Fairgrounds, Still
Burton Spruce Balkind
How a longtime local restaurant survived ownership changes, development pressure, and a changing island, and became the new home of the Downyflake
Keyley Jensen • June 2, 2026
For generations of Nantucket residents, The Fairgrounds has never really been just a restaurant. It has been a meeting place, a fundraiser hall, a post-game stop, a family dinner spot, a place for retirement parties and celebrations of life, and one of the few remaining rooms on the island where people from very different corners of Nantucket still naturally end up sitting near one another.
Teachers and contractors, high school teams and retirees, summer workers and year-round families, police officers, landscapers, business owners, ferry workers, and parents with young kids have all moved through the restaurant over the years. The Fairgrounds has long functioned as one of the island’s rare common-denominator spaces, the kind of establishment many communities assume will always exist until they gradually begin disappearing.
At a moment when much of Nantucket’s restaurant economy continues shifting toward higher-end dining, private experiences, and increasingly polished hospitality branding, The Fairgrounds has survived by remaining something simpler and more useful: familiar, accessible, year-round, and unmistakably local.
Now, under new ownership and preparing to become the future home of the Downyflake, the restaurant is entering another chapter in a history that stretches back nearly eight decades.
From Knotty Pines to The Fairgrounds
The story of The Fairgrounds begins in 1948, when Parker Gray opened The Knotty Pines Bar-B-Q at 27 Fairgrounds Road. The property would evolve repeatedly over the following decades, reflecting both changing ownership and changing versions of Nantucket itself. At various times, the building operated as The Knotty Pines, Gene Mahon’s The Roadhouse, The Pines, Faregrounds, Pudley’s Pub, and eventually The Fairgrounds.
The recent shift from “Faregrounds” back to “The Fairgrounds” was also intentional. According to the current owners, the original restaurant built by Parker Gray in 1948 sat on the site of Nantucket’s original 19th-century fairgrounds, giving the property a deeper historical connection to the island than many residents may realize. The updated name was meant to reconnect the restaurant more directly to that history and to the location itself.
Fairgrounds Road has never carried the aura of Main Street, Old South Wharf, or the harborfront. It has traditionally been more functional than picturesque, connecting year-round neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and working parts of the island. In many ways, the restaurant reflected that geography, becoming less of a destination dining room than a dependable part of people’s routines.
That identity deepened significantly after Bill and Kim Puder purchased the restaurant in 1997 from Glen Menard. Following a local naming contest, the restaurant became known as Faregrounds, a play on Fairgrounds Road, while the adjoining pub took the name Pudley’s Pub after the Puders’ pot-bellied pig, Pudley.
Under the Puders, the restaurant settled fully into its role as a community institution. The menu stayed approachable, portions remained generous, and prices stayed comparatively accessible by Nantucket standards. More importantly, the restaurant became embedded in the rhythms of local life in ways that extended far beyond dining.
Youth sports banquets filled the function rooms. Rotary gatherings met there regularly. Families celebrated birthdays, graduations, engagements, and anniversaries there. Fundraisers and nonprofit events became common occurrences throughout the year. During the colder months, when many island businesses reduced hours or closed entirely, The Fairgrounds remained part of the year-round social landscape that residents continued relying on.
Like many longtime Nantucket establishments, some of its strongest value existed not in a single famous dish or carefully curated aesthetic, but in accumulated memory and repetition. Residents remember who they sat with there, which team banquet they attended there, which family event happened there, or which winter nights ended there after work. The restaurant became woven into people’s lives through familiarity and routine rather than novelty.
Photos courtesy of The Fairgrounds & NHA
A composite history of The Fairgrounds property through multiple eras of Nantucket life. Clockwise from upper left: an early image of The Knotty Pines, the restaurant originally opened on the site in 1948; a historic photograph of the original Nantucket fairgrounds that once occupied the surrounding area in the 19th century; vintage matchbooks from The Roadhouse and Faregrounds & Pudley’s Pub; and Bill and Kim Puder outside Faregrounds & Pudley’s Pub during their nearly three decades of ownership. The property has operated under multiple names across nearly 80 years, while remaining one of Nantucket’s enduring year-round gathering places.
A Locals’ Restaurant in a Changing Island Economy
Over the years, the restaurant also accumulated its share of recognizable visitors. President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden visited during Thanksgiving trips to Nantucket, and the Puders later attended events at the White House connected to the Bidens. Figures including Bill Belichick and Tim Russert also passed through over the years. Unlike newer hospitality concepts built around exclusivity or celebrity association, however, those moments never fundamentally altered the restaurant’s identity or customer base. The Fairgrounds remained a locals’ restaurant first, even as island visibility and tourism increasingly reshaped other businesses around it.
That continuity became far less certain in 2025. After nearly three decades of ownership, Bill and Kim Puder announced plans to retire and sell the property. For many residents, the possibility that the restaurant might disappear entirely felt less hypothetical than inevitable. Nantucket had already seen a steady erosion of long-running local businesses as rising property values increasingly pushed commercial spaces toward redevelopment, repositioning, or more luxury-oriented concepts.
