For years, if you worked in the village of Catskill and wanted a quick lunch, the honest answer was: good luck. Josie Grant heard it constantly while picking up shifts at local cafes and running a sandwich pop-up out of EAT, a commissary kitchen downtown. People would ask where to grab something midday, and the answer was usually a long wait somewhere or nothing close by at all. Catskill wasn't short on restaurants. It was short on the kind of place you duck into on a Tuesday at noon without a plan.
Grant fixed that in late January, when she opened Loomie's Luncheonette in a former photography studio at 466 Main Street. But the more interesting part of this story isn't the sandwiches, though we'll get to those. It's what Loomie's reveals about a pattern showing up in at least two other places on the same short stretch of downtown this year: Main Street businesses are starting to build for the people who live here full time, not just the weekend crowd passing through on the way to a hike or a river view.
The Village Had Restaurants. It Didn't Have Lunch.
Grant isn't new to Hudson Valley food service. Before Loomie's, she ran Moxie Cupcake in New Paltz and Redstart Coffee in Kingston, then closed both and figured she was done with the industry entirely. A layoff from a marketing job and a string of barista shifts changed her mind, and when a storefront opened directly across the street from her own apartment, she took it as a sign worth acting on. Not a lot of things open up on Main Street, she said at the time, and she went all in.
The menu at Loomie's is built around what Grant calls "fat cat melts," grilled-cheese-forward sandwiches on rustic bread with chips or an apple on the side. A few examples give you the range:
- The Classic, a straightforward American cheese melt, $10
- The Loomie, smoked trout and havarti with dill on beer sourdough, $14
- The Reuben, corned beef, Swiss, sauerkraut and dressing on Swedish rye, $12
- The Figetaboutit, provolone, prosciutto di Parma and fig jam, $14
- Breakfast egg and cheese on a hard roll, $6, with bacon or sausage for $2 more
The bread isn't incidental. Loomie's sources from See & Be Kitchen in Cairo and Catskill Bread Company in Athens, and the Swedish rye used for the Reuben has been popular enough that Grant said she couldn't keep up with orders one weekend. That's a small detail, but it matters for how you read the rest of this piece. A menu built around two nearby bakeries, priced for a workday lunch rather than a special occasion, is a different bet than a restaurant built to catch tourist traffic on a Saturday. It's a bet on repeat customers who live within walking distance.
A Second Signal Two Blocks Away
If Loomie's were an isolated case, it would just be a nice addition to the village. But a second business is making a version of the same bet just up the street. Josie's Coffee Shoppe, which has operated in Saugerties since 2020, is opening a second location at 51 W. Bridge Street, in what owner Vanessa Piazza has described as a light-filled brick corner building she chose after touring several spots around the Hudson Valley.
Piazza has been candid that the Catskill location wasn't part of her original plans. It came about after she and her fiancé took over ownership of Goodies and grew attached to the village itself. As of late August 2026, she was in what she called the final stretch of opening, aiming to be serving customers by the time school was back in session. She's said she wants the space to feel like it belongs here rather than reading as a copy of the Saugerties original:
"I'm excited to give Catskill its own Josie's, one that feels like it belongs here."
That distinction matters. A satellite location built to skim visitor traffic usually just replicates the flagship. A location built to serve a specific village tends to develop its own identity, its own regulars, its own rhythm. Piazza is explicitly choosing the second path, and she's doing it a block and a half from where Grant made the same choice in January.
The Food Festival's Long Walk Back to Main Street
The third data point isn't a new business. It's an old event with a complicated relationship to downtown. The Catskill Food Festival returns to Dutchman's Landing Park on Saturday, October 3, 2026, from noon to 6 p.m., with food trucks, local vendors and live music along the Hudson River waterfront.
The festival started on Main Street in 2018 and 2019, skipped 2020 because of the pandemic, and has run at Dutchman's Landing every year since 2021. Last year's event drew more than 2,000 people and 48 vendors, a turnout large enough that parking and crowd flow are now organized around the park rather than the storefronts. That's a good outcome for a single Saturday in the fall. It's also, if you think about it for a second, an event that currently does very little for the businesses lining Main Street on the day the village has its biggest single crowd of the year.
Village leadership has noticed. Catskill Village Board of Trustees President Natasha Law, who ran a booth at last year's festival, has said there's already talk of eventually bringing the event back to Main Street. Nothing is confirmed for this October, and the 2026 festival is set to run at Dutchman's Landing again. But the fact that the conversation is happening at all tells you something: the same tension playing out at Loomie's and Josie's, whether downtown exists to serve residents or to catch visitors passing through, is being debated at the level of village governance, not just storefront leases.
What Three Small Decisions Add Up To
None of this is a dramatic transformation. It's a sandwich shop, an incoming coffee shop, and an open question about where a food festival should be held. But taken together, they point in a consistent direction. Grant opened Loomie's because she kept hearing the same complaint from people who live here, not from tourists who already have a Sunday brunch spot picked out. Piazza is deliberately building a Catskill identity for her second location instead of exporting the Saugerties template wholesale. And village leadership is weighing whether the village's most attended annual event should be reoriented toward the same Main Street businesses that Grant and Piazza are betting on.
If you already live in Catskill, this is worth watching for a practical reason that has nothing to do with real estate: it means the everyday stuff, the lunch spot, the coffee run, the weekend errand loop, is getting easier to do without leaving the village. That's a slower and less photogenic story than a new restaurant opening, but it's the one that actually changes what a Tuesday here looks like.
If you're weighing whether Catskill still has room to grow into a place that works for full-time residents and not just weekend visitors, these three threads are as good an answer as you'll find right now. A grilled cheese counter that opened because the previous answer to "where's lunch" was unacceptable. A six-year-old Saugerties cafe willing to build a second identity rather than just a second location. And a food festival whose own organizers are asking whether it belongs closer to the storefronts it currently bypasses.
Keep an eye on 466 Main Street and 51 W. Bridge Street this fall, and if you're in the village on October 3, walk down to Dutchman's Landing and see for yourself whether next year's version of this story starts to look different.
If you're weighing a move within Catskill, tracking a neighborhood shift like this one, or just want a second opinion on what your home is worth in a village that keeps evolving, Century 21 New West Properties is a good first call. Request a Free Property Valuation and let's talk about what's actually happening on your block.
