Methuen's Busiest Five Weeks: Why Broadway and The Loop Are Both Getting New Life This Fall
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
When the Interiano family decided where to put the fifth location of El Potro Mexican Bar & Grill, they had already proven the concept in Somerville, Lowell, Malden and Chelsea. They picked Methuen, and they picked The Loop specifically, in the space that used to hold Margarita's. Business Manager Joe Carreiro, a former Methuen resident himself, put it plainly: "It was always in the back of our minds to come back to a location where they call home." That single sentence says more about what's happening in this city right now than any single festival date could.
Because the interesting thing about Methuen this fall isn't any one event. It's that two very different parts of the city, the redeveloped shopping corridor off Route 213 and the older Broadway strip that predates it by decades, are both filling in with new investment inside the same five or six week window. That hasn't been the pattern here for a while. Usually one side gets the attention and the other waits its turn.
Line up the dates and the clustering is hard to miss:
That's a civic opening, a downtown street festival, and a park event stacked across five weeks, on top of a restaurant scene that's been quietly rearranging itself since spring. None of this required a special anniversary or a one-time grant. It's just what late September and October look like in Methuen this year, and it's worth understanding why it's landing on both sides of the city instead of just one.
The Loop itself is a useful place to start, because its own history explains why El Potro's arrival is notable rather than routine. The site was originally the enclosed Methuen Mall, built in 1973 on land that was once part of the Mann family's apple orchard. It held on through the 1980s, lost its anchor stores to the newer Mall at Rockingham Park across the New Hampshire line, and closed for good in 1997. The Brickstone Companies and The Wilder Companies redeveloped the site into the open-air Loop in 2000, now roughly 338,000 square feet of open-air retail, and it's remained mostly what you'd expect from that kind of project ever since: Chipotle, Crumbl, Jersey Mike's, Olive Garden, an AMC Methuen 20 multiplex. Reliable, but not exactly a place with a hometown story attached to it.
That's what makes El Potro different. Elias Interiano built the business from nothing after immigrating from El Salvador, working his way from picking tomatoes and cleaning bathrooms up through kitchen work before opening his first location in Somerville in 2006. Four locations and two decades later, his family chose Methuen for a fifth, aiming for a mid-July opening this year. It's not a chain expanding into a new market. It's a Methuen family bringing a business they built elsewhere back to the city where they live, in a shopping center defined mostly by companies headquartered somewhere else entirely.
While that story was unfolding at The Loop, a different one was developing four miles away on Broadway, inside the Village Mall at 436 Broadway. That's where the Patel family has been building out Namaste Bazaar and Namaste Café, a dual concept with Pushti Patel running the grocery side and her brother-in-law Kush Patel leading the café. As of this spring, the buildout included newly installed marble flooring, refrigeration cases and checkout aisles, with the family still hiring and a formal opening announcement expected within weeks.
The bazaar side is stocking the staples of Indian home cooking, spices, lentils, rice, frozen foods and the everyday items that are otherwise a drive away for a lot of Merrimack Valley households. Pushti Patel described the goal directly: bringing "an unmatched selection of fresh produce, authentic spices, and specialty items" that shoppers won't find at the standard local grocery store.
What matters here isn't just that a new business is opening. It's where. The Village Mall isn't the redeveloped, chain-anchored side of town. It's the older Broadway retail spine, and a new, family-run, culturally specific concept betting on that stretch says something The Loop's arrivals can't: Methuen's older commercial corridor is still a place where entrepreneurs choose to plant something new, not just where older businesses hang on.
If The Loop and Broadway are where the change is happening, Methuen Memorial Music Hall at 192 Broadway is the fixed point neither corridor's shift affects. The hall's fall calendar runs a steady stream of concerts from September into mid-October, the same organ-focused programming it's offered for generations, unbothered by which shopping center just opened a new restaurant. It's a small thing, but it matters for how the season actually feels on the ground. You can catch a concert on Broadway, walk to a new grocery a few blocks away, and still make it to Hampshire Street the following weekend for Methuen Day. None of it requires choosing a side of the city over another, which wasn't always true here.
Put the pieces next to each other and the pattern holds up: a city investing capital dollars in a brand new youth center at Ditson Place, a downtown festival that shuts down Hampshire Street for a Saturday, a returning Methuen family opening its fifth restaurant at a shopping center built on the bones of a dead mall, and a new grocery and café concept staking its future on the older Broadway corridor instead of the newer one. Four different decision-makers, four different parts of the city, all landing in the same six-week stretch without any coordination between them.
That's the thing worth noticing if you already live here. It's not that Methuen has "a lot going on this fall," which is true of most towns most Octobers. It's that the investment isn't concentrated in one corridor while the other waits. The Loop is getting a hometown restaurant story it didn't have before. Broadway is getting a grocery and café concept it didn't have before. The city is opening a youth center blocks from a Music Hall that's been running concerts since before either of those retail decisions were made. If you're planning your own fall around any single one of these, from a Methuen Day walk downtown to a Saturday dinner at El Potro to picking up spices at Namaste Bazaar once its doors open, you're not choosing between two versions of the city. For the first time in a while, both versions are worth the trip in the same season.
If you're curious how any of this local momentum connects to what's happening with home values or turnover in your specific part of Methuen, Juan Concepcion tracks both sides of the city closely and is always glad to talk through what it means for your street. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.
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