"Locals have been asking us for a Westhampton Beach market for years," Citarella owner Joe Gurrera told the Southampton Press when his fourth East End store opened on April 30 at 141 Montauk Highway. It reads like a routine quote about a grocery opening. It is actually the sentence that explains why your Saturday now looks different than it did last summer.
For as long as most residents can remember, a walk down Main Street meant one direction. You parked near the Performing Arts Center, drifted west past the shops, and if there was music on the Great Lawn you crossed over for that. The stretch of Montauk Highway on the south end of the village was something you drove through on your way to somewhere else, usually Riverhead or Hampton Bays, because that is where the serious grocery run happened. That pattern held for two decades. This year it broke.
The south end stopped being a drive-through
Citarella's new store sits where The Claddagh operated before it closed in August 2022, a stretch that had gone quiet enough that a Yelp reviewer this spring described the corridor as sleepy and now developing. The building itself was torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, according to Gurrera, with a new kitchen and refrigeration built for the store's fish counter, sushi case, and catering operation. It opened seven days a week, 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., and it created roughly 60 new year-round jobs in the area.
That last number is the one worth sitting with. A seasonal fish counter is a summer amenity, the kind of thing that shows up in June and thins out by Labor Day. A staff of 60 that works twelve months a year is something else. It means the south end of the village now has a reason to stay open in February, not just August, and it means the drive-through habit that sent people north on Route 24 for their weekly shop no longer has to hold. The same Yelp review noted that Citarella now rounds out a grab-and-go cluster on Montauk Highway alongside longtime neighbors Fine Wine and Fruit King, the kind of local pairing that only works if people are actually parking and walking between them rather than pulling in for one stop and leaving.
What filled in the middle of the block
The south end didn't change alone. Three smaller openings landed on Main Street itself this year, close enough together that a single walk now covers all of them.
Westhampton Beach Brew & Grill opened at 115 Main Street, in the space that formerly housed Daphne's, timed to coincide with the village's annual St. Patrick's Day parade in March. The owners, Brian Sckipp and John Salvaggio, aren't new to the area. They've run Westhampton Beach Brewing out of a taproom at the Gabreski Airport industrial park since 2016, and the new restaurant brings that operation into the village proper for the first time. The menu leans on the brewery's tap room signatures, including local fish and chips and Bavarian pretzels that built a following out at Gabreski, alongside a burger built from a custom blend sourced through Justin's Chop Shop.
Two doors down at 130 Main Street, PopUp Bagels opened on June 12. The brand, founded by Connecticut native Adam Goldberg during the pandemic, built its following on a grip, rip, and dip approach to sourdough bagels served whole rather than sliced. Right next to the new Brew & Grill, in what used to be the Caffeine café, Brody's Coffee opened this spring with a house blend the owner named Buster's Blend and a menu of signature lattes that includes a pistachio cream latte and a cookie butter latte, giving the block a second real coffee stop where there used to be one.
None of these three openings is individually a headline. Together they close a gap that used to make the walk between the two ends of Main Street feel like two separate errands rather than one loop.
The Saturday loop, before and after
| 2025 | 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Grocery run | Drive to Riverhead or Hampton Bays | Walk to Citarella, 141 Montauk Highway |
| Coffee | One option, north end of Main | Brody's Coffee, 115 Main Street |
| Bagels | Not a walkable option | PopUp Bagels, 130 Main Street |
| Casual dinner or a pint | Limited south-end options | Westhampton Beach Brew & Grill, 115 Main Street |
| Evening anchor | WHBPAC, 76 Main Street | WHBPAC, 76 Main Street |
The theater end hasn't changed. What changed is that it now has a counterpart instead of standing alone.
The theater end is still doing its part, and it's about to get bigger
None of this new energy would matter as much if the north end of Main Street had gone quiet, and it hasn't. The Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, a 425-seat house at 76 Main Street, opened its 2026 summer season on June 13 with Rumours, a Fleetwood Mac tribute act, followed by blues guitarist Robert Cray on June 19 and comedian Elon Gold two days later. Executive Director Julienne Penza-Boone described this year's booking as reflecting the breadth of what the venue offers.
That packed calendar is also why the building itself is about to change shape. Penza-Boone has explained the math of a small theater in one line worth knowing if you live close enough to walk there: the venue pays a touring artist the same fee whether the room holds 5,000 seats or 425. A sold-out run at 425 seats is still a hard ceiling on what a show can recoup, and WHBPAC has been selling out consistently enough that the ceiling became the problem. The theater recently secured a six million dollar state grant and plans to break ground this fall on an expansion that adds more than 100 seats to the main house along with a sunken dance floor built to hold roughly 150 people standing. If you've gotten used to the current room, this is the season to see a show in it before the layout changes.
A short walk off Main Street, at 6 Parlato Drive, Fauna has quietly become the most reliable jazz room on the western South Fork. Thursday Jazz on the Patio runs 6 to 9 p.m. with rotating sets from the Paris Ray Trio, the Quogue Jazz Trio, and the Certain Moves Trio, and Saturday nights turn into Fauna After Dark, an open-air lounge with classic cocktails and live vocal performances. If your Thursday evenings haven't included a stop there yet, this is the summer most of your neighbors finally tried it.
Where the loop actually closes
The detail that makes this a genuine loop rather than two unrelated updates is timing. The Village Green farmers market runs Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. through late November, rain or shine, according to the Greater Westhampton Chamber of Commerce. Walk the new breakfast stretch, bagel at PopUp, coffee at Brody's, and you land at the Village Green right as the market bell rings. That connection didn't exist a year ago, because two of the three stops didn't exist a year ago.
Restaurants open and close in this village every season, so a longer menu of places to eat was never going to be the real story here. The corridor's shape is the real story. A walk that used to dead-end at the theater now has a reason to keep going, and a grocery run that used to mean a drive north now happens on foot, twelve months a year, because a market with 60 year-round employees has a different relationship to a village than a seasonal stand does.
If you've been parking in the same spot and walking the same half of Main Street out of habit, this is the season to walk the other half too. The corridor is doing more than it was doing a year ago, and it rewards figuring out where the two ends actually meet.
For anyone weighing what a busier, more walkable Main Street means for property in the village longer term, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these shifts as closely as the listings. You can see how Westhampton fits into the broader East End picture on our Westhampton neighborhood page, and if you'd like to talk through what any of this means for your own plans, Erica Lancelotti is always glad to connect.
