Opening Soon: Bridge Street Breakfast & Lunch in Tylerville, A New Restaurant with a Touch of History

By Janice Sina

(April 10, 2026) — Tylerville will soon be home to a new breakfast and lunch restaurant and it has many people talking around Haddam and East Haddam, including established coffee club members. Bridge Street Breakfast and Lunch will be located in the former Cooking Company space, with a whole new personality – a blend of open, airy seating, fresh whole foods with an emphasis on locally sourced ingredients, and enough history to ground it in the hometown feel of Haddam that we all welcome.

(Photo above by Janice Sina: Renovations underway at the former Cooking Company for the new Bridge Street Breakfast and Lunch)

It takes someone who has absorbed this Haddam feel from previous generations blended with modern business savvy to pull this off and that person is Nicole Martin, owner of Jack’s Country Restaurant in Higganum, the go-to breakfast spot for locals. Nicole and her partner Tyler, a CIA-trained professional chef, bought Jack’s in 2018 from Jack Murphy, owner since 2011. Many may also remember it as the Daybreak previous to that and Jack himself even has ties as a restaurant owner in Tylerville, with some of the same employees who still work at today’s Jack’s.

In 2018, Nicole didn’t change much about the Jack’s everyone knew: the signature French toast, the secret recipe cornbread, the décor. “I wanted the transition to be easy,” she said. “The timing was right. I always wanted to open my own restaurant and Jack was selling at the right time.” Business didn’t skip a beat, earning the restaurant Best Breakfast in Connecticut Magazine Award in 2021.

As we sat in one of the cozy booths, I listened to Nicole describe her busy days with obvious enthusiasm and pride. I had to ask, “You have this thriving seven-day-a-week business. What possessed you to open yet another restaurant?” She laughed, stopped long enough to hug her mom as she went by our booth, and answered, “That’s the question I get constantly. I always thought I was going to open something else. As much as I put my stamp on Jack’s, I really wanted something that was organically mine.”

Nicole says she waited until Jack’s was solid. “They tell you the first five years of business are really, really hard. Throw a pandemic into the middle of that and it’s even harder. By the grace of our incredible customers and everyone who supported us, we came out better than ever.” So, she is starting again. Tyler will stay primarily at Jack’s. Nicole and her sister Amanda will take on Bridge Street, hiring new staff. With a pile of the day’s receipts on the table between us, she said, “My blood, sweat and tears went into this [Jack’s] for the past seven years, so having something new like this is so exciting, a change of scenery, new problems to solve, what works, what doesn’t.”

(Photo above by Nicole Martin: Partial Breakfast Menu at Bridge Street Breakfast and Lunch)

They plan to open Bridge Street Breakfast and Lunch by mid-April. Bridge Street will fill a niche for all of Haddam and especially for Tylerville. There are coffee houses nearby, lunch and dinner establishments, grab-and-go spots. “I feel it’s important to add to the community, not to take away.” This will be a full-service, sit-down restaurant with a traditional breakfast menu and a “whole and fresh” lunch menu featuring soups, sandwiches and salads with a protein option. “We will be roasting our own meats for sandwiches and making our own chicken and tuna salads. We know people want fresh food that’s not overly processed. At Jack’s we utilize as much local as we can, and intend to do that at Bridge Street as well.”

I asked Nicole if there was a broader plan to bring the hamlet of Tylerville and the town of Haddam together. “How do you knit the two communities together to make them one?” She said, “I think Tylerville always struggles with that. The more accessible Tylerville becomes, which it is now, you’ll see more businesses like myself coming in. All this construction had to be done and now it’s such a great spot, easily accessible from Haddam, East Haddam, Chester, Deep River. This is a good spot for business.”

She and I brainstormed about how people can spend a whole day down there now, having lunch, taking a walk over the bridge to see an afternoon matinee at the Goodspeed Opera House. You can sit by the river on either side, stop at a coffee shop or an ice cream shop. There are thriving dinner spots on both sides of the river. Goodspeed’s Station is a landmark. “That’s the appeal. That’s what people do in downtown Essex and Chester. A breakfast and lunch place definitely rounds it out,” she said. “It’s time to revitalize this area. The businesses that have stayed through all of the challenges are so passionate about Tylerville, and it will be nice to be a part of the passion that they have.”