Late-Summer Fayetteville: What's Opened On East Genesee And Where To Land Your Thursdays

If you drove down East Genesee Street in early July and noticed the parking lot at the old Kirby's building suddenly full again, you were watching Fayetteville's culinary center of gravity shift back onto the village street. For most of the last two years the block sat quiet behind construction paper. As of July 8, it is open, and the ripple has already reached the west end of town and the Thursday market at Towne Drive.

The short version of late summer in Fayetteville is this: the interesting food news is not at Towne Center this year. It is on East Genesee, with a Belgian outlier on West Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and a Thursday afternoon holdover in the mall parking lot that still does what it has done since 1973. Here is how the week actually shapes up now that everyone is finally open.

The room at 408 East Genesee

The authentic Italian restaurant Apizza Alimentari has opened in Fayetteville in the spot at 408 E. Genesee St. previously occupied by Kirby's, with people flocking from all over Central New York and the east side of town since the July 8 opening. The build-out took a while. It took more than two years to transform the space, and the delay was not cosmetic. Owner and operator Paul Messina said waiting on the higher-end finishes and specialty equipment pushed the opening timeline into 2026, including an imported electric oven from Italy for the pizza.

What actually happens inside the building is more layered than "another Italian place opened." Mornings focus on espresso, pastries, breads and breakfast before the space transitions into a salumeria and Roman-style pizzeria serving sandwiches on housemade focaccia, imported meats and cheeses, and pizza al taglio, the rectangular Roman-style pizza sold by the slice; the full-service trattoria and cocktail bar, featuring Italian wines, negronis and other classic Italian cocktails, opens in the coming weeks as the final stages of construction are completed. The ownership group is not accidental either. The Roman-inspired café, bakery, market and restaurant is from Apizza Regionale owners Paul Messina and John Stage, along with baker Amy Chrisogonou, in the former Kirby's Grill & Taphouse building at 408 E. Genesee St. Stage is the same John Stage attached to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, which is why the room was watched so closely.

"It will be a neighborhood keystone of the best Italian food. It will be part café, part market, pizzeria and trattoria all in one," Messina said.

For a resident, the practical takeaway is the hours. The initial hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. That is a morning-and-lunch building for now, which changes what the block looks like at 9 a.m. on a Thursday in a way it has not in years.

A Belgian tavern on the west end

The other opening worth knowing about sits on the opposite side of the village. A new restaurant and tavern inspired by the food and beer of Belgium opened in Fayetteville called 1834 Tavern Lafayette, located at 572 W. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., next door to Sonrisa Boutique. The business is owned by locals Stephanie Ouyoumjian and Matt Taylor, who also own the shop and the Hollywood House Airbnb next door; Ouyoumjian said they bought the properties together a few years ago, and the idea to open a Belgian tavern in the building that fronted Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard seemed like a natural fit.

The name is not a whim. The name comes from the year the property was deeded, 1834, and for Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat for whom the city of Fayetteville was named. The restaurant officially opened for business on Tuesday, March 17, with hours Tuesday through Saturday from 5 p.m. until around 9 p.m.

Put the two openings on a map and the pattern is obvious. Fayetteville now has a morning-into-lunch anchor on the east end and an evening-only anchor on the west end, both inside the village rather than out at the retail perimeter. If you have lived here long enough to remember when the East Genesee corridor emptied out after 2 p.m., this is the change.

Thursdays belong to Towne Drive

The one thing that has not moved is the Thursday market. The Fayetteville Farmers Market has run since 1973, and the format is stubbornly unchanged. Open every Thursday, the multi-vendor market features farm-grown vegetables, fruits, meats, cheeses, pizza, baked goods, coffee, and more, located at the Fayetteville Towne Center in the parking lot near Bonefish Grill, with summer hours running 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. from May to October.

A few things worth knowing if you are new to the routine or have not been in a while:

• The location is 102 Towne Drive, the strip parking lot on the Bonefish Grill side, not the far mall entrance.
• Thursdays only in summer, noon to six. Not Saturdays, not Sundays. That is unusual for a Central New York market and it is why the crowd skews toward people picking up dinner rather than doing a full weekend shop.
• Prepared foods are part of the mix, not just produce, which pairs well with the fact that Apizza Alimentari closes at 4 p.m. If you want a proper Thursday evening, you can now do market at 4:30 and dinner at 1834 Tavern Lafayette at 6.

That sequence did not exist in Fayetteville a year ago. It does now.

The Green Lakes shoulder

The other thing that changes in late summer is Green Lakes. The park sits three miles from the village and it is the reason a lot of people bought here in the first place. The park is open year-round from dawn to dusk, and from Memorial Day Weekend through Labor Day it charges $10 per vehicle from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Labor Day 2026 is September 7, which means the entry fee window is about to close. That matters for residents more than tourists. From September 8 forward, the park is free to enter and the parking lots at Tulip Hill and the beach open up for the first time since May.

The camping season runs a little longer. The 2026 camping season at Green Lakes runs Friday, May 15 through Sunday, October 11. If you have out-of-town guests coming for fall color and you are tired of hosting them on your couch, that is your window.

A few features that reward a shoulder-season walk rather than a July beach afternoon:

• The park's outstanding features are its two glacial lakes surrounded by upland forest, and both Round and Green Lakes are meromictic lakes, meaning there is no fall and spring mixing of surface and bottom waters. That is the reason the color holds through October in a way most Central New York lakes do not.
• Multicolored leaves emblazoned around the blue-green lakes make for a particularly striking setting in the fall.
• The 18-hole Green Lakes State Park Golf Course was designed by Robert Trent Jones, and tee times get noticeably easier to grab once school is back in session.

How the week actually shapes up now

The reason all of this matters together, and not as four separate updates, is that Fayetteville's weekly rhythm has quietly reorganized itself around the village street. A year ago the honest answer to "where should we go on a Wednesday morning" was Dunkin' or a drive to Syracuse. It is now a Roman café with pizza al taglio at 408 East Genesee. A year ago the honest answer to "where do we take friends who want a real drink and no chain" was a short list. It is now longer by one, and the one is walking distance from the west-end residential streets.

None of this changes the fundamentals that make people stay here, the trails, the lakes, the Thursday market that has outlasted five decades of retail churn. It changes what a weeknight looks like. For a village that spent most of the last decade being a bedroom for Syracuse commuters, the fact that you can now build a full Thursday inside a one-mile radius, market at four, coffee at Apizza in the morning, dinner at 1834 in the evening, and a Green Lakes walk on the way home Friday, is the news.

If you have been thinking about what your own block is worth in a Fayetteville where the village street is finally full again, or what your home would price at now that the neighborhood story has changed, Stacey Kelso-O'Connor is glad to talk it through on your timeline. Get a Free Home Valuation whenever you are ready.