NORTHAMPTON — After being closed unexpectedly for several weeks, a mainstay of the downtown lunch scene reopened its doors Thursday, welcoming people in for coffee and drinks.

“For now, the kitchen is closed — we’re not serving food,” Haymarket Cafe owner Peter Simpson said. “It’s a soft opening.”

He said he expects to offer a “somewhat reduced” menu next week, and he hopes to start the following week with the new menu he has been working on.

Questions had swirled about the restaurant since it closed its doors around the beginning of July, the only explanation being a simple note stuck to a chair, saying “Closed for a spruce up!” with a heart beneath.

Simpson said he has never closed Haymarket in the 31½ years it has been in business.

“This year, I thought, I want some time,” he said.

Besides the new menu and repainting the interior, he said, he took time to visit family.

He will need to rehire staff for the restaurant. He said he had hoped to be able to continue to pay his employees via the Employee Retention Credit through the federal CARES Act, but his last two checks never came through.

Also, with the business quiet for so long, city workers last week removed the barriers that created a space for alfresco dining outside the restaurant.

The city has allowed outdoor tables at restaurants on Main Street and Strong Avenue since the pandemic to attract people downtown and help restaurants generate revenue, some of which goes to the city in the form of meals tax. But those spaces have to be used or they’re just depriving the city of parking revenue, said Alan Wolf, spokesman for Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra.

“We rely on all of our partners to be active in creating comfortable spaces for visitors to Northampton,” Wolf said. “We need all of the businesses to manage their spaces tightly.”

Simpson, who lives above the restaurant, said he wished that hadn’t been necessary. He said he’d been told there had been complaints about litter in the space.

He said he was gratified that so many people had been wondering when the restaurant, celebrated for its embrace of a living wage, abolishing tips and its common account to help provide discount-price meals to those in need, would reopen.

For Simpson, Haymarket is “like a little world unto itself. For other people, it’s a part of their town.”

To keep it going, he said, “it takes a lot of endurance.”

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