The Highlands Only Has One Restaurant Open on Tuesdays

Say you decide on a Tuesday that tonight is a Fame night. Maybe you're craving the empanadas, maybe you just want to sit under those art deco musician murals with a cocktail. You drive to 386 Dwight Street, pull up, and the lights are off. Not because anything happened. Fame doesn't do Tuesdays. It doesn't do Sundays or Mondays either.

That single fact says more about how the Highlands actually eats than any list of "top restaurants" ever could. Two of the neighborhood's most talked-about kitchens, Woodstone Tavern on Hampden Street and Fame Lounge/Eatery near the old Wauregan mill on Dwight Street, don't run on the same clock. Most weeks, you're not picking between two restaurants. You're picking whichever one happens to be lit that night.

Four Nights a Week, Not Seven

Here's what each place actually has posted for hours right now.

Monday, both kitchens are dark. Tuesday, Woodstone runs the whole show alone. The two spots only overlap four nights out of seven, Wednesday through Saturday, and even then their hours don't quite match. Fame doesn't open its doors until 5pm on Saturdays, so if you want an early dinner with your kids that day, Woodstone is the only option that's actually serving.

This isn't a coincidence of scheduling. It reflects two different businesses built for two different rhythms of the same neighborhood, and once you see the pattern, it changes how you plan a week.

What You're Actually Choosing Between

When both places are open, you're not choosing between similar restaurants with different menus. You're choosing between two different evenings.

Woodstone Tavern sits in a restored 19th-century brick building with a 40-foot oak bar, booths, and a patio that welcomes dogs. Servers like Bill, Ryan, and Mo get called out by name in review after review for remembering regulars and walking tables through the specials. The food leans into comfort with polish: a lamb shank special over polenta, halibut with gnocchi, the Woodstone burger, jerk wings, Cacio e Pepe, fried oysters, and an onion dip with house-made chips that keeps coming up in conversation. It's the kind of place where a couple can get a quiet booth or a family can spread out in the dining room, and reservations aren't required even on a Friday.

Fame runs on a completely different register. Ordering happens at the counter. The menu moves through empanadas, yucca fries, patatas bravas, a hummus platter, and esliha, a Brazilian pastry filled with ground beef, alongside artisan sandwiches and soups by day. The walls carry art deco portraits of musicians next to vintage music videos playing on loop, and every Thursday at 8pm the space turns into a stage for live performance. Co-owners David Blood and Mauro Brito built the menu around dishes they picked up while traveling, and it shows in a lineup that reads more like a passport than a typical bar menu.

Put simply, Woodstone is where the Highlands goes to sit down. Fame is where the Highlands goes to show up.

Two Different Buildings Behind the Two Different Menus

The contrast makes more sense once you know what each building used to be.

Woodstone occupies a 19th-century structure at 876 Hampden Street that spent two years under renovation before owners Lisa and Woody Lyle reopened it in 2022 as a full-service tavern, restoring that oak bar and adding the patio that now hosts weekend live music. It's a residential-street building brought back to serve a residential-street crowd, which is part of why its hours track a normal dinner service from Tuesday through Saturday.

Fame's home has a longer and stranger history. The building traces back to 1879, when James Hale Newton built a paper mill on Dwight Street between two of Holyoke's canal levels. The Wauregan Paper Company bought it the following year, and by 1899 it had been folded into the American Writing Paper Company. The mill sat in industrial use for decades before a group of artists from the San Francisco Bay Area bought it in 2009 with plans to turn it into a European-style market for artisanal food producers. That vision is why the building is now known as an arts and industry space rather than a strip of storefronts, and it's why Fame's hours skew toward evenings and weekends. The building itself pulls a crowd that shows up after work, not one that wanders in for a Tuesday lunch.

Two buildings, two original purposes, two very different weekly rhythms. The restaurants inside them just inherited the pattern.

Planning an Actual Week Around It

If you already live in the Highlands, this is the part that's actually useful. A weekday lunch on Tuesday only has one answer: Woodstone, since Fame is dark until Wednesday. If you want a night out with live entertainment built in, Thursday at 8pm is Fame's slot, and it's the one night the neighborhood consistently mentions for that reason. If you're bringing a dog and want an early dinner on the patio, lean toward Woodstone on Saturday, since Fame doesn't flip its lights on until 5pm that day.

None of this is a ranking. Both places have their regulars for good reason. But the neighborhood habit that's actually formed here isn't about which menu someone prefers. It's about learning which kitchen is lit on which night, and building the week around that instead of guessing.

That's the kind of detail that only shows up after you've lived somewhere long enough to get burned by a locked door on a Tuesday. It's also the kind of detail that makes a neighborhood feel like yours instead of a place you're still figuring out.

If you're weighing a move within the Highlands, or just curious what else is quietly shaping life on these streets, Shelly Hardy has spent years paying attention to details exactly like this one. Reach out anytime to schedule a free consultation.