4 Major Boston Restaurant and Bar Closings to Know, June 2025
Know of a restaurant closure that should be on Eater Boston's radar? Get in touch at boston@eater.com.
Cambridge: Fried chicken restaurant and live music venue Lily P's closed down abruptly this month after nearly six years in Kendall Square. It's not clear what exactly prompted the closure, but the restaurant may not be gone forever. 'We'd love to be able to continue to operate sometime in the not-too-distant future,' co-owner Alex Tannenbaum tells Eater. In the meantime, Lily P's Hub Hall outpost at TD Garden remains open. 50 Binney Street
Downtown Boston: The owner of Belgian chocolate shop Au Chocolat has decided to retire, and the shop is shutting down, Boston Restaurant Talk reports. The shop's last day of service was Friday, June 27. 35 High Street
Downtown Boston: Pinoy Kabayan, one of Boston's few Filipino restaurants, appears to have closed down. The counter-service restaurant served all-day breakfast with some standout longganisa, a Filipino-style sweet pork sausage, plus lunch go-tos like stir-fried noodles and adobo chicken. However, Boston Restaurant Talk reports that another Filipino restaurant, Kanaka Cafe, will be opening in its place. Eater has reached out to the restaurant for more details on the switch-up. 71 Broad Street
North End: Italian seafood spot Rabia's Dolce Fumo has shuttered. 'The past five years were nothing short of a wild ride,' the restaurant stated in a Facebook post announcing the closure. Its last day was Thursday, June 26. In the wake of the closure, it sounds like the team may be cooking up something new. 'It was time to close this chapter and for us to explore new endeavors (stay tuned),' the post reads. 73 Salem Street See More: Boston Restaurant Closings
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CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
A British restaurant is launching the UK's first water menu
Food & drink UK Water availabilityFacebookTweetLink Follow The French are known for their love of fine wines. La Popote, a French-style restaurant in northern England, is no exception. The Michelin Guide-listed eatery in the county of Cheshire offers diners the choice of almost 140 varieties of wine. But now the business is taking a bold step to cater for discerning non-drinkers by offering an entire menu of bottled water. Diners will have the choice of three different bottles of still water and four sparkling beginning Friday, as well as complimentary tap water. La Popote is tapping into a global trend away from alcohol. For example, based on a Gallup poll last year, 58% of adult Americans drink alcohol, down from 67% in 2022. A growing number of Americans are giving up alcohol, whether permanently or temporarily, while many restaurants are offering a bigger range of mocktails, and sober bars and non-alcoholic bottle shops are becoming increasingly popular. Chef Joseph Rawlins, who founded and runs La Popote with his French partner Gaëlle Radigon, said they had initially been approached about the idea by Doran Binder, who was already supplying the restaurant with their 'house' water under his Crag Spring Water brand. A water sommelier, certified by the Fine Water Academy, Binder first suggested the idea of a water menu to the couple three years ago. 'I laughed it off,' Rawlins told CNN. 'I initially thought it was a ridiculous idea.' But when Binder invited the couple to a tasting at the 'water bar' he owns in the Peak District, a national park in north-central England, they were sold. 'It was mind-blowing,' Rawlins said of the experience, adding that he now believes that 'water isn't just water.' At that first tasting, they tried five or six different varieties. 'Then we did a second tasting with exactly the same waters but we paired them with certain foods – like Manchego cheese, Comté cheese, chocolate, Parma ham, olives. Like with a wine, the taste just changed.' The restaurant is the first in Britain to offer a water menu, according to Binder, and one of only a handful in the world. Binder curated La Popote's water menu, which features a selection from across Europe, including Britain, France, Spain and Portugal. Prices range from £5 ($6.80) for a large bottle of his Crag brand to £19 ($26) for The Palace of Vidago, a Portuguese sparkling water. 'The measurement of minerals in water is what drives taste and flavor,' Binder told CNN. That measurement is called Total Dissolved Solids, or TDS, he said. 'Distilled water is zero TDS. It's brilliant for cleaning windows, brilliant for electrical appliances, brilliant for your car battery – rubbish for the human being,' he said, noting that sea water is at the other end of the spectrum with 30,000-40,000 TDS. The restaurant's range goes from 14 TDS in the Lauretana sparkling mineral water from Italy to 3,300 for the Vichy Celastins from France. The French water initially tastes rather salty, Rawlins said. 'Then you put it with something that's quite salty like a Parma ham and they both naturally balance each other out, so the water is not salty anymore and it's a longer-lasting flavor of the ham in your mouth.' How the water is served is also important, Rawlins said. 'We recommend it at room temperature with ice and a slice of lemon. Water is like wine – if it's too cold, it kills all the flavor.' The water menu is giving diners 'another dimension,' he added, noting that 'a lot of people are drinking less now.' Binder, who has never drunk alcohol, agrees. 'There are more and more people who don't drink alcohol, like me. I'm a massive foodie and when I go to a restaurant they can't wait to throw a wine menu in front of my nose, which will never be of interest to me. 'But put a water menu in front of me and now you've opened up a whole new revenue stream. It's appealing to restaurants and it's appealing to more and more health-conscious people and really it's all about the epicurean experience.' Jordan Valinsky contributed to this report.
