One of Port Jefferson village's steadiest morning rituals is about to gain an evening. Local's Cafe, the specialty coffee shop at 106 East Main Street, can pour beer, wine and spirits for the first time in roughly a decade of business, starting this Tuesday, September 1.

The cafe that built a following on quinoa and oat milk

Local's opened in 2016 and staked out a corner of the village that no one else was serving: specialty coffee alongside a menu that takes health seriously without being joyless about it. The kitchen cooks from scratch, leaning on fresh spices, homemade chutneys and whole grains, and the menu reads like a fusion of the owners' cultural influences rather than a standard deli board. A sweet quinoa salad with strawberries and avocado runs $12, a curried vegetable veggie burger on a multigrain roll $14, and the lattes and matcha pours anchor the counter trade. Gluten free, vegetarian and vegan options are built into the menu rather than bolted on.

That formula made Local's a fixture of downtown Port Jefferson's daytime economy, the laptop crowd in the morning, the ferry and Main Street wanderers through the afternoon. What it never had was anything to offer past coffee.

What changes on Tuesday

The new capability is the full range a village restaurant carries, beer, wine and spirits served with food, and it belongs to Locals Cafe Inc., the company behind the shop, with years of runway ahead of it.

What Local's plans to do with it is the part the cafe has not said yet. As of this weekend, the shop's website and social feeds still talk about coffee, baked goods and breakfast, with no mention of a drinks list. The natural fits suggest themselves, a glass of wine with dinner service, prosecco next to the weekend brunch plates, and a cafe that pulls its own espresso is closer than most kitchens to a proper espresso martini. But that is the menu writing itself in advance. What Tuesday establishes is simpler: the option is now real, and it is theirs.

A village drink scene that keeps deepening

The change lands in a Port Jefferson that has spent the summer adding reasons to stay past dinner. Montauk Brewing opened its taproom in the old Port Jeff Brewing space on Main Street in August. Billie's 1890 Saloon, the village's endurance champion, changed hands this summer while keeping its name on the door. A health focused cafe with a drinks list would give the village something it does not currently have, a place where the evening option sits next to the matcha rather than replacing it.

It also fits a pattern that has been running across Long Island's cafe scene all year. Coffee shops and daytime kitchens keep discovering that a drinks list is the cheapest square footage they will ever add: the room, the staff and the customers already exist, and the bar simply extends what the same seats can sell. Sup, the Vietnamese kitchen in Jericho, started pouring this month. Inde Spice in Deer Park is adding wine to go with its biryani. A pizzeria in Massapequa that has fed the town since the 1970s decided this summer that it was finally time to offer a glass of red. Local's is the first in Port Jefferson village proper to make the move this season, and it does so from an unusually strong position, a loyal daytime crowd that needs no introduction to the room.

Ten years is the part worth pausing on

Plenty of places open with a bar baked into the business plan. Local's ran a decade without one, through a pandemic that emptied downtowns, and built its trade entirely on coffee, breakfast and a health conscious lunch. A bar added from that footing is not a rescue move. It reads like a business that knows exactly what its customers keep asking for at the end of the day, and finally decided to be able to say yes.

For the regulars, the practical meaning is the one worth watching: the seat you take with a laptop at nine in the morning may come with a different menu at five. Nothing about the cafe's daytime identity has to change for this to matter. It just means that when Local's decides to keep the lights on a little later, everything is already in place.