They say the people make the place, and it’s true at Revival Cafe + Kitchen and at Mothership Restaurant, by Revival founders and owners Liza Shirazi and Steve “Nookie” Postal.
Shirazi, who owned Harvard Square’s former Crema Cafe, and Postal, who owned Kendall Square’s former Commonwealth Market & Restaurant, opened the first Revival in Alewife in 2016. It was soon followed by a Davis Square location that filled the storefront where Bertucci’s opened its first restaurant in 1981.
Nearly a decade later, Revival has seven locations serving breakfast and lunch with a commitment to high-quality coffee. There are stores in Watertown and Lexington as well as three in Boston: one downtown on Devonshire Street, one inside One Post Office Square open to employees in the building, and a third in Fort Point on Necco Street that opened in January.
In December 2023, Shirazi and Postal opened Mothership, serving dinner and drinks in the same building as the Alewife Revival. Though the restaurants have distinct spaces, Revival flows into Mothership. The restaurants enliven an otherwise quiet office building on CambridgePark Drive.
Despite considerable growth, Revival hasn’t lost its small-business charm. That’s thanks to a concerted effort by Shirazi and Postal, who put their employees above all else and position community as the driving force of their operations.
A familial feel
“It’s all about the people,” Postal said.
On a tour of the Revival production kitchen, which makes much of what gets served throughout the chain, Postal greeted everyone by name, from pastry chefs to prep cooks. There are about 130 people employed across the seven locations.
Many have worked with him for years, and in some cases have been with him upward of a decade. He’s worked with Ellie Roycroft since 2009, when she was 18 years old, for instance. She’s now Revival’s culinary director.
Postal started his career in Boston restaurants and was the opening sous chef at Oleana before serving as executive chef for the Boston Red Sox. After a stint on a Bravo reality show called “Around the World in 80 Plates,” which Postal described as “Top Chef” meets “The Amazing Race,” he opened Commonwealth in 2013 in Kendall Square.
When he closed it a decade later, Mothership was set to open a few weeks later. He brought all his Commonwealth employees with him.
“That was a no-brainer,” Postal said.
Streamlined production
If the people are key to the success of an operation, the Alewife production kitchen is a close second. “The kitchen is by far the most appealing part about the space,” Postal said. “We would not be able to do what we do if we didn’t have this kitchen.”
Bacon gets par-cooked for the Salt-N-Pepa Sando and the Crema Roast Turkey sandwich. Chicken is grilled and sliced for the Chicken Caesar, The Wrapped Chick and the Mothership Chicken Sando. Six Minute Eggs are boiled, red onions are pickled, all dressings and sauces are mixed there.
“It’s a constant, continuous cycle,” Postal said.
A large section in the back of the kitchen is dedicated to baking. Revival sells lots of sweet treats, from cookies (chocolate chip, funfetti, mudslide, peanut butter M&M) to brownies and cakes. There are savory and sweet scones, banana bread and muffins. All sweets are made here, as well as breads and sandwich biscuits, English muffins or a bagel.
Certain investments keep it all running smoothly. There’s a huge refrigerator that turns into a proofing machine, timed to turn on at 3 a.m. so when bakers arrive at 5 a.m. dough is ready to go straight into the oven.
“When that thing isn’t working, I have to come in at midnight and take trays out of the fridge,” Postal said. “It makes all of our lives easier.”
There’s a big blast chiller where food goes to get chilled quickly, keeping it fresher for longer – essential to the success of Revival’s model. When you cook broccoli, for example, it’s bright green at first but darkens with time. “That doesn’t look nearly as appetizing, so the broccoli we use for the broccoli situation on the Bagelicious sandwich is one of the many things that gets blast chilled in order to maintain its freshness,” Postal said.
That’s the level of detail and care that goes into every single element of every single menu item at Revival. It also ensures quality across locations.
At the end of each day, the stores place “orders” to the production kitchen.
“So Davis might say we need two containers of Six Minute Eggs, Watertown might need pesto for The Jimmy Pesto, maybe someone needs bread and butter pickles or dressing,” Postal said.
