Love Lane Market Re-Opening for Fourth of July

After closing its doors in the wake of Superstorm Sandy due to heavy damage to its HVAC system, Love Lane Market is ready to re-open.

The gourmet food shop in Mattituck is planning to be open on July 4, slowly starting to offer some pizzas and meats for the holiday weekend.

In the eight months the market has been closed, Ridge native and current North Fork resident George Caso has stepped in as business partner for Mike and Patty Avella, founders of Love Lane Market and Love Lane Kitchen. The Avellas sold LLK to general manager Carolyn Iannone last August, and while Keith Luce had considered opening a meat curing house at the Love Lane Market location, he opted for Greenport instead.

Caso, 34, previously worked at both Ackerly Pond Vineyards and Waters Crest Winery, as well as Dockers in Westhampton Beach. In addition, he's worked as a private chef while also maintaining a culinary business of his own: Caveman to Go, a paleo-based diet delivery company.

Caso said on Wednesday that while Love Lane Market will retain much of the gourmet inventory it stored previously, he and Avella plan on widening its appeal a little bit.

"We will have some of the same gourmet items, but we are going to bring in some other products that are more accessible and more readily available that people can use on an everyday basis," he said.

Caso noted that the shop plans to be selling craft beer, high-quality meats, kabobs and burgers, in addition to some of the "crazy ingredients" that were previously hard to find anywhere else. Love Lane Market also plans to partner with the Roanoke Vineyards tasting room on Love Lane, for an occasional sit-down pizza and wine special, while offering beer and pizza specials of its own at their sit-down pizza bar.

The shop opened in the fall of 2011 and was never cleared out following Sandy, and Caso said that while he was unsure exactly how much it cost to get back up and running repairs for the compressors ran into the tens of thousands of dollars.

"It's a super energy-efficient unit," he said of the unit, which Avella had said short-circuited in the storm. "The downside of that is that it is expensive to fix when it gets burned out."