MARFA — Marfa’s popular Stellina restaurant is back — but with a different concept. Now going as StellinaMart, the eatery is half takeout meals, half boutique grocer.

At the restaurant’s website — store35428221.shopsettings.com, or just Google “StellinaMart” — diners can choose from a range of meal options, from prepared sandwiches and frozen soups to Stellina’s signature enchiladas and pasta dishes. But there’s also a range of new groceries, from curated wines and cheeses to more exotic items like green peppercorns.

When Stellina reopened last week, many in Marfa rejoiced — but owner Krista Steinhauer couldn’t help feeling a little bittersweet. On one hand, she was getting to cook for Marfa again.

“It’s so nice to work,” she said, “to do the thing you love in a town that you’ve lived in for 16 or 17 years.” She was ready to be back in the space and making her signature brand of New Texas fare.

But life — and life at Stellina — was so different. Crowds weren’t dining at Stellina’s cozy tables anymore. Even staff weren’t getting too close to each other. Steinhauer had fans running in the space, to keep air circulating.

When Steinhauer came back to the restaurant, she found glassware still out — a remnant of the pre-COVID days, when she still had in-person diners.

“I have the stupid rack of wine glasses I haven’t put away since March,” she said. “It almost feels like everything is frozen.”

In March, as people across the United States braced for the coronavirus pandemic, Marfa was quick to take precautions. Many restaurants and shops in Marfa closed early in March, days before even New York City — then a hotspot for the virus — shut down its public schools.

First among those restaurants and shops was Stellina. It set a cautious tone when it closed its doors around March 12, citing concerns about staff safety.

Within days, at least a dozen local businesses had followed Steinhauer’s lead. And even months later, Marfa has remained an outlier in the region, a place with little debate and dissent over precautions like mask-wearing, at least among locals.

Austin Dupree, a waitress at the former Stellina and now the cheesemonger at StellinaMart, remembers those ominous early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when researchers knew little about the disease and even less about its global spread. People “were realizing how quickly [coronavirus] was spreading in the U.S.,” and there were growing concerns among Stellina staff. And then Steinhauer, Dupree recalled, asked the staff, “What do y’all think about not doing dine-in?”

Everyone at Stellina agreed, Dupree said. “It was a total consensus.” They tried take-out for a night. But even with to-go orders only, “there was a lot more interaction with people than we were comfortable with,” Dupree said. And ultimately, “Krista just didn’t feel there was enough protection for us.”

Dupree credits Steinhauer for prioritizing staff safety and making quick decisions. “I’ve never had a boss that was more conscientious or supportive,” she said. “She always puts her employees first. It’s a pleasure to work for her.”

Still, closing the restaurant indefinitely was hard. Dupree recalled how after the last night of service, she and other staff members sat outside, debriefing and grappling with the unknowns in front of them.

“It sounds very movie-dramatic,” she said, “but one of [the other staff] joked, ‘We might not be able to hug for a long time.’” That turned out not to be such a joke after all.

As the pandemic shuttered Marfa, Steinhauer hunkered down for a while in the city of Austin, where she has family. She brainstormed ways to revamp Stellina for an era of social distancing, eventually settling on the StellinaMart concept.

But even as much of Texas “reopened” in the early spring and summer, Steinhauer remained cautious. In June, she texted a reporter at The Big Bend Sentinel a news article about Austin eateries that had tried to reopen but were closing as they found cases.

“This is going to keep happening,” she wrote. “Why gear up to open, which is no small task, only to shut down again?” Later that month, as case counts surged across the tri-county and Governor Greg Abbott ordered a shutdown of bars, those warnings seemed almost prophetic.

Now, at last, even Stellina is reopening — a sign that just maybe, normalcy is starting to return to Marfa. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, Marfa locals will be back dining inside Stellina, or fraternizing with visitors to the region without having to worry about getting sick.

For now, though, things are still different at Stellina — though the changes aren’t all bad. One former waiter is curating wines. Dupree is curating cheeses — a job she’s held in the past, including during the Great Recession in 2008. Cheesemongering “seems to be my recession-proof job,” she said with a laugh.

“I just love being back in the space,” Dupree said of her return to Stellina. “It’s nice to be working with this group again.” Dupree says she’s still figuring out “what the people of West Texas want, cheese-wise” — but she’s already got some hunches. Idiazabal has been selling well, she says, as has Brabander goat gouda.

But with just more than a week of the new concept, Dupree isn’t the only one who says she’s still figuring out this new model. Steinhauer says she’s also still learning the ropes, on everything from customer experience (she hopes the website model isn’t too confusing) to how to process and complete online orders.

One of the biggest questions for Steinhauer is what shape Stellina will take after the pandemic — and for now, she isn’t sure. One possibility she imagines is something like an in-person version of the current StellinaMart, where customers can both browse artisanal groceries or stop in for a glass of wine.

She hopes Stellina’s bar can make a comeback after the pandemic. “I love that U-shaped bar so much,” she said. “That’s something I really don’t want to change.”

In the meantime, like many in Marfa and beyond, Steinhauer still has worries. There are all the concerns of staff and customer safety, of course — the same concerns that initially prompted her to shut down the restaurant in March.

She hopes customers will be able to navigate the new online ordering system, and she wonders if Stellina can keep up its margins in this strange new era. “For grocery-retail, your margins are tiny,” she said. “You can’t put the same price tag on what you’re offering, because you’re not offering an experience.”

In other ways, Steinhauer feels like she’s come full circle. Before opening Stellina — a popular eatery for both Marfa residents and tourists — she ran Comida Futura, a weekday cafeteria she describes as “more proletariat.”

At Stellina, Steinhauer still served locals, but visitors became a bigger part of her business. She worries about whether “we acclimated ourselves to require the tourist dollar” — a decision that may have made sense before, but that now seems more like a liability.

As Marfa comes out of the pandemic, Steinhauer isn’t sure how many more switch-ups there will be at Stellina, or whether she’ll go back to the Comida Futura model of primarily serving locals. Maybe that’s what suits her, she says. After all, “I’ve said it a million times: I’m not a chef — I’m just a homecook.”

Like business owners across the region and country, Steinhauer still has lots of questions about what the future will look like and how to sustain a restaurant business in the meantime. But at least she’s certain about one thing.

“It’s nice to go back to nourishing food,” she says. “Feeding locals always feels good.”