What's New in Downtown Nantucket This Summer? Same Faces

Walk South Water Street this August and you will pass three storefronts that changed hands within the past year. Walk Federal Street and you will pass a fourth. Head out toward Fairgrounds Road and you will find a fifth, on a lot that came within a signed agreement of becoming eight house lots instead of a restaurant at all. On paper, it looks like downtown Nantucket had a banner year for new hospitality investment. Look at who is actually behind the counters and a different story shows up: almost none of these are new operators. They are longtime island restaurant people, trading the same handful of addresses among themselves, some of which have fed this town for the better part of a century.

That distinction matters if you actually live here, because it tells you something the "what's new on Nantucket" roundups do not: when a familiar spot closes, the space rarely goes dark for long, and the person who reopens it is usually someone whose name you would recognize from three other kitchens.

The Address Outlasts the Name

Start at 22 Federal Street, the corner building that housed The Corner Table for a decade before it became Café 22 this winter. The new operator is Jonas Baker, described by Remain, the nonprofit that owns the building, as a longtime island restaurateur, and the coffee comes from ACK Roasters. The space itself, the Nantucket Culinary Center, hasn't changed hands or purpose. It has just changed who's behind the counter.

Six blocks over, 9 South Water Street has a longer résumé than most of the people who've worked there. It was Fog Island Cafe for 25 years until that closed in 2018. Then it became The Beet. Then it became Misogi Noodle Bar, run by the same chef who'd owned The Beet, until a Select Board dispute over unpermitted late-night outdoor alcohol service ended that run. Now it's Bloom Bar, opened by Dylan Cavaliere, who spent eight years in management and private events at Cru and has worked intermittently at Dune, Ventuno, Straight Wharf, and The Brotherhood of Thieves. He built Bloom Bar as a weekend pop-up on The Boarding House patio last summer before landing his own address.

A few doors down at 15 South Water, the space that was once Atlantic Cafe, then Sea Dog Brew Pub, then Nix's, then Charlie Noble, sat empty after Charlie Noble closed in the fall of 2024. It's reopening as The Dive, backed by the Sneaky Good Hospitality group, following what Nantucket Current reported was a Select Board vote accepting the surrender of Charlie Noble's old alcohol license and issuing a new one to its replacement.

Here's the pattern laid out plainly:

Five addresses, five turnovers, and not one of them represents an outside chain or an investor group new to the island. Every operator on that list was already working in Nantucket hospitality before they picked up their new lease.

The Bench Is Smaller Than the Turnover Suggests

Milan Basnet, who's opening The Island Blend in the old Shangri-La Kitchen space on Orange Street, already runs Easy Street Restaurant. Ethan Devine, who bought the Fairgrounds from the Puders, comes from a family that previously ran the Veranda House hotel back when it was known as Hotel Overlook. Richard Sullivan, part-owner of The Dive, told the Select Board he'd been coming to the island since he was a kid and had wanted to work here for years.

None of this is a coincidence of timing. Nantucket's summer restaurant economy runs on a genuinely small bench of people who know the building codes, the seasonal staffing math, and each other, and when a space becomes available, it tends to go to someone already inside that circle rather than to an outside group testing the market for the first time.

The Fairgrounds sale captures that continuity best. Bill and Kim Puder had owned the restaurant on Fairgrounds Road since 1997, when they took over a property that had been a restaurant since 1948, first as Parker Gray's Knotty Pines Bar-B-Q. When the Puders sold, Ethan Devine didn't just buy a building. He inherited a lineage.

"Alexis and I hope to continue the legacy of a community-oriented restaurant that Bill and Kim have kept going for 29 years, and before them so many great Nantucketers like Mr. Holdgate and the Menards and the Barretts and the Malaveses."

That's not marketing copy. That's a new owner naming the specific families who ran the place before him, on a property that has fed this town in one form or another for 78 years.

The One That Almost Stopped Being a Restaurant

Here's the detail that changes how you should read all of this. The Fairgrounds property wasn't just quietly passed from one operator to the next. In 2022, the Puders first put it up for sale, and the deal that eventually took shape wasn't with a restaurateur at all. It was with a developer. The Puders reached an agreement with an abutting landowner to sell both parcels together for an eight-lot housing subdivision, and the Nantucket Planning Board actually approved that plan. The restaurant that had operated on Fairgrounds Road since 1948 was, on paper, headed for demolition and replacement with single-family lots.

That deal fell through in May 2025. Only after it collapsed did the Devines step in to buy the restaurant and keep it running as a restaurant.

Sit with that for a second. The oldest continuously operating restaurant lot in this roundup, the one with the deepest local roots and the most sentimental attachment, was one signature away from becoming a residential subdivision instead of The Fairgrounds. The reason it's still a place where island sports teams gather for banquets and families mark birthdays is that a housing deal fell apart and a restaurant person happened to be ready to buy when it did.

That's the mechanism underneath everything else on this list. Downtown Nantucket's restaurant spaces don't stay restaurants because of zoning protections or sentiment. They stay restaurants because, often narrowly, an operator from the existing bench is in position to buy before the alternative use wins out.

What This Means If You're Trying to Keep Track

If your favorite corner closes this year, a few things are worth knowing before you assume the worst:

• The address is more durable than any single tenant. Five different concepts have occupied 9 South Water Street since Fog Island Cafe closed in 2018, and it has never sat empty for long.
• The next operator is likely someone already working on-island, not an outside group. Every name in this roundup, Baker, Cavaliere, Basnet, the Devines, Sneaky Good's Sullivan, had prior Nantucket restaurant experience before taking on their current space.
• Not every closure resolves this cleanly. The Fairgrounds nearly didn't survive as a restaurant at all, and the only reason it did was a housing deal that collapsed for reasons that had nothing to do with the restaurant business.

None of this means the retail and restaurant turnover downtown is cause for concern. If anything, it says the opposite: a small, deep bench of island operators is still willing to bet on these addresses, corner after corner, even when the easier money might be in redevelopment. That's worth knowing the next time you walk past a storefront with paper in the windows and wonder what's coming next. Chances are, you already know the person behind it. You just haven't met them at this address yet.

If you're ever weighing what a property like one of these means for a longer-term plan on the island, whether that's a home near town or a look at how these commercial corners factor into value, Jen Shalley Allen is always glad to start the conversation.