The Grey Jay, the eastern Mediterranean-inflected breakfast, brunch and lunch restaurant from the team behind Burlington’s Honey Road, will close after service on October 12, according to executive chef and co-owner Cara Chigazola Tobin. She and general manager and co-owner Allison Gibson took a hard look at the Grey Jay’s numbers pending the renewal of their lease on 135 Pearl Street in Burlington. “As much as we love it, it just doesn’t quite work,” said Chigazola Tobin, 44. Honey Road at 156 Church Street will celebrate its decade anniversary next year and “is not going anywhere,” she emphasized. The Grey Jay was the second Burlington restaurant for the 2025 James Beard Foundation finalists in the nationwide Outstanding Restaurateur category. They opened it in December 2022 in the location best known as the 22-year home of the city’s only LGBTQ+ bar — first called Pearls, then 135 Pearl. Making the restaurant’s full-service model work for breakfast and lunch in the relatively small, 36-seat space proved a challenge, Chigazola Tobin said. “We need about 20 more seats to actually make it work financially,” she explained. The rising costs of ingredients and other overhead expenses have also been harder to absorb at a daytime destination, “where the check average is lower,” Chigazola Tobin said. While the restaurant was busy on weekends, she said, weekday downtown lunch traffic never bounced back to pre-pandemic levels, as the owners’ business projections anticipated. Chigazola Tobin did not rule out a future return of the Grey Jay in a larger space, or the appearance of some of its dishes on the Honey Road menu or even an occasional Grey Jay-style brunch pop-up there. She said business at Honey Road has rebounded with the completion of downtown Burlington’s Great Streets project. “After all the construction, it felt like this year was normal,” Chigazola Tobin said. Any Grey Jay gift certificates outstanding after that restaurant’s mid-October closure can be redeemed at Honey Road. The post The Grey Jay to Close in Burlington in Mid-October appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less