business. “With Carl Barron Plaza being online, we’re really thinking about the energy that can radiate between those two places. Carl Barron Plaza has 100 seats. The Tower has a service window, or folks will go in, get their food, and they’ll make their way out,” he said.
The plan is to open a process by January for restaurateurs to apply to use the Tower space, possibly with a selection process that includes points for Cambridge residents, minority business owners and other factors representative of the city and Central Square – and helpful to the long-term local economy. “We have high hopes for a small building,” Monestime said.
Destination: Central
The business improvement district was launched in June 2019 out of the Central Square Business Association. The evolution allows it to collect dues from local business owners to drive tourism and other projects in a state-designated cultural district that is also home to a vast number of social services. The Bid employs ambassadors to direct tourists as well as watch over the unhoused and people visiting the square’s many social services, including a needle exchange for safe drug use.
That complexity has been explored in annual meetings held since the Bid’s organization, but Destination: Central was the first to be open to the general public and – instead of take place in a conference room – take participants from spot to spot through the neighborhood, with music and food along the way. The tour started at City Hall with speeches.
“At our last meeting, we talked about redirecting energy, taking bold ideas and putting them to work supported by a strong public-private partnership with the city – ideas that would really help sustain the cultural district and bring joy to many Cantabrigians,” Monestime said in his introduction to the event. “Tonight, we want you to see it for yourself … we figured the best way to talk about Central was to get everybody out into the district and experience it, because people here are really doing good work, taking chances, opening businesses and creating places for people to come together.”
More than 100 residents, city officials and staff, business owners and nonprofit leaders followed a path from City Hall to the plaza and Tower, Graffiti Alley, the Street Theory Collective art gallery and entertainment space, Dance Complex, Zuzu nightclub, Central on Air radio station, and Miracle of Science and Smoot Standard restaurants.
City manager Yi-An Huang said before the tour, “This really is the heart of Cambridge … I see so much of what makes Cambridge special, and in this stretch of Central Square I also see so many of our values being lived out. I see how we’re caring for people in need. The most vulnerable people in our city are in Central Square – and how we live, work, play and create a thriving community in this space is the greatest test.”
This post was updated Oct. 27, 2026, to reflect that the Central Square Business Improvement District says rent at The Tower will be subsidized.
