Twenty years after purchasing the parcel at 472 Old Stone Highway in Springs and opening Old Stone Market, Wolf Reiter and Vicky Sdrougias called it a career. The market closed, much to the sorrow of many, on Monday.
Formerly Marty’s Deli, the year-round spot served homemade hot meals, sandwiches, pastries and croissants, and other delicacies.
“We’re closing because I’m tired,” Ms. Sdrougias said. “I found last year cooking in the kitchen — the temperature goes over 100 degrees — it was just brutal. I’d get home, I could barely get out of the car and walk to the house. I just can’t do it anymore.”
Some customers, upon learning of the market’s imminent closing, started to cry, Ms. Sdrougias said. “You don’t know what this place has meant to me,” was their message, she said, as they shared tales of how Old Stone’s offerings helped them endure crises like divorce and the pandemic. One was “fondling my homemade jam and crying the other day,” she said. “I had to go give a big hug.”
“It’s been really gratifying,” she said. “I’ve been touched by the outpouring from the community as we’re closing. It just reminded me when I came here 20 years ago,” when the couple was just five years removed from New York City. “Over the past 20 years, we’ve really become members of the community out here. . . . People talk about your family and then your ‘work’ family. There’s customers we’ve seen every day for the better part of 20 years.”
In New York, Ms. Sdrougias was a psychologist, working in the mental health department at Rikers Island, which houses the city’s largest jail. “There’s more beds there than there are in any state hospital anywhere,” she said. Early in their ownership of the market, it became necessary to continue at Rikers longer than anticipated, thanks to the great recession, which officially spanned December 2007 to June 2009, though its impacts persisted for several years afterward.
“At that point, I was just really a cook,” she said. “I became a baker at that point,” realizing the importance of an expanded menu. “When I started baking here . . . there was no Carissa’s or anything like that. I had no competition, so I really expanded and came to embrace the baking part of it and making cakes, different cookies, different types of desserts, which hadn’t been part of my culinary life up to then.”
When the Covid-19 pandemic caused the demise of many small businesses, “we were one of the few businesses that made money hand over a fist,” Ms. Sdrougias said.
“All these empty houses,” Mr. Reiter said of second homes, “were full all the time.”
“It was like summertime for a year,” though not without challenges, Ms. Sdrougias said. “We had gloves out for people, and they wouldn’t wear the gloves. Some guy threw his coffee at me, told me people like me were perpetuating the hoax.” For all their precautions, she and the couple’s daughter, Ruby, contracted the virus upon returning to the market after a cross-country trip.
“Normally, we barely make any profit in the winter,” said Mr. Reiter, who holds the distinction of being asked to dance by Mick Jagger while bartending at the Stephen Talkhouse in the mid-1970s (it’s a long story) and once owned the long-gone Sea Wolf restaurant in Springs. “But with Covid, it quadrupled or quintupled the rest of that winter.”
Ms. Sdrougias admitted to having mixed feelings, at one point, about leaving the business, but that ambivalence has subsided. “I started to become very joyous about retiring,” she said. She won’t miss the pressure of enduring lean winters while maintaining a staff of three. “We had really good year-round help, and if you let them go in the winter, you don’t know they’re going to come back in the spring. They have bills all year round. So we felt it was important to stay open over the winters.”
Now, she plans to “get myself reacquainted with the beautiful Hamptons. I came out here because I love the beach. I want to enjoy myself.”
The couple, who live in Springs, maintain an apartment in the city, and Mr. Reiter expressed a wish to spend more time there, “but I love this area,” he said. “It’s so beautiful. I know so many people. I’m going to be happy here.”
On Monday afternoon, they hosted a party for the community. “We want to say goodbye to all our neighbors,” Ms. Sdrougias said.
Sabrina Moller and Belal Bilto, of the boutique private chef company Platedate, will soon open the Shop at the site.