Bread and Butter Market & Bottle to open on Sound Avenue in Riverhead

Sound Avenue is about to get the kind of stop drivers have long had to hunt for: a place for coffee, groceries, sandwiches, ice cream and a bottle of wine without detouring off Riverhead’s North Fork gateway. Bread and Butter Market & Bottle is set to open at 5087 Sound Ave. for Memorial Day Weekend, bringing a practical new option to a corridor that serves farm-stand visitors, local workers and residents moving through one of Suffolk County’s busiest east-west routes.

The business is being opened by Diana Roesch DiMenna and her daughter, Tess DiMenna, on the former Wegert’s Grocery site. The concept is built around convenience and local character, with grocery staples, sandwiches, coffee, ice cream, North Fork-produced products, local wine and small-batch alcohol. The adjacent liquor-store component will open after the State Liquor Authority issues its license, giving the property a two-part retail role that is unusual for the area but tailored to the traffic that already passes along Sound Avenue.

The family’s move to the North Fork in 2024 helped shape the idea. Diana, Tess, Tess’s sister Claire and the rest of the family bought a home and a former potato and sod farm property after previously splitting time between the Hamptons and New York City. They later launched Flower Fairy Farm, and Claire DiMenna went on to run Critterville Farm Sanctuary in Riverhead. Diana saw the need for a better market almost as soon as they arrived, after noticing empty deli cases and the lack of a convenient all-purpose stop for people using the corridor every day.

That site carries its own piece of Riverhead history. RiverheadLocal reported that one of the buildings on the property dates to at least the 1940s, part of a stretch of road the Town of Riverhead designates as a historic corridor. Sound Avenue has also been at the center of local preservation debates, including a 2024 pause on proposed agritourism-resort zoning changes after public pushback, and Suffolk County’s preservation purchase of almost 140 acres of open space and farmland along the corridor in January 2021.

Critterville adds another layer to the family’s North Fork footprint. The sanctuary says it began in 2017 with three goats and now houses more than 70 animals, while later reporting put the Riverhead site at about 90 animals. Bread and Butter’s opening, on a road defined by farmland, preservation and steady traffic, aims to turn a familiar gap in service into a daily stop that fits the North Fork’s working landscape.