David Boyajian says he first noticed the barn about twenty-seven months before he opened its doors. It sat on Glen Road behind Castle Hill Chocolates, filled with the kind of random storage that accumulates in a two-hundred-year-old building nobody quite knows what to do with. He fell for it anyway. By the time tacobarn served its first plate this past winter, that barn had been rebuilt into a 4,165-square-foot, two-story restaurant with 125 seats, a loft, and a menu built on the same instincts Boyajian picked up as one of the first employees at the original bartaco, working alongside Scott Lawton and Andy Pforzheimer before he opened his own Sparrow Pizza Bar in West Hartford in 2022.
Twenty-seven months is also roughly how long it took Newtown's Planning and Zoning Commission to get from a contested parking hearing to an open restaurant. That's not a coincidence. It's the pattern.
The Corner That Keeps Getting a Pass
Every restaurant that has opened in Sandy Hook center over the past three years has crossed the same intersection first, not the physical one where Church Hill Road meets Glen Road, Riverside Road, and Washington Avenue, but the procedural one at a Planning and Zoning hearing. Residents have called that intersection a traffic problem on the record more than once. One neighbor told the commission he's affected by it "multiple times a day." Another worried the crossing was dangerous enough that pedestrians would just dart across Glen Road instead of walking to the nearest crosswalk.
None of it has stopped a single approval. In October 2023, developer Chris Hottois asked the commission to let a new eighty-table restaurant use a shared lot owned by the Sandy Hook Organization for Prosperity instead of building its own parking. He got it, unanimously, on the condition that his team fix a handicap-access concern first. That restaurant became tacobarn. The village keeps saying yes to restaurants at a corner it keeps flagging as a traffic risk everywhere else.
What "Eight Restaurants" Actually Meant
In September 2024, as Sandy Hook prepared for a new park and pavilion built by longtime local developer Michael Burton, investor Mercurio Porco put a number on what had happened in the village so far: "Now we have eight restaurants in Sandy Hook. You can get any kind of food you want." That tally already included the Foundry Kitchen and Tavern on Glen Road, Mangia Mi, the Hilltop Kitchen building at the foot of Riverside Road, and a New Haven-raised chef's newly opened Italian restaurant inside a restored 1898 Victorian just up the street. It also came roughly a year after Burton, president of the Sandy Hook Organization for Prosperity, told the town's Planning and Zoning Commission that a market study had found the village could support "12 or more restaurants."
Tacobarn's opening pushed the count toward nine. That still leaves the district three restaurants short of the ceiling its own boosters set for it back when the group was arguing for shared parking, not against it. If you've noticed Sandy Hook feeling different than it did two years ago, that's the honest math behind the feeling: closer to full, not yet finished.
The current anchors, for anyone keeping track while deciding where to eat this week:
- The Foundry Kitchen and Tavern, 1 Glen Road, taken over as a first restaurant venture by chef Clark Neugold and his wife Kate
- Mangia Mi, Glen Road
- Hilltop Kitchen, at the Riverside Road corner slated for redevelopment
- tacobarn, 6 Glen Road, inside the restored barn
The Argument For Walking
The parking fights keep surfacing the same disagreement, and it isn't really about parking. It's about what kind of place Sandy Hook is supposed to be. Hottois made the case plainly during one hearing: "The whole point of the village is for people to park once and walk. The town invested a lot of money putting sidewalks in; it is actually good for business for people to walk because they get to see other businesses that they may not have come to Sandy Hook for."
A longtime resident named Shepard put the contrast in sharper terms during that same public comment period, describing the Sandy Hook he grew up in before Interstate 84 cut the village off from through traffic:
"I just would like to state for the record that when I was a kid Sandy Hook was 'Mayberry R.F.D.,' everybody knew the butcher, everybody knew the barber, it was a lovely place down there. When I was a teenager they were shooting at each other down there, and any given weekend there were bar fights. It was a rough area. But when the design district came in with that residential mix and business mix, it did wonderful things for Sandy Hook center, and everybody now would say it is the gem of Newtown."
That recovery has run alongside a harder chapter in the village's history, the aftermath of the December 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which brought state and federal recovery funds into local businesses in the years that followed. The restaurant push of the last three years is a newer, separate phase, driven by private developers betting that a walkable village center with real dining options is worth building toward, one variance at a time.
The Corner That's Still Empty
The same intersection that keeps approving restaurants is also about to get denser. In November 2024, Newtown's commission signed off on Bethel developer Kevin Williams' plan for four buildings at the corner of Riverside Road and Washington Avenue, the same corner anchored by Hilltop Kitchen. The project replaces a blighted, campaign-sign-covered building with 31 condominiums, retail space, and an addition onto the Hilltop Kitchen building itself. "Right now, there's so much interest in the project it's crazy," Williams said. "People are trying to reserve their units, and we don't have anything on the market yet." Residents expected the first units by fall 2025.
Williams also made a promise that hasn't surfaced in any coverage since. "The big thing that everyone wants in Sandy Hook center is a market, so we are going to have a market," he told the commission. Sandy Hook has added a taco bar and an Italian kitchen inside a Victorian, with 31 new households expected to land within walking distance of both by now, but the one piece of everyday infrastructure residents have said they actually want, a place to pick up groceries without leaving the village, hasn't been confirmed as built.
What to Watch For Next
If the district reaches that twelve-restaurant ceiling Burton cited back in 2023, it will have gotten there through the same mechanism every time: a builder asking the commission to bend the parking math, a handful of residents raising the same traffic concerns, and a vote that goes to the restaurant anyway. That's worth knowing if you live nearby and have wondered why a corner everyone agrees is congested keeps getting new tenants instead of a traffic fix.
It's also worth watching what fills the gap between where the district is now and what it was promised. A market has been dangled for years without materializing. Whoever builds it first will be filling the one hole in Sandy Hook's dining map that no amount of tacos or hand-pulled pasta has covered.
We keep an eye on these shifts because they change how a neighborhood actually lives day to day, long before they show up in a listing description. If you want a read on how a specific corner of Newtown, Sandy Hook included, is trending before you make a move of your own, Connie Widmann & Team can walk you through what's changed on the ground and what's still just a promise at a podium.
