The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Restaurant coming to life inside former jail
Market Place planning to open in March
LITCHFIELD — Interior construction on Market Place Litchfield, the newest iteration of the restaurant business with eateries in Woodbury, Avon, Newtown and Danbury, is moving along.
A recent visit to the restaurant, which is coming to life inside the former Litchfield jail on West Street/Route 202, found a small crew of workers painting a ceiling in a room off the kitchen.
The kitchen itself has a new gas range and work spaces for food preparation. A large freezer is installed in an adjacent space. Around the corner from the kitchen, a long hallway will lead patrons to the bar area, which offers a high ceiling, brick walls and cozy booths. The building’s history as a jail is illustrated by the bars on the windows.
The dining room is an intimate space, with more booths upholstered with tan leather and dark brown wooden tables. Every room is filled with natural light from the windows that face the Litchfield Green.
Those who designed the restaurant took the time to include many features of the former jail, including the barred windows and even some of the cells, which housed prisoners when the building was used by the Litchfield County Courthouse — another vintage building facing the green that awaits a new use after closing in 2017.
The building was bought by designer and renovation expert Russell Barton of Litchfield, who paid $140,000 for the property in 2017.
At that time, Barton said
he envisioned the building to have a restaurant, coffee shop, small retail shops, office space and loft apartments.
Since then, the building has undergone a transformation and now houses a clothing boutique, a beauty salon, The Bakehouse bakery and a number of professional offices. The loft apartments atop the structure appear to be occupied.
Barton discussed the renaissance of the building during an interview in November 2018.
“I”m very excited and pleased that we are so close to the completion of the project,” he said at the time. “It was a lot of work, money and took a lot of time, but we are here and it feels great.”
According to www.historicbuildings.com, the jail is the oldest public building in town and one of the oldest penal facilities in Connecticut. It had a cell block added in 1846, and a three-story wing with additional cell blocks in 1900.
The jail closed in 1992 and was then used as a treatment center for men serving prison sentences. It shut down again in 1993, and reopened in 1994 as a rehabilitation center for women facing incarceration. When that center closed, the state decided to sell it. In 2009, according to a state public works advisory, requests for proposals was issued to buy the 12,400square-foot structure. It sat vacant until Barton bought it in 2013.
Barton and the four-member LLC that owns the property had many hurdles to overcome before the renovation of the jail began. Using a mixed-use commercial application through Litchfield’s Planning & Zoning Commission as well as the Litchfield Historic District Commission, which oversees the 1-squaremile borough that includes North and South streets, West Street and the green, they had to assure officials at each step that the project would be tasteful and sensitive to the downtown area and that it would retain the historic nature of the circa-1812 building.
At the time, Barton said it was “an expensive project and not an easy one .. .but with all my projects I had a vision, and this one came out exactly how I planned it would.”
Market Place co-owner Eli Hawli said in November 2018 that the restaurant will feature “American tavern food,” craft cocktails, and beers sourced from area distilleries and breweries, and as much of the meats, fish and vegetables as possible from local farms and gardens. Hawli said he hoped to open by Christmas; but the opening date was pushed back to January, then February, and now March.
Market Place’s website details its menu with starters like an ahi tuna avocado sushi roll, hickory smoked chicken wings, calamari, crispy Brussels sprouts with cheese and pumpkin seeds and swordfish kabobs, soups and a variety of inventive salads. Dinner entrees include squash raviolo, rigatoni Bolognese, grilled salmon and four-hour braised beef short ribs. “Hand held” entrees include burgers, fish tacos and paninis. The craft cocktails vary from “The Diplomat” with rum lime, tea syrup and egg white; “Fall,” with malt whiskey, stout, pumpkin spice and Tahitian vanilla; and “Smokey and the Bandit” with Pierde Almas mezcal, lime, wild honey and Cuban mint.
The variety of choices appear to vary from site to site and season to season.