Oak Bluffs Gained Five Restaurants This Season. It Lost Its Hardware Store, Its Fudge, and a Gift Shop.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Walk Circuit Avenue this week and you will pass a handwritten sign taped inside the window at Murdick's Fudge. It has been there since mid-August, after the operating manager was hurt in an accident and the company closed all three of its Vineyard shops, including the Circuit Avenue storefront that has cut fudge in front of customers since the company opened on the Island in 1979. The sign says the company hopes to reopen later in the summer. As of this week, it has not.
That single dark storefront is easy to read as a small, sad footnote to an otherwise busy season. It is actually the clearest evidence of something bigger happening on this street. Oak Bluffs opened or approved five new restaurants in 2026. In the same twelve months, it lost its hardware store, its longest-running fudge shop, and a well-liked gift store. The street is not simply changing hands. It is changing purpose, and the reason has less to do with what visitors want to eat and more to do with what a small commercial building on Martha's Vineyard actually costs to run today.
Start with what opened. In late March, the long-vacant former Linda Jean's space reopened as Highlands General, a year-round fast-casual restaurant and market. Doug Abdelnour, who also owns Nomans and Nancy's, bought the building with hotelier Charles Hajjar for $4.9 million in November and brought in Nancy's managers Steve Ansara and Kelly Sciandra as partners. It is open daily from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., which makes it one of the only reliable year-round breakfast spots left in town, a gap Abdelnour said was obvious the moment he started planning.
A few doors down, the space that housed Dos Mas became Esh in April, after the Shai family shelved an original plan to renovate around a fireplace and pivoted the whole concept toward brunch and a broader seasonal American menu with a California accent. It is one of the few Circuit Avenue spots now serving brunch on weekends, a detail that matters more than it sounds like it should on a street that has never had much of one.
Jetty Beach House opened for Memorial Day in the former Lobsterville space, run by the team behind Midnight Taco, serving a raw bar, steak frites, and a house cocktail called the Jetty Spritz. In May, the Black Dog's CEO Dan Pucillo told the Oak Bluffs select board he was bringing a second concept to town: Coastwise Pub, moving into 6 Circuit Avenue, the space Mikado occupied for years. Pucillo said food would lead the menu but that the pub would lean into a cocktail bar atmosphere, and that it would serve coffee in the mornings, a detail that drew audible relief from the board.
The most talked-about addition is still under construction. Inkwell Beach House is set to take over the former Martha's Vineyard Chowder Company space on Oak Bluffs Avenue, spearheaded by television personality and summer Islander AJ Calloway. The downstairs restaurant will be run by celebrity chef G. Garvin, known for Turn Up the Heat and Hustle, Sizzle, and Smoke. Calloway told the select board he wants an "events ecosystem" where a sit-down dinner can slide into an afterparty without anyone changing rooms.
Five kitchens, five different owners, five different bets on what Circuit Avenue diners want next. None of them are betting on a hammer or a scoop of fudge.
Phillips Hardware closed in September 2025 after nearly a century in the same building, when sisters Donna Leon and Susan Phillips decided to retire. The store had been, in the words of one Oak Bluffs historical commission member years earlier, part of the heartbeat of the town's business district. It was not replaced by another practical business. It was demolished.
Slip 77, a longtime source of gifts and Island clothing, has also closed. And then there is Murdick's, whose three Vineyard shops, Edgartown, Oak Bluffs, and Vineyard Haven, have all sat dark since the accident this summer, a company that started on Mackinac Island in 1979 and had grown into the kind of stop families built a beach day around.
Bill Honeycutt, who owns Offshore Ale Company on Kennebec Avenue, put the tension plainly at a Martha's Vineyard Commission hearing earlier this year, arguing for redevelopment on Circuit Avenue's most visible vacant lot.
"We're a year-round business, and we desperately need traffic generators. Oak Bluffs is really hurting at this point."
That is a business owner asking for more foot traffic, not fewer errands. But the two goals are not the same thing, and the Phillips Hardware site shows exactly why.
You might expect the most prominent vacant lot on Circuit Avenue, the old Phillips Hardware building at 30 Circuit Avenue, to become restaurant number six. It will not. In March, the Martha's Vineyard Commission voted 13 to 0 to approve a very different kind of project: a mixed-use building called Oakwood, with two ground-floor retail spaces intended for dry goods and ten apartments upstairs, all of it restricted as workforce housing rather than short-term rentals.
The owners are the Pacheco family, who also run Reliable Market next door and bought the Phillips building in 2022. Their original plan called for traditional stick-built construction, styled after the Victorian-era Oakwood Hotel that once stood on the site. They switched to modular construction instead, and Jennifer Pacheco Freeman explained why to the commission in blunt terms.
"We've spent all the family money. Now we have to go to the bank."
That sentence is the real story behind this season's turnover. A family that has owned a Circuit Avenue building for four years, and whose relatives ran a hardware store there for a century, could not afford to build the version everyone in town said they wanted. What pencils out instead is workforce housing over retail, not another dining room. If the most established commercial family on the street is choosing apartments over a restaurant lease, that tells you something about what a restaurant lease on Circuit Avenue actually costs to fill right now, and why five different operators chose to renovate existing spaces rather than build new ones.
For anyone trying to keep the addresses straight:
The whole lineup gets its first real test on Saturday, September 19, when Oak Bluffs closes Circuit Avenue for Tivoli Day, the street fair and block party that has marked the end of summer here for four decades. It is the one day every business on the street, new and old, operates shoulder to shoulder in front of the same crowd, with a rain date the following Sunday if the weather does not cooperate.
This year it will be the first chance to see whether Highlands General's breakfast crowd, Esh's brunch regulars, and whatever early buzz Jetty Beach House and Coastwise Pub have built can actually fill a street that also has one less hardware store, one fewer gift shop, and, if the sign in the window is any indication, no fudge at all.
The honest read on Circuit Avenue this year is not that it got busier. It got narrower. More places to eat, fewer places to run an errand, and a street increasingly built around the visit rather than the daily stop. Whether that trade works out for the town is a question Tivoli Day will start to answer, one folding table at a time.
If you are watching these shifts because you own property here, manage a rental, or are weighing a move to the island, The Agency Martha's Vineyard tracks this kind of commercial turnover as closely as we track listings. Reach out to request a local consultation.
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