Revival is as committed to coffee as it is food – Shirazi and Postal opened Revival on the principle that excellent coffee does not need to be sacrificed for excellent food, and vice versa – which informed the installation of a reverse osmosis water filtration system, which uses pressure to separate contaminants and impurities from water, resulting in a cleaner, more purified version.
“The water in Cambridge is extremely hard, so you have to do this,” Postal said. “Otherwise your coffee machines and anything else that uses water will eventually be totally messed up.”
Cambridge’s water is so notoriously bad, Postal said, that many cafes and coffee shops have installed these sorts of systems – “pretty much everyone except Dunkin’ and some mom and pop shops,” Postal said.
And since the water is different at every location, this also enables Revival to control quality across its stores.
“If you had a coffee in Lexington, a coffee in Watertown and a coffee in Alewife, they would all taste different,” Postal said. “Anyone who cares about how their coffee tastes, and especially how it tastes across locations, has one of these.”
Events and community at Mothership
Postal and Shirazi describe Mothership as a “familiar neighborhood hang.”Revival is open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily, serving breakfast and lunch, and then Mothership opens at 3 p.m., serving dinner and drinks until 9 p.m.
“We’ve got this huge space, and it’s great that one side is always busy,” Postal said. “Since Mothership opens when Revival closes, it really switches over, and that’s cool to see.”
With Mothership, Shirazi and Postal aim to provide people with a casual place to spend their evenings, somewhere you can go and just “hang.”
“It’s easygoing, the food’s not fussy, that’s what we’re all about,” Postal said.
The menu is heavy on shareables such as pretzel bites with honey mustard, falafel bites with whipped feta, crispy chicken wings, chicken tenders and the like, with a couple salads and dinner options called “‘fancy’ foods” available from 5 p.m. There’s steak frites and a smash burger alongside braised lamb, roast chicken and stuffed flounder.
At Mothership, there’s been a big emphasis on events. There’s trivia every Wednesday with Revival/Mothership gift cards up for grabs, a monthly gluten-free night and speed dating nights organized by Boston Single Mingle. Shirazi and Postal host local tarot reader and comedian Antonio Morales for tarot comedy shows and last month offered a sip-and-sculpt pottery class by Pottery with a Purpose.
“We love bringing people together and seeing them in the space,” Shirazi said.
Revival/Mothership is also available for private events, whether it’s a work event or a baby shower. The full space can accommodate up to 130 guests standing or 90 guests for a seated meal, with smaller configurations available. “Weddings, parties, bar mitzvahs, you name it, we can do it,” Shirazi said. “It’s big enough that you can have your area with food, your area for dancing, a photo booth.”
Not without its challenges
For the most part, Revival runs with a practiced ease. The past nine years have brought challenges too, which is part of the reason community, internally and externally, is so important.
The pandemic hit restaurants hard across the board; restaurants that survived Covid did so only if their landlords were willing to work with them, Postal said.
Though his businesses have mostly come back from it, there’s always a winter drop in business to contend with, and since egg prices started rising at the end of last year due to widespread bird flu outbreaks, Revival had to implement a 50 cent surcharge on menu items that use them.
“It’s annoying for us and it’s annoying for customers,” Postal said. “We hate having to do things like that.”
Not so for everyone: Postal pointed out it proved extremely profitable for Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer in the U.S., which brought in $508 million in the first quarter of 2025, more than three times the $146 million it reported in the same period last year.
“It sucks to see that,” Postal said.
Trump administration tariffs are also posing a problem. Revival serves all its drinks in personalized cups with the Revival logo and, emblazoned on the side in blue lettering, “you got this” – the store’s unofficial tagline. They come from China, and tariffs are making them significantly more expensive.
“Things are changing all the time, but we can’t be spending six figures on cups,” Postal said.
They’re going to run out of their current supply in September, and will likely have to move to unbranded cups.
“But we just have to keep going,” Postal said. “We love it and we’ll keep doing our thing.”
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