"It feels like back to the future," Sweetwaters owner David Melincoff told WCAX on the April afternoon his restaurant reopened at 120 Church Street after a four-year absence. He wasn't wrong. Regulars came back to the same corner booth, the same brass rail, the same cornflake-crusted chicken fingers that had been the subject of nostalgic Facebook posts since 2022. Brook Jette of Middlebury told the station her family used to stop at Sweetwaters every holiday season before shopping, and that losing it had felt like losing a piece of Church Street itself.
What almost nobody reported at the time is that the story didn't stop there. By the time Seven Days checked back in this month, the chef who'd been the emotional center of the whole reopening, Jessee Lawyer, had already left again, this time for the Great Northern kitchen at Zero Gravity Beer Hall. Kyle Wescott, the reopening team's original chef de cuisine, is now running the kitchen. If you read the spring coverage and assumed you knew who was cooking your Shirt Sleeve wrap, you were four months behind.
That's the actual shape of what's happening on Church Street this year. It isn't a simple story of decline followed by revival. It's a small number of storefronts and a small number of people trading places with each other, sometimes more than once in the same season.
The addresses that keep changing hands
Look at the block between Main and Pearl and you can trace the same handful of moves happening in slow motion.
| Address | What happened before 2026 | What's true now |
|---|---|---|
| 120 Church Street | Sweetwaters closed in September 2022 so Pascolo Ristorante could relocate in from 83 Church | Sweetwaters reopened April 23, with a second chef change already behind it |
| 83 Church Street | Sat empty as Pascolo's former home for three years | Pascolo moved back into its original space after Sweetwaters' return freed it up |
| 25 Cherry Street | Bleu Northeast Kitchen closed December 31 | The Harborvale opened this spring under chef Doug Paine |
| 180 College Street (the small corner kiosk) | Leunig's Petit Bijou held a ten-year lease starting New Year's 2017 | Vacant, with the city still working through a request for proposals |
Two restaurants effectively swapped addresses. A third opened in a space vacated by a fourth. And the smallest, most visible corner spot in the whole district still doesn't have an announced tenant. None of this is expansion in the way a city press release would describe it. It's musical chairs among people who already know each other, played out on real estate that's been fought over since the 1980s.
The comeback that needed a second act
The Sweetwaters story is worth sitting with because it shows how fast a good-news headline can go stale. When Melincoff first floated the idea to Seven Days back in January, he framed his own role modestly, calling himself more of a guiding light than a hands-on owner, and said the restaurant needed new blood. Lawyer, who'd cooked at Sweetwaters for nine years before the 2022 closure and had spent the intervening stretch at Edelweiss Mountain Deli in Stowe, was announced as the returning chef and new co-owner. He told Seven Days the chicken fingers "screamed 1980s" but that people loved them anyway, and that keeping the Shirt Sleeve wrap on the menu was never in question.
That was the version of the story that made the rounds in January and April. By the time Seven Days went back for a proper review, Lawyer had already moved to Zero Gravity, and Wescott, the chef de cuisine who helped design the reopening menu, had stepped into the executive chef role. He added a Queen City Rice Bowl and a chile-glazed, pan-seared salmon to the classics, and told the paper plainly, "We're not the French Laundry." The restaurant is still doing what it always did well, which is being approachable to nearly everyone who walks in, according to managing partner Jessie Littler. But the cast that made the reopening an emotional story in April isn't entirely the cast running the kitchen in August.
If you've been telling out-of-town friends "you have to try Sweetwaters again, the original chef's back," it's worth updating that sentence.
Where the actual growth is happening
Not every move this year has been a re-shuffle of existing space. The Harborvale, the restaurant inside the newly renovated hotel at 25 Cherry Street, is a genuinely new concept from chef Doug Paine, the longtime force behind both Juniper at Hotel Vermont and Bleu Northeast Kitchen, the very restaurant the Harborvale now replaces in that same building. According to Seven Days, the restaurant runs café service through a late-night bar seven days a week, with dishes like wild boar ribs and stuffed squid on the dinner menu and a breakfast plate that nods to Paine's time cooking in Stowe.
Leunig's Bistro, meanwhile, isn't adding to downtown at all this year. It's growing outward. The company confirmed to WCAX that it's opening a 5,300-square-foot second location called Leunig's on Market at Catamount Run in South Burlington, complete with its own bar and event space. It's a small but telling detail: one of Church Street's most established names is choosing to expand its footprint away from Church Street, even while its old kiosk lease at Church and College sits unresolved.
That kiosk, the 135-square-foot spot Leunig's used to run as Leunig's Petit Bijou, is the one piece of this year's puzzle nobody has closed the loop on. Church Street Marketplace put out a request for proposals in February, asking for a tenant willing to keep the space open a minimum of six hours a day, six days a week, year-round, with a preference for breakfast and lunch service, according to Seven Days. Applications closed February 27. As of the most recent public reporting, no new operator had been named.
The rhythm you can still catch this month
None of this cast-change story means downtown has gone quiet this summer. Church Street Marketplace's Thursday evening series runs through August 13, with patio dining spilling into the street and a different lineup each week, according to the marketplace's own listings. Down at the water, Foam Brewers keeps its usual free schedule going, with jazz from the Dave Grippo–Bruce Sklar Quintet on August 13, a Rage Against the Machine tribute set from Burning Monk on August 14, and the Vermont Reggae Fest closing out the month on August 22, per the brewery's event calendar.
Waterfront Park hosted a run of national touring acts through the end of July, and the bigger draw is still ahead. Grand Point North, Grace Potter's own festival, returns to the waterfront September 18 through 20 with Portugal. The Man, Dawes, Dark Star Orchestra, and Trampled by Turtles on the bill, according to WCAX's lineup coverage. If you've gone every year since it restarted, the September dates are the ones to hold open now, before hotel blocks fill in.
And Saturday mornings still belong to the Burlington Farmers Market, which has run in the South End since 1980 and moved to its current home at 345 Pine Street years ago. It's the one fixture in this whole story that hasn't changed hands, closed, or reopened under new management. Some things on Church Street's periphery are still exactly where you left them.
What this actually tells you
The easy version of this story is "downtown Burlington is bouncing back." The more accurate version is narrower and more interesting: a handful of specific buildings and a handful of specific people keep trading places with each other, and the news cycle rarely catches up to the second or third move before reporting the first one as the whole story. If you live here, that's less a headline than a habit worth having. Check twice before you tell a friend who's cooking at your favorite spot. The address might be right. The chef might not be.
If you're weighing a move of your own, whether that's into the neighborhood or somewhere quieter along the water, Karen Bresnahan has spent years reading exactly these kinds of shifts across Burlington and the Lake Champlain Valley. Let's Connect.
