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Photo / Maureen Milliken
Verna's All Day, a chop house and market, will open this year in the Main Street-facing space of the Bill and Joan Alfond Commons, 150 Main St., Waterville. The building is owned by Colby College.
The final piece of Colby College's recently developed retail space in downtown Waterville is in place with a lease to Briana and Andrew Volk, who plan to open a chop house as well as a food market at the Alfond Commons.
The Volks, who own Portland Hunt & Alpine Club in Portland, say Verna's All Day will open at 150 Main St. in Waterville sometime this year. The restaurant is named for Briana Volk's grandmother.
Colby has been looking for the right tenant for the space since the Bill and Joan Alfond Commons opened in August 2018. The 100,000-square-foot building has dormitory rooms on the top three floors, with retail and community space on the ground floor. The restaurant and market will face Main Street, and be between Camden National Bank and the Chace Community Forum.
The retail lease to the Volks is the final one in Colby's available space. Rockland-based chocolate maker Bixby & Co. announced in December it will open a retail shop and cafe at 173 Main St., across the street from Alfond Commons. Colby bought the building in 2015, and redeveloped it into retail and office space, with Portland Pie Co. as the first tenant, leasing 3,500 square feet in February 2018.
While it's taken a while to fill the Alfond Commons retail space, Brian Clark, Colby vice president of planning, said it wasn't for want of potential tenants.There were a number of requests for leases. "We wanted to be selective," he said.
Colby was looking for a "high-level, quality destination" tenant to fill the space, he added, and people in the area had made it clear they wanted a Maine business, not a chain.
The college did its own marketing for the space, and Clark approached the Volks, looking for general ideas and possible connections more than a year ago. He didn't have the intention of wooing them, he was just looking for ideas.
"Portland has a great restaurant scene," he said. He reached out to Andrew Volk, a Colby alumnus. "I wanted to see what he though was possible, and we had a great conversation," Clark said.
Clark contacted the Volks at the right time. "We'd been talking about opportunities outside of Portland," Andrew Volk said. He and Briana love Waterville and seized the opportunity to be part of the city's resurgence.
The timeline for opening isn't set, and the couple is working with several designers and architects on plans. They hope to open the restaurant and market by the end of the year.
They employ about 15 full-time equivalent staff in Portland, and plan to create 20 to 30 jobs in Waterville, Briana Volk said.
They said they have a great team in Portland, and expect to have one in Waterville as well. Both Volks said they feel passionately that food service work is a profession, and they treat their staff that way. They pay well, provide education opportunities, provide health insurance and are working on a parental leave policy.
Briana Volk said that they'd often talked about opening a "classic American chop house," that would feature great service, good steaks, a focus on good vegetables and have a community feel to it.
"We want people to come in and feel at home," she said.
The couple plan to work with local food producers, including craft breweries.
Andrew Volk said being in the Kennebec Valley opens up a whole new range of producers for them, and many have already made contact and given them leads on where to get everything from beef to baked goods.
"One of the exciting things is that we're getting to know people" in the area, not only Waterville, but Augusta and Skowhegan, Andrew said.
While the announcement of the restaurant lease fills Colby's available retail space at the north end of Main Street in downtown, the college still has a lot going on down the street.
The fundraising for the Paul J. Schupf Art Center at 99 Main St., in partnership with arts organization Waterville Creates! is ongoing, and the college recently announced a $1 million commitment from Mark Hubbert, a 1979 Colby graduate, for The Hub, a community gathering space that will be a central feature of the arts center.
A block south of that, work on the Lockwood Hotel, which is expected to open later this year, continues.
Across the street from the Lockwood is a block of three mid-19th century buildings that the college bought in 2015 and is redeveloping. Clark said "exciting news" is expected soon on plans for the space at 14-20 Main St., which most recently housed pawn shops and a tattoo parlor and has survived two fires in the last two decades.
The lower Main Street block "was in really rough shape," he said. While the inner structure is being replaced, the historic exteriors are being restored.
While Clark points out the space Verna's will occupy is the first new retail space downtown in 50 years, he also says it's great the college can preserve older buildings as well.
Things are happening on campus as well. The 350,000-square-foot athletic complex at the corner of Campus Drive and Armstrong Road, on the west edge of the campus, is about 75% complete and should be ready for the 2020-21 school year.
The college has also filed a notice of intent with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to begin work on a new performing arts center that it's been planning for several years for part of the Mary Low parking lot area on Mayflower Drive at the campus's southern entrance. Work on the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts is expected to begin this summer, and the center will open in 2022, Clark said.
Consigli Construction, of Portland, is doing predevelopment work and is also the developer of the athletic complex.
Clark said that the college considers the new campus construction to also benefit the community. "It strengthens the community, not just Waterville, but central Maine towns," he said.
What's going on with this space?? Apparently Colby should have gone with one of the lease applicants they got before approaching the Volks; someone who was actually serious about starting a business. Not a single thing has been done inside this space to indicte a restaurant is going in anytime soon.
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