On a Saturday in July 2025, a hand-lettered sign went up on the door at 190 Weston Road. It read, in part, that the Lunch Box had closed that door "forever," thanking the Zacavish and Tolk families for 48 years of serving the Weston community. For anyone who has lived in town longer than a season, that address needs no explanation. For everyone else: it was the only restaurant in Weston Center, and it had been since 1977.
What opened there this year isn't a replacement in the way that word usually works. It's the same family, the same four walls, and a business that solves a completely different problem than the one it left behind.
Two Families, One Address
The Lunch Box started in 1977 under Dante and Barbara Zacavish, who ran it as the kind of grab-and-go spot where the staff knew regulars by name. Josh Tolk, a Trumbull native who had managed properties at Weston Center since 1990, first floated a restaurant idea to Dante back in 2006. He was picturing a billiard hall in Bridgeport. Dante had a different suggestion: "why don't you buy the Lunch Box."
It took eight more years. Josh and his wife Jessica got married, had two daughters, and Josh quietly went through culinary school before the sale finally closed in April 2014. They kept the name and expanded the menu, running it for another decade under the Lunch Box banner before deciding the space needed to become something else entirely.
The Years Before the Door Moved
The change wasn't sudden. By Josh's own account, he and Jessica spent roughly five years experimenting with the restaurant's format without landing on something that worked. The breakthrough Jessica had been pushing for was a real bar, one built with a top fashioned from salvaged bowling alley lanes rather than a standard lunch counter. Getting there meant relocating the entrance from the building's original south-facing door to the east side, which meant a zoning application, which meant time.
The town's Planning and Zoning Commission approved that application in April 2025, clearing the way for what the filing described as a new pub-like restaurant. Four months later, the Lunch Box served its last plate.
What Actually Disappeared
The practical shifts had been visible for a while before the closure made them permanent. The restaurant had already stopped serving breakfast, a category it had been known for alongside lunch. It had trimmed its hours and stopped opening on Sundays, historically one of the busier brunch days for a town-center spot. One longtime reader of the Westport community blog 06880 noted that those changes made the eventual closure feel less surprising than it might have otherwise. By the time the sign went up that July Saturday, the version of the Lunch Box that people remembered from decades of weekday lunches had already been scaled back for some time.
What's easy to miss in a closure story is the interim: for the better part of a year, Weston Center had no sit-down restaurant open in daylight hours. The food market at Town Center kept functioning the way it always has, provisioning the household grocery runs and the occasional grab-and-go, but the counter where you'd sit down for a burger between errands simply wasn't there.
What Opened Instead
The Chase opened in 2026 in that same space, run by Josh and Jessica under a concept Josh says he'd been dreaming up since the early 2000s, well before the Lunch Box was even his to buy. The name comes from the family dog. The menu leans into bar staples: pizza, burgers, chicken sandwiches, and cocktails, with room to expand from there. Josh has described the pitch directly: Weston already has plenty of fancy restaurants, and what he wanted to build was a place where people could just hang out. The Chase stays open well past midnight, a detail on its own more than the Lunch Box's evening hours ever attempted.
One Slot, Two Different Jobs
Weston Center has room for exactly one restaurant. It always has. The town's own description of the center lists a food market, a bank, a dry cleaner, a post office, a real estate office, a spirits shop, a gas station, and one restaurant. That's the whole commercial footprint. For 48 years, the single restaurant slot in that footprint was assigned to daytime: a breakfast counter, then a lunch spot, then dinner if you stayed late enough. Now that same slot is assigned to night. The Chase isn't trying to be a lunch counter with a new coat of paint. It's a saloon that starts filling up when the Lunch Box would have already been locked up for hours.
That's a real change for anyone who used the old spot as a weekday lunch stop. The daytime option that existed at that address for nearly five decades is gone, and nothing in Weston Center has replaced it. What exists now fills a different part of the clock entirely.
What This Means If You're Planning a Weston Week
If you're used to grabbing lunch at the old Lunch Box counter, that habit doesn't have a direct replacement inside Weston Center right now. The food market still covers grab-and-go basics. For a sit-down midday meal, that means a short drive, the same way it would have for dinner options beyond the center's single restaurant slot even before this year.
If you're planning an evening out closer to home, The Chase is now that option, and it's built for a later crowd than the space ever served before. Walking in, you'd have a hard time connecting the antique-filled saloon to the quick-service counter that occupied the same address for most of your life in town. That's the point. The Tolks didn't patch a gap. They moved the gap somewhere else on the clock.
Weston Center has changed hands before without changing shape. This time, the shape of the day changed instead.
If you're weighing what a shift like this means for property near Weston's commercial core, or you're curious how small-town retail turnover like this tends to ripple through a neighborhood, On The Harbor is happy to talk through what we're seeing on the ground.
