Wally’s Place for Sale in South Hero

The Champlain Islands might be down a café this summer time — at the very least quickly. After 15 years of working Wally’s Place bagel store, café and bakery in South Hero, homeowners Matt and Kristen Bartle will shut the biz on Sunday, June 11.

Wally’s Place is not formally listed on the market with a dealer, Matt Bartle advised Seven Days. However the couple are prepared for brand new homeowners to “take it and think about it from recent eyes,” he mentioned, and he is been fielding inquiries from potential consumers.

“We’re actually open to a whole lot of completely different concepts proper now,” Bartle mentioned. “Once we realized we did not have sufficient staffing to get via the summer time, we needed to put a date on it and say, ‘If nothing occurs, we’re simply gonna shut the doorways.’”

The favored café at 54 Neighborhood Lane at present serves breakfast and lunch six days every week, with breads and sweets baked in-house. Wally’s New York-style bagels have received the Seven Daysies award for greatest bagel outdoors Chittenden County since 2018.

Promoting includes a troublesome resolution, Bartle mentioned: The couple may settle for “a bunch of cash” from a purchaser who finally ends up altering the enterprise fully. Or they may take little to no payoff and “facilitate the subsequent part of a group area.”

“It is a conundrum,” he mentioned. “I reside right here, and I wish to come right here and drink espresso. However I wish to do it on the opposite aspect of the counter.”

Wally’s Place is known as for Bartle’s grandfather, who retired to South Hero. As a child, Bartle got here to the islands each summer time from New Jersey to go to his grandparents. In 2008, he opened the bagel store as a “tiny little hole-in-the-wall,” he mentioned.

The store remained at its unique 1 Ferry Street location till 2016; since 2020, that area has been dwelling to Two Heroes Brewery‘s pilot taproom. Bartle, who’s a companion in Two Heroes, mentioned development is wrapping up on the brewery’s new location at 252 Route 2. He hopes Two Heroes will open a tasting room there in mid-June, with a public home sooner or later, and he plans to concentrate on the meals choices there after he closes Wally’s Place.