Walk past 58 East Parkway on a Sunday morning and you will still see brown paper taped inside the windows, almost two years after the DeCicco Family Markets sign came down. A block away on Spencer Place, workers were laying a colorful tile floor in mid-August inside what used to be Akai, the Japanese restaurant that closed to make room for something new. Both spaces are becoming something Scarsdale residents have been asking about for months. Only one of them looks close to a ribbon cutting.
That gap is not a coincidence, and it tells you something real about how downtown Scarsdale actually gets built out. A full-service restaurant can go from empty shell to open doors in a matter of months here. A grocery store, even a small one, is a different kind of project entirely.
Two Storefronts, Two Timelines
Here is where each project stood as of mid-August 2026, based on the most recent on-the-ground reporting from Scarsdale10583.
| Piccolino by DeCicco & Sons | Capretta | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 58 East Parkway | 57 Spencer Place |
| Operator | DeCicco family (Eastchester, Ardsley, Sleepy Hollow locations) | Z Hospitality Group (Aurora in Rye, Terra and Mediterraneo in Greenwich) |
| Status in mid-August | Exterior windows installed, interior work continuing | Tile floor going in, construction visibly advancing |
| Public opening date | None announced | None announced, but described as close |
Neither business has posted a firm date. But the texture of the reporting is different. Scarsdale10583's August update on Capretta said the group hopes to open in time to greet residents "when you come back from your summer vacation." The same article's language on Piccolino was softer: "fingers crossed for an opening this fall." One project is being described in weeks. The other is still being described in seasons.
Why the Restaurant Is Winning
Capretta has an advantage Piccolino doesn't: it is a straightforward swap. A restaurant closed, another restaurant is going in, and the buildout is largely about finishes, kitchen equipment, and a floor plan the space was already built to handle. Z Hospitality Group is not new to this. The company already runs Aurora on the water in Rye and a cluster of restaurants in Greenwich and New Canaan, which means the crew doing the Scarsdale buildout has done this exact kind of project before.
Scarsdale's downtown has shown it can absorb new restaurants quickly and successfully. Micheline, the French bistro from Eleven Madison Park alum and Scarsdale native Jonathan Aubrey, moved into the former Metro Diner space on Scarsdale Avenue and has become one of the restaurants OpenTable now lists among the village's best for atmosphere. Bistro de Ville opened on Summerfield Street in September 2023 and has stayed busy since, run by a longtime Scarsdale resident who describes wanting to bring "the Heart of Paris" to her own neighborhood. None of that took two years.
What's Actually Slowing the Grocery Store
Piccolino is not a simple swap. The site closed as DeCicco Family Markets in November 2024, and the new operators, a different branch of the DeCicco family, filed renovation plans that the Board of Architectural Review approved in July 2025. That approval came with conditions, including a requirement to reduce the size of a proposed cupola designed to echo the clock at the center of the Village. The original target was a December 2025 opening. By late November 2025, Scarsdale10583 reported the site was still quiet and found that DeCicco's was in the middle of a complete gut renovation, from the basement up, while simultaneously building a new store in Glenville, Connecticut. That kind of overlap slows any single project down.
There is also a harder constraint than construction schedules. Joe DeCicco has said the company has concerns about the limited size of Scarsdale's parking lot and is trying to arrange additional customer parking in the Village before opening. A restaurant with fifty seats can survive on street parking and a short wait. A grocery store depends on people being able to park, shop, and load a car in a reasonable window, and Scarsdale's village lot was not built with a full-size supermarket in mind.
That is also why Piccolino was designed the way it was. Renderings presented to the Board of Architectural Review describe a small-format concept store, not a full supermarket, sized closer to Balducci's at the Five Corners than to a traditional grocery. The plans include outdoor seating on East Parkway and signage for something called "bar piccolino," suggesting a curated, grab-and-go format with prepared foods and a wine and beer component rather than full weekly-shop aisles. Chris DeCicco described the concept plainly when the name was announced: shoppers "won't have to cross-reference labels or check for quality ingredients" because the selection will already be curated for them. It is a smaller promise than a full grocery store, which may be part of why it is taking longer to get exactly right.
The Same Chain Just Set a Firm Date, Two Towns Over
For contrast, look at what is happening in Hartsdale. Sprouts Farmers Market is opening at 393 North Central Park Avenue, in the space that used to be BEST Market, on Friday, September 4, 2026. That date has been public for weeks and hasn't moved. Sprouts opened its first New York State location in Centereach back in January 2026, and the Hartsdale store is a straightforward retrofit of an existing supermarket box on a commercial corridor with its own large parking lot.
The difference isn't the brand or the ambition. It's the site. A strip location built for a supermarket can be turned around fast. A village-center storefront with architectural review conditions, a constrained parking lot, and a boutique-scale concept takes longer, even when the same underlying pressure to open exists.
What Fills the Gap Until Then
None of this means downtown Scarsdale is short on ways to shop or eat this fall. The Scarsdale Farmers Market continues every Sunday through November 22, from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Spencer Place at Chase Road, run in partnership with Down to Earth Markets. Destination Scarsdale activations run alongside it from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., turning what used to be a produce run into something closer to a standing weekly gathering. It is not a substitute for a full grocery store, but it is the reason the wait for Piccolino hasn't felt as sharp as it might have two years ago.
On the restaurant side, options keep expanding while the grocery gap persists. Between Micheline, Bistro de Ville, Sapori of Scarsdale, and whatever Capretta turns out to be once its doors open, the village center is not struggling for places to eat dinner. It is struggling for a place to buy the ingredients to cook it yourself, and that is the one thing this particular stretch of real estate has never made easy to build.
If you are watching these storefronts because you are thinking about what life in Scarsdale actually looks like week to week, that is exactly the kind of texture we track. Totally Westchester covers the Village the way residents actually experience it, not just the listings. When the time comes to make a move here or anywhere else in Westchester, we would love to help you Start Your Westchester Move.