The Egg's Nest Corner Has Been Empty for Three Years. Here's What's Actually Feeding High Falls Now.

Drive down Route 213 through High Falls and the brightly painted building on the corner still stops people. Murals cover every inch of the exterior, the kind of place that looks like it should have a line out the door. Instead there's a lease sign in the window and no line at all. The Egg's Nest served its last brunch in May 2023, and as of a Yelp listing update this past May, it's still marked closed.

It's tempting to read that vacancy as a verdict on the hamlet. Kitchenette closed in May 2022, in the building it took over from an earlier iteration of the High Falls Café. The Last Bite served its final plate that September. For a town of fewer than a thousand people, three closures in eighteen months felt like a pattern, and locals have theories: pandemic aftershocks, food costs that never came back down, staff who couldn't find housing close enough to afford the commute. All of that is real. None of it means the corner sitting empty is telling you what you think it's telling you.

The more useful question isn't why those places closed. It's who's still open, who just made a choice to close something else entirely, and what that choice reveals about where the actual demand in this hamlet sits.

The one kitchen carrying the block

Ollie's Pizza opened in 2020 in a restored barn at 4 Bruceville Road, a few hundred feet off the corner everyone still stares at. It was started by Innis Lawrence, who grew up in High Falls, along with his wife Sophie Peltzer-Rollo and their friend Ilan Bachrach. The current hours run four days a week, Thursday and Monday evenings, and full days Friday through Sunday, which is a narrower schedule than the restaurants it effectively replaced, but the traffic on the days it's open has been steady enough to make it the anchor of what's left of Route 213's food scene.

Part of that is deliberate design, not luck. Lawrence has described pizza as a volume business, one where a big outdoor yard and a streamlined menu let a small kitchen serve far more people than a full-service restaurant with the same square footage. "People really love pizza," he's said, which sounds obvious until you compare it to what a place like the Egg's Nest actually required to operate: three dining rooms, a full bar, a private event space, and enough staff to run all of it at once.

The same operators just closed something, and it wasn't in High Falls

Here's the part that actually changes the story. In 2023, the Ollie's team expanded to Kingston, buying the building that had housed Tony's Pizzeria on Broadway and turning it into three ventures: a provisions and commissary operation called Fletcher & Lu, a walk-up slice shop, and eventually a European-style bistro called Eliza, alongside a separate wine bar, Kingston Wine Co.

The slice shop was the one that got cut. Peltzer-Rollo said each business was evaluated on its own terms before that decision was made, and the closure announcement drew hundreds of comments from regulars who were sorry to see it go. Notice which location wasn't on the chopping block. If the operator with the strongest financial backing in the entire hamlet's history had doubts about High Falls, the obvious move would have been to trim there first. Instead they kept the barn on Bruceville Road running and pulled back in the city thirty minutes away. That's not the behavior of a business hedging against a dying hamlet. That's a business narrowing its bets toward the location that already works.

Why the empty corner is a different problem than a slow one

The Egg's Nest complex isn't sitting empty because nobody wants to eat there. It's sitting empty because of what it would take to reopen it. The listing covers 7,305 square feet across the restaurant, an event space, an upstairs apartment, and a separate residence, with the full package priced at $11,000 a month if leased as one unit. That's the kind of overhead that requires a very specific kind of tenant, someone ready to run a five-thousand-square-foot legacy restaurant with three dining rooms and a full bar, not just a kitchen and a yard.

Compare that to Ollie's, which built its model around a smaller footprint and a menu designed to move volume without a large staff. The two buildings aren't competing for the same tenant pool. One is built for a business that can scale on 200 square feet and a wood oven. The other is built for someone willing to take on a much bigger, much more expensive proposition, and that's a narrower list of buyers than the corner's history suggests. The vacancy says less about High Falls than it does about the size of that particular deal.

What's actually filling the calendar this fall

None of this means Route 213 is quiet. It means the reasons to walk into town have shifted away from a restaurant row and toward something closer to a heritage and trail destination, anchored by the D&H Canal Museum at 1315 Route 213.

• The museum runs guided walks along the Five Locks Walk, a National Historic Landmark stretch of five surviving D&H Canal locks restored in 2000. Historian Bill Merchant leads them through the museum's open season, no registration required.
• The Sunday flea market in front of the museum has been running as a fundraiser for nearly fifty years, open Sundays from May through October.
• The High Falls Conservancy opened its Creekwalk in the fall of 2024, a short path across Main Street from the Post Office near the old Locktender's Cottage, built to eventually connect the O&W Rail Trail down to the Rondout and up into the Five Locks Walk.
• The High Falls Food Co-op keeps doing what it's always done, which is quietly being the one place in town you can count on for groceries without driving to Kingston.
• Stone House Tavern, just outside the hamlet proper, stays busy enough on weekend nights that regulars know to expect a wait.

Put together, that's a town that didn't lose its food scene so much as consolidate it around one operator who figured out the economics, while the rest of the calendar filled in with the kind of programming a canal museum and a land trust can run without needing a commercial kitchen at all.

That's a different hamlet than the one implied by a boarded-up corner, and it's worth knowing the difference if you're the one walking past it every week. Fewer Tuesday dinner options, more reasons to be downtown on a Sunday morning. That's not decline. That's just what High Falls looks like now.

If you're weighing what a stretch of Route 213 like this actually means for day-to-day life here, whether you already live nearby or are trying to picture what a block like this feels like on a Sunday morning, Taft Street Realty has spent years working this part of Ulster County and is always glad to talk through what a specific address or hamlet is really like to live in.