The Fifteen-Year Wait at the Josiah Smith Tavern Comes Down to Twenty-Two Parking Spaces
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Drive past the Weston Town Green most days and the Josiah Smith Tavern still looks the way it has looked for a decade: fenced, quiet, handsome in the way old white clapboard buildings are handsome when nobody is using them for anything but storage. The building has been sitting there since 1757, and if you have lived in town long enough you have probably stopped registering it as a building with a future and started registering it as scenery.
That is about to change, or it is about to not change again, depending on what happens at the Zoning Board of Appeals this fall.
The restaurant slated to move into the Tavern, called The Woods, has spent the better part of two decades working through liquor licenses, historic preservation reviews, and construction budgets. It has cleared almost all of it. What stands between the building and a November opening now is a parking count, and the specific shape of that math tells you more about how projects like this actually get built than any ribbon-cutting photo would.
The Town of Weston designated the Friends of the Josiah Smith Tavern as the preferred nonprofit partner for the building's reuse back in 2016, after issuing a request for proposals for what a restored Tavern, Barn, and Connector could become. The original concept on paper was a 105-seat farm-to-table restaurant tucked into the Barn and Connector, with the Historical Society, Weston Forest & Trails, and the Weston Community League occupying subsidized office space elsewhere in the building. All three of those nonprofits are in the building today, which is one part of the project that has been finished for years.
The restaurant side kept evolving. By the time Boston Urban Hospitality, the restaurant group behind The Woods, filed its most recent plans, the proposed occupancy had grown to 175 seats, split between 134 indoor seats and 41 seasonal outdoor seats. That is a meaningfully bigger restaurant than the original 105-seat concept, and according to the Friends of the Josiah Smith Tavern, the larger footprint reflects what it actually takes to make the restaurant financially viable given the scale of investment required to finish the buildout.
A bigger restaurant needs more parking, and that is where the project has stalled. Under Weston's zoning, a 175-seat restaurant at this site requires 77 parking spaces. The Tavern property provides 43 of those on-site. Another 12 on-street spaces were already approved by the Planning Board back in July 2019, when the restaurant concept was smaller. That leaves a gap of 22 spaces, and Town Counsel has advised that on-street parking beyond what has already been approved can only count toward the total if the Zoning Board of Appeals grants a variance.
That single number, 22, is the entire remaining obstacle. Everything else, the liquor license, the historic preservation sign-off, the architectural plans, has already cleared its board.
Boston Urban Hospitality sent its detailed response to the Weston Select Board on July 6, addressing the parking question directly. The Friends of the Josiah Smith Tavern has been encouraging residents who support the project to contact the Select Board in the weeks since, framing the additional on-street spaces as consistent with how the Tavern has functioned for events and rentals all along.
The Zoning Board of Appeals has been holding regular hearings this fall, and the outcome of that process is what determines whether construction documents move forward on schedule. If the variance is granted, the project's stated target is a November opening. If it is not, the timeline slips again, the way it has slipped from an original early 2026 projection to spring 2026 to where things stand now.
For a building that has already waited this long, a few more weeks of hearings is not a crisis. But it is the reason nobody in town is treating "The Woods is opening soon" as a settled fact yet. It is a target that depends on one board's decision, not a date on a menu.
Brian Piccini, the restaurateur behind The Woods, is not new to Weston or to historic buildings. He has lived in town since 2018, and his group, Boston Urban Hospitality, also runs Deuxave in Back Bay, Boston Chops in the South End and Downtown Crossing, and dbar in Dorchester. Both Deuxave and Boston Chops occupy historically protected storefronts, so working inside a building with preservation requirements is familiar territory for him rather than a new constraint.
Piccini has described the project's momentum in personal terms.
"I can feel the energy. The town has been working for 15 years before me to get this done."
His plans for the space lean into what the building already is rather than trying to modernize around it. The centerpiece will be a wood-fired grill, driving a farm-to-table menu built around locally sourced seafood, meats, and produce, with a family-friendly approach to the dining room. There will be an outdoor patio seating 33 that looks out over the Town Green, plus an interior courtyard between the inn and the barn seating 16, designed with a wooden trellis or canvas cover so that New England's unpredictable weather does not shut down outdoor seating on short notice.
Inside, the restaurant will include three private dining rooms, one of them a 45-seat space that was once the Tavern's ballroom, and another built around what Piccini describes as the historic bar where George Washington once stopped in for a drink. When there is no private event booked, those rooms break down into smaller two-tops and four-tops, which changes the character of a Tuesday dinner versus a Saturday buyout.
Exterior changes to the building itself will be minimal. Piccini has said the plan adds only a small sign over the front door and a stone marker at the parking lot, with all kitchen equipment, including hoods, compressors, and generators, kept out of view from the road and walkways. Preserving the Tavern's look from the outside has been treated as a non-negotiable throughout design conversations with the town's boards.
Here is the part of the story that gives it weight beyond "a nice new place to eat." When The Woods opens, it will be the first restaurant in Weston to hold a public liquor license since Prohibition.
The Tavern operated as an actual tavern for its first eighty years after being built in 1757, then spent three generations as a private residence for the Jones family before the town took ownership and began the reuse process that led to today's nonprofit offices and, eventually, to this restaurant. The 105-year interruption between the building's original use and its current one is the anomaly in that story. What is happening now, in a strange way, is a return to form.
The building's second-floor ballroom, with its rose-colored walls, arched ceiling, two decorative fireplaces, and windows on three sides, already hosts weddings, celebrations, and community gatherings and looks directly across the Green at the First Parish Church, whose bell was cast by Paul Revere. That view has been part of Weston's civic center for longer than most of the buildings around it. A working restaurant on the ground floor changes what happens after those events end, giving people somewhere to walk to rather than somewhere to drive away from.
If you want to follow the parking decision as it happens rather than read about it after the fact, the Town of Weston posts Zoning Board of Appeals agendas on its municipal calendar, and the Friends of the Josiah Smith Tavern maintains a project page with the relevant correspondence attached, including the July 6 letter from Boston Urban Hospitality. Both are public and both update faster than any single article can.
Whatever the ZBA decides, the calculation behind this delay is worth remembering the next time a fenced-off building in town looks stalled for no obvious reason. Sometimes the holdup is not indecision. Sometimes it is twenty-two parking spaces standing between a bigger, more ambitious restaurant and a building that has been waiting since 1757 to serve dinner again.
If the Tavern's reopening has you thinking differently about the Town Green corridor or about what a project like this signals for property values nearby, Beyond Boston Properties knows this stretch of Weston as well as anyone. Request a Personalized Home Valuation whenever you are ready to talk specifics about your own address.
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