Drive down Beach Road past the Tisbury Marketplace this month and you'll pass a building with plywood over its windows sitting right next to a fish market that looks brand new. If you've lived in Tisbury long enough to remember when both of those buildings looked the same, tired and a little worn from decades of salt air, the contrast is jarring enough to make you slow down.
Most people driving that stretch assume two different things happened here: one business closed for good, one business got a facelift. That's not quite right. What's actually happening is that Michael Santoro, who already owns the Net Result, bought the building next door too. The empty storefront isn't a vacancy. It's phase two.
What Actually Happened To The Ice Box
The Ice Box, the seasonal ice cream shop that's occupied that corner of the Marketplace for years, sold this spring. The deed shows Salopia LLC transferred the property to Santoro Seafood Inc. for $871,250 on May 18. Alex Salop, who co-owned the shop, told the Martha's Vineyard Times simply that they hadn't ultimately made it work.
That's the kind of quiet, unglamorous ending most Beach Road businesses have, sold not to an outside investor chasing a trend but to the guy who already runs the seafood market next door. Santoro's plan for the space wasn't public when the sale closed, but by midsummer it had become clear he's converting it into an oyster bar, with a target opening in spring 2027.
The Renovation Next Door Was Bigger Than It Looked
If you assumed the Net Result's construction fencing this past winter was routine sprucing up, it wasn't. The market closed on October 31, 2025, and stayed closed for eight months, reopening on July 5, 2026. Half the original building came down. What went up in its place includes new walk-in freezers, lobster tanks, and a software-monitored refrigeration system, along with a reworked receiving area and new display cases.
General manager Mike Holtham put the scale of it plainly: the market supplies 65 different caterers, restaurants, and private chefs, and had simply run out of room to do that well. The renovation wasn't cosmetic. It was capacity.
So when Santoro closed on the Ice Box property in April, four months into an already-massive renovation of the building next to it, he wasn't picking up a random parcel. He was extending a project that was already under construction, onto the one piece of real estate that happened to share a wall with it.
Two Addresses, One Plan
Here's the part that changes how you should read that plywood the next time you drive past it. Santoro now controls both buildings on that section of the Marketplace: the seafood market that's supplied the island's kitchens since 1985, and the space next door that will eventually pour wine and shuck oysters a few steps from where the fish comes off the boat. That's not two separate stories about Beach Road businesses coming and going. It's one operator building a two-building footprint on the same corner, on a timeline that runs from a 2025 renovation permit through a 2027 opening.
For anyone who's watched a Beach Road storefront sit boarded up and assumed the worst about the local business climate, this is a useful correction. The building isn't dark because nobody wants it. It's dark because the person who wanted it already has it, and he's not in a hurry.
The Rest Of The Corridor Is Shuffling Too
The Ice Box and Net Result aren't the only things that changed hands on this stretch of town in 2026, even if they're the most connected. A few blocks up Main Street, the longtime Mocha Mott's location, a gathering spot for locals for years, was acquired by the Toccopuro group back in February. Mocha Mott's itself didn't disappear. It's still running in Oak Bluffs. The Main Street building just has new owners with a different concept in mind for the space.
Down at the Vineyard Haven Marina, Garde East gave way to The Wave Restaurant and Bar, brought in by a Nantucket restaurant group. Owner Milan Basnet has described the move as a double win, pairing waterfront access with a chef pulled from Easy Street, one of his restaurants on Nantucket.
If you're keeping a mental list of what's changed within a half mile of the ferry dock this year, it looks something like this:
- The Ice Box (Tisbury Marketplace) → sold to Santoro Seafood Inc. in May 2026, future oyster bar targeted for spring 2027
- Net Result (Tisbury Marketplace) → same location, eight-month gut renovation, reopened July 5, 2026
- Mocha Mott's (Main Street) → building sold to the Toccopuro group in February 2026, Mocha Mott's continues to operate in Oak Bluffs
- Garde East (Vineyard Haven Marina) → became The Wave Restaurant and Bar for the 2026 season
None of that reads like decline. It reads like a corridor where every closing has an owner already lined up on the other side of it, whether that's an island restaurateur expanding his own footprint or an outside group with island-adjacent experience filling a gap.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you walk or bike this stretch regularly, the next twelve months are worth watching. The Net Result you're shopping at now is already the finished product of an eight-month build. The building next to it is the unfinished half of the same plan, and it won't look like much until closer to 2027. That's a long runway for a small storefront, but it also means the corner isn't going to sit empty indefinitely or turn into something unrelated to what's already there. Santoro bought it to extend a seafood operation he's run since 2019, not to flip it.
The bigger pattern worth carrying with you is this: when a familiar building on Beach Road goes quiet, it's worth asking who bought it before assuming what it means. This year, the answer twice over has been someone who already had a stake in the block.
Tisbury changes in small, specific ways almost every season, and most of those changes are easier to understand once you know who's actually behind them. If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's happening on your own street before it shows up in a headline, or if you're ever curious about the property side of this island, from a seasonal cottage to a piece of Beach Road itself, Jarrett Hurwitz tracks this market closely enough to have the answer before you finish asking the question.
