Ryan Ellis, from left, Tyler Ward and Selene Meets pose for a portrait Thursday at what will become Lately’s, a new bagel and pizza shop at 108 Water St. in Hallowell. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

HALLOWELL — Lately’s, a bagel shop by morning and pizzeria by afternoon and evening, plans to fill an empty Water Street storefront in the next month.

Owner Ryan Ellis said he hopes initially to open Lately’s from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Thursday to Sunday, with the hope to eventually operate seven days a week and extend hours past midnight on the weekend. The final major hurdle before setting an opening date, Ellis said, is a health inspection.

Lately’s will serve handmade bagels, brought in daily from Ellis’ Augusta commercial kitchen, from opening to early afternoon, then switch over to serving New York-style pizza until the restaurant closes. The restaurant also plans to sell canned alcoholic beverages, but only for off-site consumption.

“Both the bagel and the pizza stuff has been born out of not really finding what I’ve been looking for,” Ellis said. “I’ve traveled a fair amount and had a lot of bagels. There are some good bagels in Maine, but I don’t think there are nearly enough. And that’s kind of how I feel about the pizza, too.”

Ellis said he has been making bagels for close to 15 years — first as a personal hobby, but more recently with an eye toward opening a business. Once he heard about the open storefront at 108 Water St., he said, he slowly started putting that idea into action.

But only serving bagels and closing at around 1 p.m., he said, didn’t make much sense as a business model. That’s how the pizza side came to be.

“That seems like a huge amount of wasted time in the day,” Ellis said. “There’s not a lot of food in Hallowell after 8 or 9 o’clock at night. And, for that matter, there’s not a lot of food in central Maine after 8 or 9 o’clock at night, unless you want to talk about fast food.”

The storefront at 108 Water St. is the new home for Lately’s, a bagel and pizza shop that’s expected to open soon in Hallowell. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

He said it became apparent that there was an opportunity for Lately’s to become a late-night staple downtown, especially given Hallowell’s lively night scene on weekends. Lately’s even connects to Easy Street Lounge, one of Hallowell’s popular bars, via an interior staircase.

“You can go from one to the next without having to go outside, which could be nice when it gets cold and slippery outside,” Ellis said. “People can just have an option to stick around.”

The storefront was has housed a number of businesses. Most recently, it was the site of a catering business, Lately’s General Manager Tyler Ward said. The building, which includes 104, 106 and 108 Water St., housed another pizzeria about 10 years ago; Hallowell House of Pizza was vandalized and burglarized in 2015, leading it to close permanently.

The building, situated at the foot of the steep Winthrop Street hill, was the site of a near-miss tractor-trailer crash in 2018, fifteen years after a truck carrying water crashed into the basement after failing to stop coming down the hill.

The shop will seat about 20 customers at a time, according to a permit application, and Ellis said he hopes to hire six to eight employees.