For most of the last fifty years, if you wanted a sandwich before a Devil's Den hike or a slice of pie after the Grange fair, there was exactly one place in Weston Town Center to get it. The Lunch Box opened in 1977 and stayed open under that same name for nearly five decades. Then in the summer of 2025, it closed. Not for renovations. Not for a season. The sign came down, the website went dark, and for the better part of a year, Weston's tiny commercial cluster off Weston Road had no restaurant at all.
This fall, the same address has a new sign. It is called The Chase, and it opened its doors in 2026 after nearly twenty years of quiet planning by the same family that ran the Lunch Box for its final decade. The story of how that happened says something about how this town actually works, which is that Weston Center does not really support competing restaurants. It supports one at a time, and when that one changes hands, it tends to change everything about itself in the process.
One Address, One Restaurant, Since 1977
The Lunch Box was a fixture long before most current residents moved to town. Original owners Dante and Barbara Zacavish ran it as the neighborhood's grab-and-go spot for decades before selling it in 2014 to Josh and Jessica Tolk, a Weston couple who wanted into the restaurant business. Josh was not a stranger to the property. He had been the landlord for Weston Center since 1990, working as a real estate property manager while the Lunch Box operated a few doors down from his office.
That detail matters more than it looks. When the person who owns the ground floor of a town's only commercial strip decides to become its restaurant operator too, the two roles start to blur. The building and the business became a single, slow-moving project, run by one family, with two decades between the original idea and the version that finally opened.
Why It Took Two Decades
The idea for The Chase did not start in 2025. It started in 2006, when Josh approached Dante with a plan to open a billiard hall in Bridgeport. Dante's response, as Josh has recalled it, was to suggest he buy the Lunch Box instead. Eight years later, in 2014, he did. The billiard hall idea never went away. It just waited.
For years afterward, Josh and Jessica experimented within the existing restaurant, trying different formats without landing on the one they wanted. The turning point came in 2024, when they began the zoning process to add a new restaurant entrance on the east side of the building and build out a proper bar, one fashioned from an old bowling alley, to give Jessica the lunch counter she had wanted for years. The Lunch Box closed for good in the summer of 2025 so that work could happen. The Chase, named for the family dog, opened in 2026.
"We are making it fun and different, so people can hang out," Josh has said of the new concept. That is a shift from what the space used to be. The Lunch Box was a quick stop for coffee and a sandwich. The Chase is built to keep people there past midnight, with pizza, burgers, chicken sandwiches, and cocktails on the menu, and room to actually linger. The address at 190 Weston Road has not moved. The reason to walk in has changed completely.
What This Means for Weston's Compressed Fall Calendar
The timing is not incidental. Weston's fall runs on a short, predictable rhythm built around two hubs a few miles apart, and for the first time in over a year, there is now a third stop that fits neatly on either end of a Saturday built around them.
Tomorrow, Saturday, September 13, 2026, is the Norfield Grange Agricultural Fair and Market, the annual gathering that has run in Weston for generations with produce contests, local makers, and food at a scale that suits a stroller and a leashed dog better than the larger regional fairs an hour north. It is the kind of event that has always needed a place nearby to grab something to eat before or after, and for most of this year that place has not existed.
The other hub is Lachat Town Farm on Godfrey Road West, where the farmers market runs the last Friday of the month from June through October. The 2026 season closes with two dates left on the calendar, September 25 and October 30, with food trucks and the on-site Barn Bar rounding out each evening. Lachat's Music in the Meadow concert series wraps up its 2026 run on September 19, six to nine in the evening, with a lineup spanning rock, indie, folk, and blues, including a set devoted to the Grateful Dead. If you go to one Lachat evening this fall, that is the one worth clearing a calendar for.
Between those two hubs sits the reason most people moved here in the first place: the Lucius Pond Ordway-Devil's Den Preserve, 1,746 acres of protected woodland that the Nature Conservancy calls its largest contiguous preserve in the state, and the largest tract of protected land in Fairfield County. The preserve exists because of one woman. Katharine Ordway, a longtime Weston resident, assembled it through a series of donations between 1966 and 1968, starting with an 1,100-acre purchase from the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company, and named part of it for her father Lucius, whose death in 1948 left his five children an estate worth 18.8 million dollars. That inheritance is why a hike through Weston's woods today still ends at land one family chose to protect rather than develop.
What none of these three fixed points has had, until this year, is a reliable place to sit down afterward. The Grange fair ends by early evening. The farmers market closes down by nine. Devil's Den has no concessions at all. For the year the Lunch Box sat empty, anyone finishing a Saturday built around those anchors had to either head home or drive toward Wilton or Westport for a proper meal. The Chase does not replace what the Lunch Box was. It replaces what the Lunch Box did, which was give the town's two other gathering spots somewhere to send people afterward.
What This Confirms About Living Here
Weston is not a town where a restaurant closing means three new ones open to compete for the gap. The commercial center is small enough, and controlled by few enough hands, that a closure just means a wait. This one lasted a year and cost the family that owns the building nearly two decades of planning before they landed on the version they wanted. That is not a flaw in how Weston works. It is the mechanism. The town's two-acre zoning and its deliberately undersized commercial footprint were built to slow down exactly this kind of change, and they did their job here too, just on a restaurant instead of a subdivision.
If you already live here, the practical update is simple: Town Center has somewhere to go again, on the same corner it always did, at hours it never used to keep. If you are the kind of person who tracks how a town's small landmarks shift hands over the years, because you are thinking about what your own property here is worth or when the right time to sell it might be, that is a different conversation, and one Jillian Klaff is glad to have. Request a personalized market consultation whenever the timing is right for you.
