Bellport getting Fine Fare grocery on the site of the former Cirillo's Market

Bellport will once again have a grocery store.

The new Fine Fare Bellport will open at a site that was occupied for decades by Cirillo’s Market IGA, which closed in 2023, leaving the village without a grocery store.

Suffolk County resident and longtime grocer William Lukeman and his two business partners will co-own the new store, which Lukeman expects will open in late summer.

To be located at 115 S. Country Rd., the Fine Fare store will be small — about 8,500 square feet — compared to most grocery stores, but it will have full-service deli and butcher departments, produce, dairy, frozen and dry goods, a fresh juice bar and a hot food bar, he said.

The store is taking longer to outfit than would be typical because the equipment is being custom-built, Lukeman said.

“Everything’s going to be custom-built for that [smaller] footprint, so I can maximize as much of the square footage as possible, so I can get as many diversified products” as possible in the store, he said.

Lukeman and his partners own five other Fine Fare stores — one each in Copiague, Riverhead and Farmingville and two in Brentwood.

The Bellport store will be the smallest of the six stores, with the largest being the Farmingville supermarket, at 27,000 square feet.

The Fine Fare name is owned by General Trading, a Carlstadt, New Jersey-based wholesale food distributor serving independent grocers. There are more than 60 Fine Fare stores in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, according to the Fine Fare website.

General Trading declined to comment.

Fine Fare Bellport will start operations with about 45 employees, most of whom will be full-time workers, said Lukeman, who said the employee numbers could grow based on the success of the site.

Bellport is a 1.5-square-mile village.

Because the closest supermarket, a Stop & Shop in Medford, is nearly 4 miles away from the planned Fine Fare site, Lukeman expects to draw strong foot traffic from the Bellport community and beyond, he said.

“I have to see when I show up ... how accepting the community will be to me. I think we’ll be all right though, because we have our own produce company. So, as you know, all supermarkets drive [sales] on produce, so if you have a good produce section, you can say that people will come,” he said.

Landlord: Village wanted a grocery store

Before Cirillo’s Market in Bellport closed, there had been various grocery stores on the South Country Road property since the 1960s, said Cary Staller, president of Staller Associates, the Islandia-based real estate company that owns the Bellport retail property.

The former Cirillo’s space could have been rented sooner but it took longer because community members, including Bellport Mayor Maureen Veitch, advocated for Staller to bring a grocery store to the space, Staller said.

“So, we wanted to meet … their needs,” he said.

Veitch did not respond to Newsday's requests for comment.

The building has space for two tenants, one of which is a CVS drugstore.

When the building was constructed in the 1960s, it had space for only one tenant, a Bohack supermarket, Staller said.

That store was replaced by a Gristedes grocery store in 1977.

Cirillo’s later took over the space, Staller said.

In the 1990s, Staller built an addition on the right side of the building and leased it to CVS, he said.

Cirillo’s and CVS swapped locations in 2002 because the drugstore wanted more space and a drive-thru, he said.

Fran Cirillo, owner of Cirillo's, sold the grocery store around 2022, and it was closed the next year, Lukeman said.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.