For three years, the question in Bellport Village has been the same one: when does the supermarket come back? This week produced the two most concrete answers yet, and neither came from a press release. The store is hiring its department managers, and on Friday afternoon its beer license application landed at the New York State Liquor Authority under the name every shopper in the village has been waiting on: Fine Fare.

The filing, received by the state on September 4, was made by 115 S Country Rd Produce Corp., the entity behind the new market, for a grocery store license at 115 South Country Road, the space on the village's main street that has sat dark since Cirillo's Market, the village IGA, closed in June 2023. A grocery beer license is the kind of paperwork a market files when the shelves are close to real, and it joins a hiring push the store announced on its own Facebook page a day earlier, seeking a deli manager and a dairy manager.

The village that lost its market

Bellport is a walkable village, and for decades the IGA on South Country Road was the reason a resident could live a full week without leaving it. When Cirillo's closed, the nearest full grocery run moved out to the highway, and getting the space filled became a village project. Mayor Maureen Veitch has said publicly that the landlord, Staller Associates president Cary Staller, called her on New Year's Eve with the news that a tenant was in hand, and that former mayor Frank Trotta, who grew up working in his own family's Bellport grocery store, had spent months helping to push the deal along. The store's social pages began teasing the announcement just before New Year's and confirmed it in the first week of January.

Who is behind it

The operator is William Lukeman, a Suffolk grocer who runs a group of Fine Fare supermarkets on Long Island, including stores in Brentwood, Copiague, Riverhead and Farmingville. His track record is the encouraging part for anyone who remembers the IGA's later years: in 2004, after rebuilding the Brentwood store, he was one of a handful of retailers worldwide recognized with IGA's top global award for excellence in retailing. He has signed a 20-year lease on the Bellport space and has described a top-to-bottom rebuild of the store running into the millions, with new refrigeration, new registers and new cases throughout.

At about 8,500 square feet, Bellport will be the smallest store in his group, but the plans he has laid out publicly are those of a full-service market: a fresh deli with Boar's Head meats, an in-house butcher cutting prime, produce trucked in rather than warehoused, dairy, frozen foods, a juice bar and prepared hot food. Lukeman has also said each of his stores stocks to its neighborhood, with dedicated country-of-origin aisles built around what the surrounding community actually cooks. Staffing estimates have run to roughly 25 full-time and part-time jobs.

The timeline, honestly

Opening estimates for this store have slipped before. In January the target was late April or early May. By late spring it had moved to late summer, and late summer is now. The store has not posted an opening date, and this article will not invent one.

What has changed is the nature of the signals. A teaser post is a promise; a manager hiring push and a license filing are logistics, and logistics are what the last weeks before a supermarket opens actually look like. The license itself does not need to be granted before the doors can open, since a market can sell everything but the beer while an application is pending.

For the village, the meaning is simple enough. The gap between Bellport and its groceries, measured since June 2023 in car trips out to the highway, is closing. When the doors do open, South Country Road gets back the one storefront a village center cannot really function without, and the corner where generations bought their milk goes back to being exactly what it was.