Those fears intensified when plans emerged to combine 25 and 27 Fairgrounds Road into an eight-lot residential subdivision known as Pudley’s Court. Under the proposal, the restaurant would be demolished and replaced with housing lots.
From a real estate perspective, the proposal made perfect sense. The property sat on valuable land in a housing-starved market where nearly every parcel carries redevelopment pressure and speculative interest. For many residents, however, the idea of losing The Fairgrounds represented something larger than the loss of another restaurant. It reflected the continued shrinking of spaces on Nantucket that still felt socially broad, casual, and economically reachable to year-round residents.
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A Different Kind of Transition
The proposed redevelopment ultimately fell through. Later in 2025, Ethan and Alexis Devine reached an agreement to purchase the property and continue operating it as a restaurant. Their approach, by design, was not centered on reinvention. The goal was not to transform The Fairgrounds into a luxury concept or radically reposition the business toward a different clientele. Instead, the Devines emphasized continuity by maintaining the restaurant’s year-round role while gradually updating operations and preserving the relationships the business had built over decades.
At the same time, the new ownership began introducing a different layer of energy to the property, one that leaned into community events, live music, and family-oriented gatherings rather than exclusivity or upscale repositioning. Recent months have included jazz nights, bluegrass performances, line dancing, maple-themed community events, and expanded use of the restaurant as a casual social space rather than simply a dining room.
One recent post promoting a jazz night at The Fairgrounds described “magic in the room” and referenced “the spirits of Roadhouses past,” connecting the current revival directly to earlier eras of the property’s history. Another promoted the restaurant’s first Maple Fest and grand opening celebration, featuring maple boiling demonstrations, sugar-on-snow, live bluegrass, Nanpuppets performances, face painting, balloon art, pancake-eating contests, line dancing, and family activities throughout the afternoon before dinner service began later that evening.
The events reflected an approach that feels notably different from many of Nantucket’s newer hospitality concepts. Rather than centering exclusivity, reservation scarcity, or high-end branding, the focus has largely remained on creating an active, accessible gathering space that feels usable to year-round residents and families.
The Value of Common Denominators Places
That continuity became even more significant when another longtime Nantucket institution entered the picture. In late 2024, the Downyflake closed its Sparks Avenue location after redevelopment pressures forced the restaurant from the property it had occupied for generations. For many Nantucket residents, the closure carried emotional weight well beyond breakfast. The Downyflake had become one of the island’s most enduring local rituals, known for early mornings, familiar counter conversations, donuts, coffee, and routines that repeated across generations of families and workers.
When the Devines later acquired the Downyflake business, brand, and equipment from longtime owners Pate Kennedy and Ron Oldham, a different possibility emerged. Rather than disappearing entirely, the Downyflake could continue operating inside The Fairgrounds while maintaining much of its familiar identity.
In some ways, the pairing made cultural sense immediately because both businesses occupied a remarkably similar place in Nantucket life. Neither depended on exclusivity, trendiness, or curated scarcity. Both succeeded because they became useful and dependable parts of everyday island routines that residents returned to repeatedly over many years.
Oldham described places like The Fairgrounds and the Downyflake as “common denominator” establishments, meaning spaces where different segments of the community still naturally overlap. That overlap has become increasingly difficult to preserve on an island where many public-facing spaces now skew either heavily seasonal or heavily luxury-oriented, leaving fewer environments that feel broadly accessible to a wide range of residents.
The current plan calls for Downyflake donuts, coffee, and breakfast service to operate from The Fairgrounds, initially on a smaller scale before potentially expanding further. The arrangement allows one longtime Nantucket institution to help sustain another while preserving some continuity for residents who feared both businesses might disappear entirely.
More broadly, the transition may also represent something increasingly uncommon on Nantucket: a locally owned business preserving continuity instead of replacing it with an entirely different concept designed primarily around higher-end repositioning.
Remaining Part of Nantucket’s Present
That doesn’t mean The Fairgrounds exists outside the pressures reshaping the island. Like nearly every year-round business on Nantucket, it still operates inside an economy defined by labor shortages, housing scarcity, rising insurance costs, seasonal imbalance, and escalating real estate values. The same economic forces that nearly eliminated the restaurant have not disappeared and will continue influencing the island’s business landscape moving forward.
The fact that the restaurant remains standing at all matters to many residents precisely because so many similar places no longer do. Over several decades, The Fairgrounds has functioned as one of the island’s social middle grounds,not especially fashionable, not exclusive, not performative, and not designed primarily for visitors searching for a curated version of Nantucket. The restaurant succeeded because it remained dependable, familiar, and broadly welcoming while much of the island around it became increasingly segmented by price, season, and status.
As Nantucket continues evolving economically and culturally, places like The Fairgrounds have become increasingly difficult to preserve because the pressures pushing toward redevelopment and upscale repositioning rarely stop. The restaurant survived long enough to become part of Nantucket’s collective memory. Now, with new ownership and the Downyflake preparing to reopen within it, The Fairgrounds is attempting something considerably more difficult: remaining part of the island’s everyday present rather than simply becoming another piece of its past.