Greenwood Park is quiet again this September, the way it was quiet before 2021. The picnic tables are still bolted into the grass under the trees near the Lions Club hall. The bistro lights are gone. Nobody is threading through a line for a pizza with lobster on it, and nobody has been all season.
That absence is worth sitting with, because it is not the same thing as a restaurant closing. Peaks Island has lost restaurants before and absorbed the loss without much comment. This one is different. For five summers, one pop-up pizzeria was the reason someone on the mainland might check the ferry schedule and go to Peaks Island specifically to eat dinner. Everything else that fed the island before Il Leone arrived is still feeding it now. What changed is that the island no longer has a restaurant built to pull people across the bay. It only has restaurants built to feed the people who are already there.
Five Summers, One April Announcement
Il Leone started in 2021 as something closer to an experiment than a restaurant: a trailer, a wood-fired oven on a tow hitch, and ten picnic tables under a grove of trees on land the Peaks Island Lions Club had never intended to lease out for dining. Owner and pizzaiolo Ben Wexler-Waite built naturally leavened Neapolitan pies in an Italian oven hot enough to finish a pizza in under a minute, and the menu leaned hard into Maine ingredients, including a lobster pizza that became the thing people photographed and talked about on the mainland. It ran seasonally, May through October, five years in a row.
In April 2026, that ended. Wexler-Waite announced on social media that Il Leone would not reopen on Peaks Island for the season, citing what he called unforeseen circumstances with the site beyond the control of either party. The Peaks Island Lions Club, his landlord, echoed the same language and added that it was sorry to see the business leave but hopeful it would live on in other forms. Neither side offered more detail, and the Portland Press Herald noted that the Lions Club is among nearly twenty Portland nonprofits that recently lost tax-exempt status, though no one confirmed whether that change had anything to do with the lease falling apart. It is the kind of loose end that will probably stay loose. What is not loose is the outcome: no Il Leone on Peaks Island this year.
What "Closed" Actually Meant By August
It would have been reasonable, back in April, to treat this as a pause rather than an ending. Wexler-Waite said he was scouting other Maine locations. He had already proven he could operate two kitchens at once, having opened a brick-and-mortar Il Leone in Park Slope, Brooklyn in November 2025, in the space that used to hold Bar Vinazo. That New York location has been drawing lines since it opened, serving the same naturally leavened dough and the same lobster pizza that made the Peaks Island version famous, just baked in an electric oven instead of a wood-fired one because of city regulations.
But summer came and went, and no replacement site on Peaks or elsewhere in Maine materialized. By August, the business listing for Il Leone at its original Garden Place address on Peaks Island was marked closed. The island spent its entire 2026 season, ferry schedule to ferry schedule, without the restaurant that had defined its last five summers.
Who Was Actually Feeding the Island This Summer
Here is the part that matters more than the closure itself. Nothing rushed in to fill Il Leone's exact role, because nothing else on the island was built to play that role in the first place.
Baba's Café reopened for its season on May 29. It occupies a renovated 1901 cape house and is named for the original Baba, a man who emigrated from Estonia to Peaks Island in 1971. It shares its lawn with a mobile oyster cart, Peaks Island Shellfish Co., which harvests in the morning and shucks in the afternoon. Baba's is open Wednesday through Monday, eight to four, and it is exactly what it looks like: a coffee and pastry stop with a harbor view, a place you end up at because you are already on the island for something else, not a place that generates its own ferry traffic.
Island Lobster Company kept doing what it has always done, which is a dock-side lobster bake run by Thom and Katie Werner, with Thom unloading his own catch at the dock in front of the restaurant. Cockeyed Gull kept its deck open with views across Portland Harbor. The Inn on Peaks Island kept its public restaurant running, still pouring its own cask-conditioned ale brewed on site alongside Shipyard Brewing's Capt'n Eli's soda. All three predate Il Leone by years, all three are good, and none of them turned into the kind of destination that makes a mainlander check a ferry schedule on a Tuesday night specifically because of what is on the menu. That was Il Leone's job on the island, and it was the only restaurant doing that job.
The Lions Club itself adjusted rather than replaced. Without its pizza tenant, the club leaned back on its older identity, running community burger nights alongside its usual grants and scholarships. That is a fine use of the land. It is also, by definition, not a draw for anyone who does not already have a reason to be on Peaks Island that day.
The Rest of the Island's Calendar Kept Its Own Rhythm
None of this means the island went quiet. The Fifth Maine Museum, perched on its rocky shore with a wraparound porch over Casco Bay, ran its usual late-summer schedule: a final pancake breakfast of the season in August, an Art on the Porch event on August 10 that drew more than thirty island artists selling handmade work, and its Annual Membership Meeting, which this year included a talk from Penobscot historian James Francis on what he called a Penobscot sense of place. These are the events that hold the island together in a way that has nothing to do with what's cooking at Greenwood Park, and they ran on schedule regardless of what happened to the pizza lease.
The ferry itself marks the turn of the season more plainly than any restaurant closing does. Casco Bay Lines shifted to its fall schedule effective September 8, running through October 12, which means the extra summer boats that carried day-trippers out for lunch and dinner are already thinning out. Whatever the island's food scene looks like from here through October, it will be serving a smaller, more local crowd than it did in July.
What the Island's Food Scene Actually Lost
The honest way to describe what happened is not that Peaks Island lost a restaurant. It's that Peaks Island's food economy quietly downgraded from having one restaurant that functioned as a reason to visit, to having a full set of restaurants that function as things to do once you're already there. Baba's serves the person already off the ferry looking for coffee. Island Lobster Company serves the family already spending the afternoon at the beach. The Inn on Peaks and Cockeyed Gull serve the visitor already staying the weekend or the local out for dinner. Every one of those businesses depends on someone else's reason to be on Peaks Island. For five years, Il Leone was that reason for a meaningful slice of the crowd. This year, for the first time since 2021, nothing on the island played that role.
That's a smaller island for the mainland's dining calendar, even if it's the same island for everyone who already calls it home. Whether something new eventually leases that grove of trees near the Lions Club, or whether Peaks Island settles into being a place people come for the beach and the museum and eat well once they've arrived rather than a place people come specifically to eat, is the open question this fall leaves behind.
If you're weighing what island life on Peaks actually looks like day to day, not just in July but across a full year, the team at Legacy Properties Sotheby's International Realty spends enough time on Casco Bay to talk through the details that don't show up in a listing description. Work With Us when you're ready to talk about what a season on Peaks Island really involves.
