The Ritz Cafe, a well-known family-owned tavern on Circuit avenue in Oak Bluffs, is under agreement to be sold.
The buyer is John Reveruzzi, a Connecticut businessman with ties to the Vineyard. Mr. Reveruzzi is a part owner of David Ryan’s restaurant in Edgartown and the Sugar Shack, a Caribbean pub and eatery on the Oak Bluffs harbor.
The Ritz has been on the market since November, said Janet King who, along with her siblings, has managed the bar for the past 28 years.
A purchase and sale agreement has been signed. The purchase price has not been disclosed. No closing date has been set yet. The Oak Bluffs selectmen have scheduled a public hearing on Jan. 22 at 5:30 p.m. on a proposed transfer of the liquor license.
“We are working through the process now and coming to some conclusions about what we’re going to offer,” Mr. Reveruzzi said by telephone this week.
The building where the Ritz now stands originally housed the Globe Fish Market. Before becoming a bar in 1944, it was a fruit and confectioner’s shop, an ice cream parlor and a package store.
In 1967, Arthur Pachico and his wife Shirley bought the bar. Nearly twenty years later, Ms. King and her siblings took over the operation from their mother and stepfather. They brought live music to the bar and reopened its kitchen.
Mr. Reveruzzi said this week he hopes to continue to offer a stage for musicians and to once again reopen the kitchen, which slowed in recent years and then closed following the statewide ban on smoking indoors. “I don’t envision a lot of physical changes to the space,” he said.
“I love the Ritz, it’s been a great place for me,” Ms. King said this week. “I’m hoping the new people come in and it stays a local bar, it stays the Ritz.”
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