Fast Company
an hour ago
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Social media is dead. Meta has admitted as much. What now?
Back in March, Facebook introduced a new feature that wasn't exactly new. The Friends tab—described by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as 'a throwback to OG Facebook'—is a way for the app's users to see only the latest posts from friends, and none of the algorithm-recommended content otherwise dominating their feeds. Personal social networking, once Facebook's core product, had finally been relegated to a nostalgic lark its users could whimsically opt into. Less than a month later, with its years-in-the-making antitrust trial, the Federal Trade Commission sought to prove Meta's early-2010s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp gave it a monopoly on personal social networking sites. Over the course of the trial's six weeks, Meta's defense emerged: a precise accounting of why Facebook's new Friends feature feels so quaint and retro. As detailed in a just-released post-trial brief, Meta's argument is that it can't possibly have a monopoly on personal social networking—because personal social networking no longer meaningfully exists. That's entirely due to the way people now use Facebook and Instagram, with most of them drawn to what Meta calls 'unconnected' content, from accounts users don't even follow. The protracted legal battle began in December 2020, when the FTC filed its lawsuit against Meta in conjunction with 46 states. The agency claimed Meta had scooped up smaller social startups like Instagram to extinguish their threat to its supremacy, and used the reach of its platforms to slow down user growth among competitors. (Less compelling for the FTC, apparently, were the instances in which Meta allegedly just copied features from the companies it didn't acquire.) Unfortunately for the FTC, the lawsuit began taking shape right as TikTok was enjoying the kind of explosive growth that Meta's monopoly is meant to have made impossible, and right as that growth's seismic impact on the entire social media landscape settled in. In its earliest days, Facebook was all about connection, rather than content. People used it to build digital rapport with new friends, get back in touch with old ones, and keep tabs on crushes. Gradually, though, the site's News Feed began absorbing more and more of the greater internet around it, to discourage users from ever leaving. Even before TikTok's For You page hit social media like a nonchronological atom bomb, Meta seemed to realize that content relevance was driving engagement more than friendship strength, and began peppering in 'unconnected' posts that algorithmically matched user interest. TikTok's ascendance merely accelerated the shift toward unconnected-ness. 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With this puzzlingly limited definition of the services Facebook and Instagram provide, the FTC claims Meta's market share of personal social networking sites amounts to 78% of all monthly active users and 85% of time spent in-app. That assertion holds water, however, only if the mid-aughts version of social media were still a market any of these apps is currently competing to dominate. During the trial, the FTC thoroughly emphasized TikTok and YouTube's disinterest in 'friend sharing' as a means of differentiating them from Meta's apps. Adam Presser, who leads operations at TikTok, testified that only around 1% of users' time on TikTok is spent on the app's Friends tab. (The company only keeps that feature around, he claimed, in hopes that it might eventually enhance users' experience in some way.) The FTC further revealed during the trial the failure of YouTube's mid-2010s experiments with adding social features like private messaging, and that YouTube has since abandoned friend-sharing as a goal. If anything, the FTC may have been too convincing in its portrayal of the short-form video giants' indifference toward friend sharing. By doing so, the agency left an opening for Meta to argue why its own apps are now similarly inclined. People's habits have shifted away from friend sharing In its posttrial brief, Meta reveals the full extent to which it was rattled by TikTok's late-2010s success with both short-form video and AI recommendations, which the company claims slowed user growth for both Facebook and Instagram. 'Meta consequently made a major strategic shift to respond to competition,' the brief states. 