The writing is on the wall at Reading Room, the lauded St. Petersburg restaurant helmed by an award-winning chef.

Owners confirmed to the Tampa Bay Times Thursday that it will close for the summer. And when it reopens, it will likely be an entirely new concept.

The restaurant's executive chef Lauren Macellaro, a 2018 semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation's Best Chef: South award, and her team are leaving June 8.

"It sounds dramatic when I say it out loud, but I quit," Macellaro said by phone recently.

Macellaro and her partner Jessika Palombo joined Reading Room owners Kevin Lane and Kevin Damphouse to open the restaurant in early 2017.

The place soon became known for its rigorous sourcing of local meats and carefully crafted dishes heavy on vegetables from the garden surrounding the restaurant. National accolades followed. In 2018 and 2019, it was second on the Times list of Tampa Bay's best restaurants.

RELATED: The Tampa Bay Times top restaurants of 2018. And the 2019 list.

Macellaro said she reached a breaking point after this normally busy restaurant season proved very slow.

"I talked about changing the concept to no avail," she said. "You know, you get a James Beard nomination, you're named one of the best restaurants in the area two years in a row, and you're not busy. What are we doing wrong?"

When we reached out to Lane about what will happen to Reading Room after Macellaro leaves, he referred us to Jim Kovacs, the executive managing director for retail services at Colliers International.

Kovacs confirmed Reading Room is closing for the summer, and that his firm is helping Lane look for a new restaurant concept to fill the space at 6001 Central Ave.

"I'm hoping by next season, we'll have a fresh new operator and a new brand," Kovacs said. "I'm not sure how quickly things will happen."

Macellaro said her relationship with the owners had started to "diminish." Kovacs confirmed the sentiment.

"I think there may have been some creative differences," he said. "Chefs and business owners sometimes think differently. A chef has an artistic mind; a business owner has a business mind. And sometimes those don't meet in the middle."

Both parties seem focused on moving forward. Kovacs said Lane wants to be landlord instead of a more hands-on business owner with the space's next tenant.

"He really enjoyed his time with the chef, but running a restaurant is stressful," Kovacs said.

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Macellaro is looking ahead to "at least a month of seclusion," during which she can regroup and figure out what she wants to do next — and whether that even involves cooking in a Tampa Bay restaurant.

"I've found there seems to be pressure from ownership and customers. I don't want to have to reduce the quality of things," she said. "Good food is expensive, and so is sourcing. And that's important to me. But I'm not sure how many people care about that."

She's keeping things simple this last week at the restaurant, and said she has been especially touched by the customers who come to say goodbye.

"Jessika and I set out to create the restaurant this became," she said. "We just want to make sure we make a good decision the next time we do something like this. We put our heart into a place."

Contact Michelle Stark at mstark@tampabay.com. Follow @mstark17.