Drive past 27 Fairgrounds Road on a weekday morning right now and you'll see a lit counter and a dark dining room. The counter has donuts. Scotch-Irish cake, raspberry brambles, the kind of things that made people drive across the island for the old Downyflake even when the coffee was mediocre and the parking lot was gravel. The dining room, the one with the tables and the eventual eggs-over-easy, is still waiting on a cook.
Depending on which article you read this year, the Downyflake is either fully back or hasn't really returned at all. Both are true, just for different halves of the business. The gap between those two halves, and how long it's taking to close, tells you more about how a small Nantucket institution survives right now than either version of the story on its own.
What's Actually on the Counter
The donuts arrived in August. Marianne Stanton's Near and Afar newsletter, writing in a late-September update, put it plainly: Downyflake-branded doughnuts and pastries were added to The Fairgrounds' offerings that month and became a genuine hit, an improvement, she noted, over the sometimes-greasy versions from the old Sparks Avenue location. That's the visible, tastable part of the comeback, and it's the reason the phrase "the Downyflake is back" has been circulating since summer.
What hasn't started, as of that same late-September report, is breakfast service. Ethan Devine, who now owns The Fairgrounds, had just hired a breakfast cook and was still finalizing a front-of-house position. The plan is to fold in some of the original recipes from Karsten Reinemo, whose family ran the Downyflake for years before it moved to Sparks Avenue. No date had been set. The donuts are a preview. The full counter-and-conversation breakfast experience that people actually mean when they say "the Downyflake" is still being assembled.
Two Owners, One Address
The reason this is happening in stages instead of all at once traces back to a piece of real estate math that played out over 2024 and 2025.
The Downyflake closed its Sparks Avenue location in the fall of 2024, forced out by construction on a new mixed-use development on a site it had occupied since the mid-1990s. Owners Pate Kennedy and Ron Oldham spent roughly a year and a half looking for a new home for the business. Meanwhile, a few miles away, Ethan and Alexis Devine bought The Fairgrounds restaurant and its Fairgrounds Road property earlier in 2026 from longtime owners Bill and Kim Puder.
Rather than the Downyflake finding its own standalone building, which is a much harder proposition on an island where commercial space turns over into condos and boutiques, Kennedy and Oldham sold the Downyflake's business, brand, and assets to the Devines, who combined the two under one roof. Kennedy and Oldham are staying on to help run it in its new spot, its third location in the brand's history.
Devine has described the arrangement as a continuation of something he recognized in both sets of previous owners. He told Nantucket Current that the Puders and the Downyflake's owners "have a lot in common," pointing to years of decisions that weren't always the most profitable ones available but kept the businesses accessible to the community they served. That's not a small detail. It's the reason two nearly-ninety-year-old and multi-decade Nantucket names ended up sharing a kitchen instead of each trying to survive on its own lease.
Why Donuts Came First
The staged rollout isn't a marketing choice. It's a staffing one.
The Fairgrounds' existing operation runs lunch, dinner, and weekend music, an afternoon-into-evening schedule. Layering donuts and pastries onto that structure required no new morning shift. It's product that can be baked ahead and sold from a counter without opening the dining room hours earlier than the rest of the business already runs.
Full breakfast service is a different commitment. The original plan, reported back in May, called for the Downyflake to eventually run breakfast from 7 to 11 a.m. before the property transitions into The Fairgrounds' lunch and dinner service, meaning an entirely separate block of hours with its own cook and its own front-of-house staff layered onto a restaurant that wasn't previously open in the morning at all. That's the piece still being built. Hiring a breakfast cook is one line item. Finding someone to run the front of house for a shift that didn't exist six months ago is another. As of late September, only the first was done.
The Word Ron Oldham Used
Oldham has a name for what The Fairgrounds and the Downyflake have in common that made this pairing make sense: "common denominator" establishments, places where different segments of the community still naturally overlap, regardless of income or how long someone has lived on the island.
That kind of space is getting harder to find on Nantucket, where public-facing businesses increasingly sort into one of two categories: heavily seasonal and upscale, or heavily local and utilitarian, with less in between. A donut counter that survives by being useful to year-round residents, seasonal workers, and summer visitors alike doesn't fit neatly into either bucket, which is part of why it took a merger, rather than a simple relocation, to keep it going. Neither business built its following on exclusivity or curated scarcity, and sharing an address let both keep the everyday role they already had.
Here's what that actually looks like if you're deciding whether to drive out to Fairgrounds Road this week:
| As of late September 2026 | Status |
|---|---|
| Donuts, coffee, breakfast sandwiches from the counter | Running, added in August |
| Pastries (Scotch-Irish cake, raspberry brambles) | Running, added in August |
| Lunch and dinner service | Running, part of The Fairgrounds' existing hours |
| Weekend music | Running |
| Full sit-down breakfast (Karsten Reinemo recipes) | Not yet, cook hired, front-of-house still being finalized |
What This Means If You Live Here
If you're chasing the donuts and pastries, they're already there, and by most accounts an improvement on what the old Sparks Avenue counter was turning out toward the end. If what you actually miss is the sit-down version, the eggs, the counter conversations, the full ritual that made the Downyflake a fixture for the better part of nine decades, that's not open yet, and nobody involved has put a date on it.
The useful takeaway isn't the menu. It's what the timeline says about how a small, unglamorous, genuinely useful Nantucket business stays alive on an island where real estate doesn't leave much room for standalone comebacks. It doesn't reopen in one piece. It gets absorbed into another survivor's kitchen, and it comes back one shift at a time, starting with whatever the existing staff can already handle, and ending, eventually, with the part everyone's actually been waiting for.
Tracking a story like this closely, who bought what, who's still involved, what's actually running versus what's still being staffed, is the same instinct we bring to reading the island's property market. If you want that kind of read on a specific Nantucket address, The Robinette Team is glad to walk through it with you.
