Walk past 58 East Parkway this month and you'll see progress. There's a copper-topped frame taking shape over what used to be the entrance, and it's clearly meant to echo the clock at the center of the Village. What you won't see is a sign with a date on it. That's been true for a while now, and it's worth understanding why, because the reason says something real about what it takes to open a store in a downtown as small and as watched as this one.
The empty grocery store at East Parkway has been the Village's longest-running conversation for almost two years. Everyone has an opinion on when it opens. Almost nobody has been right.
The Store That Keeps Almost Opening
The space at 58 East Parkway operated as DeCicco Family Markets for 31 years before it closed in November 2024. A different branch of the same extended DeCicco family, the one behind the stores in Eastchester, Ardsley, and Sleepy Hollow, picked up the lease and began a gut renovation from the basement up. That part isn't unusual. What is unusual is the name on the new sign.
For the first time in the company's history, DeCicco & Sons is opening a store under a name other than its own. It's called Piccolino, Italian for little one, a nod to the store's smaller footprint compared to the full-size locations elsewhere in the county. CEO John DeCicco described it as an attempt to reimagine what a neighborhood market could be, and the architectural renderings back that up: a copper-roofed cupola over the corner entrance facing the train station, outdoor tables and umbrellas spilling onto East Parkway and Spencer Place, and a bar piccolino concept for wine and beer alongside the grab-and-go counter.
Ambitious concept, real design work, and a timeline that has slipped three times in a row:
- The original target was December 2025.
- By late 2025, with construction still underway, that moved to May 2026.
- By March 2026, the company's own announcement had softened to "this summer."
- As of this week, the most recent on-the-ground report says the exterior windows are in and the crew is making progress inside, with the honest framing now being "fingers crossed for this fall."
None of that is a knock on the project. A 50-plus-year grocery company doesn't rebrand for the first time in its history on a whim, and the design details suggest they're building something meant to last, not just refilling a vacant storefront. But it's also not nothing that a company simultaneously constructing a brand-new full-size store in Glenville, Connecticut, and finishing another new store there ahead of a Scarsdale build, is running behind on the smaller, harder site. Joe DeCicco has pointed to a real constraint behind some of the delay: the Village lot's parking is tight, and the company has been trying to work out additional parking for shoppers before it fully commits to an opening date.
A Few Minutes Away, a Different Grocery Story
While the Village waits, a grocery option with an actual calendar date has appeared just up the road. Sprouts Farmers Market is opening at 393 N. Central Park Avenue in Hartsdale, in the space that used to be BEST Market, on Friday, September 4, 2026. That's a firm date, not a hope.
The contrast is worth sitting with. Sprouts is building into an existing big-box footprint on Central Avenue, a straightforward retrofit with none of the parking-lot puzzle or historic-corner design constraints that come with a project inside the Village core. Piccolino is trying to do something harder: bring a specialty grocery concept into a small, prominent, heavily used lot at the center of a downtown where every decision gets watched. The greenfield option got a date. The homegrown one is still working through the math.
That doesn't mean Piccolino won't be worth the wait. It means the wait is explainable, and residents who've been checking the windows every week now have a clearer sense of why September isn't a sure thing even if fall still is.
What's Replacing Akai
A block over on Spencer Place, the other storefront everyone's been watching is the former home of Akai, the Japanese restaurant at 57 Spencer Place. That space is now under construction for Capretta, a modern Italian restaurant from Z Hospitality Group.
Z Hospitality isn't a first-time operator taking a swing on an unfamiliar market. The group has been running restaurants in Fairfield County and Westchester for three decades, and its current roster includes Terra and Mediterraneo in Greenwich, Terra in Danbury, and Aurora in Rye. Capretta is their entry into Scarsdale, and their own materials list it as coming this summer, though as of mid-August the construction crew is still working, with a colorful tile floor visible through the windows and no confirmed open date yet. Given the group's track record of finishing what it starts across two counties, a fall opening reads as the realistic bet, even without an official date attached.
What's notable here isn't the cuisine, Italian isn't scarce in the Village, it's who's building it. A regional group with seven other restaurants already running successfully nearby is a different kind of bet than an independent chef opening a first location. It suggests confidence in the corner, not just an available lease.
The Village Already Knows How This Ends
If the current wait feels frustrating, it helps to remember that Scarsdale has done this before, and it worked.
In September 2023, a fully renovated space on Scarsdale Avenue, formerly the longtime Metro Diner, reopened as Micheline, a French bistro from Scarsdale native and Eleven Madison Park alum Jonathan Aubrey. The build-out was a genuine transformation, from diner counter to beamed ceiling and a back-lit bar, and it landed. Three years later, Micheline is a fixture, not a novelty.
The same month, on Summerfield Street, longtime Scarsdale residents Kevin and Carol Napadensky opened Bistro de Ville, another French concept built by people who already lived in town and wanted a version of Paris a few minutes from home. It's still there, still known for the same warm greeting that made it work in the first place.
Both of those projects went through the same phase Piccolino and Capretta are in right now: construction dust, a storefront residents drove past wondering when it would open, and no firm date for months. Both turned into places people actually built routines around. That's the pattern worth holding onto while the copper cupola on East Parkway finishes taking shape and the tile floor on Spencer Place gets grouted in.
What This Actually Means for the Fall
The honest version of the update is this: nothing on either corner has a date you can circle yet, and the projects taking the longest are the ones trying to fit the most ambition into the smallest, most constrained sites in the Village. That's a different story than simple delay. It's the price of building something specific to a corner instead of dropping a standard format into an easy lot, which is exactly what's happening a few minutes away in Hartsdale on a locked-in September 4 date.
If you've been checking the windows on East Parkway and Spencer Place every week hoping for a sign, the realistic expectation is fall, not Labor Day, and that's worth knowing before you plan around either one.
If you're weighing what a changing Village center means for your own home, whether that's timing a move, sizing up a renovation, or just understanding how these small commercial shifts ripple into property values nearby, Roseanna Tedone has spent years reading exactly these signals across Scarsdale and the surrounding towns. Let's Connect.