'It invested billions of dollars to develop its own AI-recommendation algorithms to rival TikTok and introduced a new feature (called Reels) to serve the demonstrated consumer demand that was shifting away from friend sharing.' The document goes on to mention that a Meta executive, whose name and title are redacted, has been 'paying creators hundreds of millions of dollars' to secure exclusive content for Instagram. For better or worse, to suggest that Meta has not been competing in the arms race for unconnected video content is to deny reality. At the same time, Meta's users have demonstrably gravitated to content over connection. The posttrial brief cites a 2023 experiment to determine what most engages Facebook users. Upon increasing 'friend-original' content in users' feeds by 20%, the company reported that users began spending less time on the app. When Meta took the opposite tact, however, serving more short-form video content instead, users stayed locked in longer. 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In retrospect, Meta may have rolled out its 'OG Facebook'-style Friends tab less than a month before the antitrust trial began just to prove how uninterested today's users are in friend sharing. The posttrial brief cites, in its as-yet-unsealed evidence, 'de minimis usage of the new dedicated Friends Tab' as confirmation that 'the puck is moving elsewhere.' Where social media goes from here is yet to be determined So, where is social media heading? There are plenty of hints in where it already is—much of them having to do with AI. Social apps are currently inundated with all manner of AI slop. A Cornell University study found that during the 2024 election about 12% of images and 1.4% of text posts on X were AI-generated. More recently, TikTok has seen a surge in AI-generated video content—with a clip of bunnies on trampolines, created by Google Veo 3, garnering more than 230 million views on the app this summer. 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Perhaps the future of social media is group chat apps like Geneva, Internet 1.0-aping 'social magazines' like Perfectly Imperfect, or subscription-based micro-communities on Patreon built around shared interests in a podcast or creator. On a long enough timeline, though, every done-to-death trend becomes ripe for renewal. (See: our reboot-filled box office, or Uber's obsession with reinventing the bus.) It may just be a matter of time before user fatigue from connecting with people across disparate sites and apps leads a Silicon Valley wunderkind to bring everyone together in a massive digital community. Sort of like a social network.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Crystal Palace make transfer ‘approach' for £30m-rated Eze replacement
Crystal Palace have reportedly made contact with Leicester City over a deal for Bilal El Khannouss as they search for a replacement for Eberechi Eze. Eze is nearing a move to Tottenham Hotspur, who reignited their interest in the playmaker after James Maddison suffered an anterior cruciate ligament injury during pre-season. The two clubs are engaged in talks, but Palace want to sign a replacement for their star player before letting him move to north London. Crystal Palace make transfer 'approach' for Eze replacement To that end, the FA Cup holders have 'approached' Leicester City to 'discuss a possible deal' for El Khannouss, according to Sky Sports News. It is claimed that the attacking midfielder could leave the Foxes for a transfer fee in the region of £30 million plus add-ons. Leicester are 'prepared' to sell the 21-year-old in order to meet their financial obligations with regards to Profit and Sustainability Rules, and to provide funds for new manager Marti Cifuentes to sign new players. El Khannous registered two goals and three assists in 32 Premier League appearances for the Midlands outfit last season as they were relegated to the Championship. Palace have also been looking at Club Brugge star Christos Tzolis, who they 'remain interested' in. They are 'prepared' to shell out £26m to make the 23-year-old their new no.10, but the Belgian club are holding out for a bigger fee after the player signed a new four-year deal last month. The Telegraph's Mike McGrath reported on Monday that Palace made a £26m transfer bid, but Brugge value Tzolis at £34.5m. The Greece international spent three years at Norwich City, but was sold to Fortuna Dusseldorf last summer before swiftly moving to Belgium. Read – See Also – Follow The Football Faithful on Social Media: | | | |
