Why Simcha Restaurant in Sharon MA Keeps Locals Coming Back

Order the hummus at Simcha and the server will tell you not to wait. The pita comes straight from a wood-fired oven built to run at 900 degrees, and if you let it sit even a minute the steam that makes it worth eating disappears with it. Rip it open, use the torn edge as a scoop, and go. It is a small ritual, repeated at nearly every table on a Friday night, in a storefront that most of Sharon had written off years before Avi Shemtov ever walked through the door.

That storefront is in Sharon Heights, the shopping plaza off South Main Street that had spent years as what one longtime reviewer flatly called "a revolving door of fledgling shops." Restaurants opened there and closed there. Nothing stuck. Then in March 2019, a Sharon native who had spent close to a decade running a food truck decided that his first full-service restaurant would open in exactly that space, serving a menu built almost entirely around what grows a few minutes down the same road at Ward's Berry Farm. Seven years later, Simcha is still there, the farm is still expanding what it offers each fall, and the pairing of the two says more about how Sharon actually eats than any list of new openings could.

The Address That Never Held On To Anything

Before Simcha, the space at 370 South Main Street cycled through tenants the way strip malls in a lot of towns do. Nothing about the location was wrong exactly. It sits close to the center of town, easy to reach, plenty of parking. It just never held a concept long enough for anyone to build a habit around it.

Shemtov's path there wasn't a straight line either. He grew up in Sharon, spent close to nine years building a following with his Chubby Chickpea food truck, and used that time to develop a menu built on his family's Sephardic cooking, dishes shaped by his father's Turkish-Israeli heritage. When he finally opened his own dining room, he named it Simcha, Hebrew for joy, after his paternal grandmother, who fled Turkey with his grandfather in 1949 and resettled in Israel. It is a restaurant named for someone who never set foot in Massachusetts, built by her grandson in the town where he grew up, in a space that had never worked for anyone else.

What's Actually Coming Out Of That Wood-Fired Oven

The pita is the anchor, but it's not the whole story. Simcha's hummus comes in a couple of versions, one built on heirloom beans grown in Maine and blended with tahini, another folding in white beans and bacon, an unmistakable New England twist on a very old dish. The Moroccan carrots, charred and finished with orange blossom syrup, use produce and herbs sourced from Ward's Berry Farm, a fact the restaurant treats as a selling point rather than a footnote. Short rib poutine swaps regular fries for chickpea polenta and Bulgarian feta. The Yemenite fried chicken, built on a brine and a chickpea-flour batter with a spicy zhug sauce, was developed after a trip to Nashville and has become the restaurant's second most-requested dish behind the hummus.

The restaurant runs dinner Tuesday through Saturday and a Sunday brunch in a dining room that seats under forty people, which means reservations matter more here than they would at a larger place. Reviews from years apart tell largely the same story: fresh pita, a menu that keeps evolving, and food that surprises people who didn't expect to find it in a strip mall. That consistency, more than any single dish, is why a restaurant built around a fairly specific culinary point of view has outlasted every generic concept that came before it in the same four walls.

The Farm Down The Road That Keeps Reinventing Itself

Ward's Berry Farm, at 614 South Main Street, is the other half of this story, and it has never needed Simcha to matter to Sharon. It has been a fixture with pick-your-own strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, peaches, tulips, and pumpkins depending on the season, a bakery turning out Mrs. Ward's fruit jams and jellies alongside fresh bread and pies, a deli and smoothie bar, and a rotating cast of pigs, chickens, goats, and ducks that kids come specifically to see. In the fall it adds a hay pyramid for climbing and a corn maze that's been a seasonal ritual for families in town for years.

What's newer is the sunflower maze. In 2025 the farm turned nearly two acres of its sunflower fields, planted with more than a dozen varieties, into a walkable maze with paths cut in the shape of flowers and butterflies when seen from above. A farm employee explained the logic simply when a local news crew came out to film it: they already grew sunflowers for pick-your-own, they grow tall enough to walk through, so why not build something out of them before the corn maze season even starts. It's the kind of addition that doesn't announce itself with a grand opening, it just shows up one August, gets a little local news coverage, and becomes one more reason people plan a Saturday around a trip to the farm.

The connection between the farm and the restaurant isn't incidental. Simcha's kitchen leans on Ward's for the herbs and produce that shape dishes like the Moroccan carrots, which means a plate at a restaurant named for a woman who lived and died an ocean away is, in practice, built from vegetables grown a few hundred yards from where she's honored. That's not a marketing line. It's just how the ingredients get to the kitchen.

The Rest Of South Main Street

Simcha and Ward's don't sit alone on that stretch of road. Wagon Wheel Diner, at 384 South Main Street, has held its spot as one of the more distinctive-looking diners in town for years, the kind of place people default to for a straightforward breakfast. Sichuan Gourmet Sharon and Alice's Mandarin Taste, on South Main Street and Pond Street respectively, cover two different takes on Chinese food within a short drive of each other, one leaning into more traditional Sichuan heat, the other serving the familiar American-Chinese combinations people grew up ordering.

None of these places are trying to be something they're not. Nobody imported a concept from Boston and hoped it would translate. The diner is a diner. The farm is a farm that happens to keep adding new things to do. The Israeli restaurant is named for somebody's grandmother and sources its vegetables from down the street. What holds the stretch together isn't a theme, it's that everything on it is specifically, verifiably from here.

What This Means For Your Next Trip Down South Main

Mid-August in Sharon sits in the gap between two seasons at Ward's Berry Farm. The pick-your-own summer crops are winding down, and the corn maze and hay pyramid haven't opened yet for fall. If the sunflower maze is back again this year, this is the stretch of summer to catch it before the fields get cut back and the farm turns its attention to pumpkins. Pair that trip with a Sunday brunch reservation at Simcha, and you've covered both ends of the same supply chain in one afternoon.

None of this requires a reason beyond wanting a good meal and a decent walk. What makes a place like Sharon Heights finally work after years of not working, and what makes a farm that's been open for generations still add something new most summers, comes down to the same answer both times: get specific, get local, and stop trying to be generic.

If you're already living in Sharon and want a broader sense of how the town's outdoor and community life fits together, our earlier look at everyday life around Lake Massapoag covers some of the same neighborhood from a different angle. And if Sharon is a town you're getting to know for the first time, our Sharon neighborhood guide has more on what the area offers day to day.

At Talib Hussain Realty Group, we spend as much time paying attention to what makes towns like Sharon work as we do tracking the market itself. If you ever want to talk about what a move into or within Sharon might look like, Let's Connect.