Cabot and Rantoul: Why Beverly's New Restaurants and a $162 Million Sale Are the Same Story

Two things happened in downtown Beverly within the last eighteen months that, on the surface, have nothing to do with each other. Shaquille O'Neal's Big Chicken opened its newest Massachusetts location at 55 Dodge Street in June. And a New York real estate investment firm paid $162 million for four apartment buildings on Rantoul Street.

One of those is a chicken sandwich. The other is a wire transfer. But if you've lived in Beverly long enough to remember when Rantoul Street was mostly parking lots and a Family Dollar, you already sense the connection. What's happening on Cabot and Rantoul right now isn't just the usual churn of restaurants opening and closing. It's outside money finally pricing in what residents have been saying to each other for years, and the two stories only make sense read together.

The New Names on the Block

Start with what actually opened. Big Chicken, the fast-casual chain built around O'Neal's name, launched its Beverly location on June 29, about nine months after its previous North Shore outpost at the Northshore Mall in Peabody closed. The Beverly build-out came from JBMM Hospitality, the local franchise group run by Barry Lattuca, James O'Hanlon, Michael Scibelli, and Martin LaChance, who also operate the Big Chicken at Wrentham Premium Outlets. That's not a chain testing a random exit off Route 128. That's local operators who already know the Massachusetts market picking Beverly specifically after their Peabody location didn't work.

A few blocks over on Cabot Street, Daniella's on Cabot opened in December 2025 in the space that had been Ellis Square Social. It's an Italian restaurant from North Shore Hospitality Group, run by owner Daniella Mammola, built around a menu of Italian classics, seafood, and steak, with a family-style Sunday Supper that leans into the neighborhood-restaurant format rather than a special-occasion one.

And over at Cummings Center, leasing paperwork surfaced last fall showing Pressed Cafe, the fresh-pressed-juice and breakfast-bowl chain with locations across Boston's Back Bay, Seaport, Burlington, and several New Hampshire towns, is moving into the former Acapulcos Mexican Family Restaurant & Cantina space. If it follows through this year as planned, it puts a regional lifestyle-cafe chain inside Beverly's largest office park, feeding an entirely different daily rhythm than Cabot Street's dinner crowd.

Three very different concepts. Three very different price points. All choosing Beverly in roughly the same window.

The Corridor That Never Stopped Turning Over

None of this is new behavior for downtown Beverly. It's an acceleration of something that's been running for a few years now.

Kitchen Table opened at 392 Cabot Street in 2023, built by chef William Fogarty around a farm-to-table menu and a bar stocked with women-owned and small-business products. Third Wheel, a bike shop at 78 Cabot Street, opened that same year from Trey and Lindsay Barth, with Lindsay stepping away from her role as executive director of Beverly Main Streets to run it. The Castle, a board game cafe, outgrew its original Rantoul Street spot and reopened with double the kitchen space at 140 Rantoul in the Block at Odell Park development, adding a full bar and dinner service to what had been a coffee-and-cards operation. RiverWalk Brewing's Steve Sanderson turned a Cabot Street pub into The Falconer Taproom & Kitchen.

Beverly Main Streets, the nonprofit that covers Cabot Street, Rantoul Street, and the adjoining blocks, has been tracking this pace closely enough that it launched a Small Business Spotlight program specifically to tell the stories behind the storefronts before people forget who used to be there. That's not a program you build for a district where nothing changes.

So the honest read isn't that Beverly's downtown suddenly got hot. It's that the corridor has been rebuilding itself business by business for years, and what's different about this latest wave is who's doing the rebuilding. The 2023 wave was local operators betting on themselves. The 2026 wave includes a national franchise and a regional chain betting on Beverly specifically, ahead of expanding anywhere else nearby.

What $162 Million on Rantoul Street Actually Says

The bigger tell is the real estate underneath all of it. Four apartment buildings on Rantoul Street, known individually as The Block at Odell Park, The Flats at 131, Link 480, and Canvas, sold to The Praedium Group, a New York investment firm, for $162 million. Together the buildings hold 394 apartments and 13 ground-floor retail spaces, which means the restaurant and shop turnover described above isn't happening despite the residential building boom. It's happening inside it. Those ground-floor spaces are the storefronts.

The seller was Beverly Crossing, the local development company that built all four buildings between 2017 and 2023 and had spent nearly two decades shepherding Rantoul Street's transformation from an industrial stretch into a walkable mixed-use corridor. In announcing the deal, Praedium described downtown Beverly as having evolved into a "culinary and retail destination," and one of the firm's directors put it even more plainly: "Beverly, MA blends urban convenience with the charm of a coastal suburb."

That's an outside investor, with no reason to flatter the city, choosing to frame the deal around restaurants and shops rather than rent growth or unit mix. When a $162 million buyer leads with the food scene, it means the food scene is doing real economic work, not just filling column inches in a neighborhood newsletter.

What This Means If You Already Live Here

If you're already in Beverly, the practical version of all this is simpler than the investment story. The ground-floor retail spaces inside those Rantoul Street buildings are going to keep changing hands, because that's the model now. Big Chicken and Daniella's on Cabot both moved into spaces that used to be something else entirely. Expect the same on Rantoul as new ownership settles in, particularly in spaces that have already cycled through more than one concept.

It also means the corridor is likely to keep skewing toward concepts built for regular, weekday use rather than special-occasion dining. Pressed Cafe at Cummings Center is a breakfast-and-lunch play for office workers. Big Chicken is a quick weeknight dinner. Daniella's Sunday Supper format is designed around a recurring weekly habit, not a once-a-year reservation. If you've noticed downtown feeling more usable on a Tuesday than it did five years ago, that's not a coincidence. That's what these particular businesses were built to do.

And if you've had a hard time finding parking on Cabot or Rantoul lately, the density math explains some of that too. Thirteen ground-floor retail spaces plus 394 apartments in four buildings, layered onto a corridor that also holds the Beverly Main Streets district's older storefronts, adds up to more daily foot and car traffic than the same four blocks carried a decade ago. That's the tradeoff that comes with a downtown getting more useful rather than less.

None of this changes how Beverly feels to walk through on a Saturday morning. It changes what you can expect to find there next year, and who's paying attention to make sure something interesting fills the space when the current tenant moves on.

If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of Beverly is actually worth, or you're curious how downtown's changes are showing up in what buyers are willing to pay nearby, the team at McClelland Del Rio Group knows this corridor block by block. Request a Home Valuation and we'll walk you through it.