LYME — After a 14-month absence, the classic Italian subs, on-site prepared eggplant parmesan, meat- and vegetable-lasagna dinners and gourmet pizzas are once again available to go.
Add to that new menu items like a four-hour braised short rib grilled cheese sandwich and the neighborhood vibe of hanging out with your laptop all morning in the new cafe.
Stella’s Italian Kitchen & Market, which closed last summer, reopened last week Monday under a new ownership structure and with new morning hours that revive one of the Upper Valley’s favorite casual bistros. This time co-owner Bob Coyle has two new partners working alongside him: CFO Rose Catalona and chef Morgan Lory, both former Stella’s employees.
And they’re not the only ones returning.
“We have a lot of wait service coming back that worked here before, and three people in the kitchen are coming back, including our sous chef Mike Clancy … at least as soon as he gets here from New Orleans,” Coyle said last week, a couple of hours after reopening Stella’s doors at 7 a.m.
Stella’s more-than-yearlong closing evidently created pent-up demand: Coyle said they were making between 70 to 80 pizzas per night last week as customers were stopping to pick one up on the way home.
“We’re getting crushed,” he said. “The community excitement is palpable.”
Coyle has taken the front area of the space, which formerly was given over to a provisions market, and turned it into a cafe with tables and seating. Now open Monday through Saturday at 7 a.m., the cafe has Wi-Fi, and Coyle hopes it will become a morning gathering spot for Lyme residents.
Along with an assortment of scones, croissants, muffins and sticky buns all baked by Lory along with his custom-made granola mixes, the cafe boasts a new, four-spout Nuova Simonelli espresso machine — the Ferrari of espresso makers that costs $10,000 but which Coyle says he was able to snag for only $3,000 “through my supplier” — which rests on the counter.
“The community really needs a social gathering place,” Coyle said, noting that there’s nothing quite like that along the Route 10 corridor north of Hanover.
The reopening of Stella’s is one of four new restaurants making their debut all within a few weeks of each other in the Upper Valley.
In Woodstock, the space formerly occupied by Bentleys, which closed in March, is currently undergoing renovation for a new restaurant to open in either late summer or early fall, according to a notice posted on the building’s outside wall. The project is being headed up by Bob Crowe, who was a partner in a prior owner of Bentleys and its sister restaurant, Fire Stones in Quechee.
Meanwhile, in Windsor, a new restaurant named Au Jus was opened on Aug. 1 by two chefs, Nate Rose and Josh Martin, who previously worked together at Neal’s in Proctorsville, Vt. And in Hanover, a new Asian restaurant, Han Fusion, is getting ready to open next month in the basement-level space formerly occupied by Orient in the Hanover Park building on Lebanon Street.
The sudden flux of new and reopened restaurants reverses the spate of restaurant closings over the past year, as Stella’s, Bentleys and Hanover’s Canoe Club all closed their doors within a few months of each other. Two other restaurants, Wild Roots in South Royalton and Isaac B’s in Orford, closed after brief lives.
Coyle said it would be a couple of weeks before the back dining room of Stella’s has reopened for dinner. Until then, the cafe will be open for take-out sandwiches, pizza and frozen to-go meals until 8 p.m.
Lory, one of Coyle’s partners in Stella’s 2.0, is a Hartford native and former head chef at the Quechee Club who, besides early stints at Three Tomatoes in Lebanon — when it was known as Sweet Tomatoes — and the Woodstock Inn, also cooked in the kitchen at Stella’s for several years. In fact, it was during his earlier stint at Stella’s that Lory met Catalona, a Thetford native and interior designer, who was then a waitress. The two, besides being partnered in both the business and building with Coyle, are now engaged to be married.
(Denby Coyle, Bob Coyle’s wife with whom he partnered in Stella’s since they opened the restaurant in 2008, is no longer involved in the business).
As part of Stella’s relaunch — the restaurant takes its name from Marlon Brando’s famous cry “Hey, Stella”! in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire — the kitchen was completely re-detailed and a new 10-burner cooking range installed. Coyle still stocks the front with a selection of gourmet provisions, although he cut back on items to make room for the new cafe.
“Instead of carrying 14 different kinds of hot sauces, now I just have two,” he explained.
For a while after he closed Stella’s in June 2018, Coyle, who lives in an apartment on the third floor, considered selling the building, assessed at $1.2 million, and had it listed with a real estate broker.
But, after mulling several feelers — “One guy wanted to turn it into an office building, which didn’t sit well with me,” he said — Coyle and Lory got together over drinks to discuss going into business together and reopening the restaurant.
On Monday morning, Lyme residents and old customers were stopping in to check out Stella’s new cafe, which includes furnishing touches like the original linoleum soda fountain counter from the building’s Nichols Hardware store days, which Coyle had retrieved out of storage.
Lyme resident Susan Musty, walking out with a mocha latte and gluten-free chocolate chip cookie, said, “We were all so sad when it closed,” and noted she had been following developments on the listserv.
“Guy Nichols had a little breakfast and lunch place in the front of his hardware store,” Musty remembered. “It was a real meeting place for people in town, and it’s nice to see that again.”
Sitting outside under an overhang where Coyle had set up a couple of small tables and chairs, Brenda Ashooh was enjoying her scone and light roast coffee — for which Stella’s charges the 1980s price of $1 per 12-ounce cup — with her husband, Nick, sitting across from her.
Before Stella’s closed “it was our favorite restaurant; we’d come here almost every Friday night,” said Nick Ashooh, a corporate communications consultant. He described his favorite Stella’s dinner dish as the pan-fried half-chicken with green beans, “which is to die for.”
“We wanted to show our support,” Ashooh said about why he and Brenda were among the first customers to stop by on Monday morning. “There are three nice options here again,” he said, noting that Lyme also has the Latham House and Lyme Inn restaurants.
But Coyle starting a cafe and offering an assortment of breakfast pastries, Ashooh said, “is smart.”
“I hope he does well,” he added.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
