Forks Up! | The Squash Roll Question

If you've ever waited in line at Nauset Farms the day before Thanksgiving, you know the feeling of hoping the rolls are still there when you reach the counter. People in East Orleans are feeling a version of that again this fall, and it has nothing to do with the holiday.

On September 9, the Orleans Select Board voted unanimously to transfer the market's licenses to Cameron and Tyler Hadfield. Peter Gori, who bought Nauset Farms in 2023, is selling. The buyer is a private individual who has asked not to be named. The Hadfields will run the place, and they expect to take over within about six weeks.

That puts the handoff around late October, when the beach traffic has thinned out and the market is back to serving mostly locals.

It Was Fancy's First

Plenty of people who stop at 199 Main Street have no idea the building started out as a farm stand. Ron Fancy's parents built it in 1981 and called it Fancy's Farm Stand.

Over the years the farm stand became a market, and the market became a regular stop for a lot of people. When Edible Cape Cod profiled it about a decade ago, the general manager described it as "kind of the meeting place of the whole neighborhood." Plenty of businesses say that about themselves. What made it believable was everything else in the article.

585 Tins and Something Called a Nauset Bomb

The numbers in that profile are hard to forget. On a summer day, the market sold 700 sandwiches before noon. When Eastham turnips came in, they were gone in about a day. The butcher had been cutting meat for more than forty years. The shelves held homemade potato chips and something the store called a Nauset Bomb.

Then there were the squash rolls: soft, orange and slightly sweet. The market sold 585 tins of them for a single Thanksgiving.

That was 2016, and the market has had a different owner since. Today's bakery page just lists "homemade breads, muffins, and sweet treats," without naming anything in particular. Whether the rolls, the chips and the Bomb are all still around is the sort of thing a neighbor would find out by asking at the counter. For a lot of longtime customers, though, that 2016 lineup is still what they picture when they hear "Nauset Farms," and it's part of what the Hadfields are taking on.

A Torn-Up Road, a Blizzard, a Dead Generator

Gori didn't have an easy three years. According to the Cape Cod Chronicle, sewer work shut down stretches of East Main Street in 2024. A market like this depends on people pulling in because it's on their way. When the road outside is closed, a lot of them don't.

Then came February's blizzard. The generator failed, and the market lost a significant amount of inventory. That's hard on any business, and worse for one built around a deli case, a butcher counter and a bakery.

Gori isn't leaving the food world. He's the general manager and an incoming partner at Sundee School. Anyone who drove East Main during the construction, or sat through that storm with the power out, can probably understand why he's moving on.

The Harwich Brothers Who Say They Won't Rock the Boat

You may already know the Hadfields' places even if you don't know their names. The brothers grew up in Harwich. They opened The Rail in 2021, took over running Barley Neck, and recently bought the Polka Dot Panini food truck.

A market is a different job from a restaurant. People don't come in for a night out. They come in for a breakfast sandwich before work, a steak for the weekend, or the bread they forgot to buy. The market's own website still highlights the award-winning breakfast sandwiches and burritos, the butcher shop and the made-to-order deli.

Cameron Hadfield seems to understand what he's walking into. "We don't want to go and rock the boat," he told the Chronicle. "We just want to try and breathe some life into the area." The staff is staying, and no immediate changes have been announced.

They have floated a couple of ideas. One is using the market's kitchen for catering. Another is bringing the bakery's know-how into desserts at Barley Neck. For now, those are only ideas.

That's the balance any local handoff has to strike. An operator with several businesses can share staff, buy more cheaply and keep a kitchen busy after lunch. Push that too far and every place starts to feel alike. Regulars will be able to tell which way this goes, because they notice changes at the counter first.

The Wednesday Before Thanksgiving

Until the new team settles in, the posted hours are 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Wednesday through Monday, closed Tuesdays. The sandwich shop runs its full menu Thursday through Monday, and you can order ahead online. Hours tend to change when a business changes hands, so it's worth calling before a special trip.

Nauset Farms is closed on Thanksgiving Day. That means the first big test for the new team comes the day before, Wednesday, November 25.

By then the Hadfields will have had the keys for about a month. The people in line won't care.

Nauset Farms | 199 Main Street, East Orleans Wed–Mon, 8 a.m.–5:30 p.m. · Closed Tuesdays (508) 255-2800 · nausetfarms.com