Walk the corner of Franklin Avenue and Ninth Street this month and the black awning reads a name most Garden City residents didn't recognize back in January: The James. The building is the same one that housed Primehouse Steak & Sushi for six years. The parking lot hasn't moved. The corner hasn't moved. What changed is who's cooking, and it turns out the answer says something about how this strip actually grows.
Chef-owner Art Gustafson opened Primehouse in July 2019 and ran it for six years before stepping back, keeping his other Rockville Centre restaurants, Chadwick's and Salsa Mexicana, in his own hands. Late in 2025, partners Andrew Affa and Steve Squitiro took over operations, kept Gustafson's chef and staff in place through the holidays, then closed the doors in January to gut and rebuild the space. The Garden City Chamber of Commerce held the ribbon cutting on June 17, and The James opened to the public the next day.
If that name sounds familiar, it should. Affa and Squitiro already run The James in Babylon, which opened in May 2024 inside the historic Babylon Carriage House, and Arlo Kitchen & Bar in Northport, a two-acre hilltop property that expanded its parking from 60 spaces to roughly 200 after it took off. Garden City is their third location and the smallest by design. Where the Babylon dining room seats more than 220, the Garden City space seats around 130, with a semi-open kitchen, a bar, and an outdoor patio. The menu didn't get reinvented for the move either. It's the same structure as Babylon: raw bar, fresh pastas, wild-caught seafood, a prime dry-aged steak program.
"Everybody has said the same thing, that Garden City has been wanting and needing a restaurant of this caliber."
That's Affa, describing the reaction since opening night. What he's really describing is a five-year-old brand that already worked in Babylon, scaled down and dropped into a location that already had foot traffic built by someone else. Garden City didn't get an experiment. It got a proven concept, tailored smaller.
The Greek Restaurant That Chose Garden City Because of Garden City
A few doors down, the same pattern played out with a different cuisine. Meli-Estiatorio, the Greek restaurant known for its Forest Hills location, opened its second outpost at 815 Franklin Avenue in January, and owner Jimmy Tsoumas didn't pick the block at random. He grew up in Queens and spent time on the North Shore and in Roslyn, and by his own account he'd been a regular at Novita and Waterzooi, two restaurants that have anchored this stretch of Franklin Avenue for years. Watching those two rooms fill up on a given weeknight gave him the case for opening his own place nearby.
"My flair is in Greek dishes and Mediterranean style cuisine which reflects both my background and culture."
The opening celebration wasn't just a soft launch either. Tsoumas hosted an invitational preview night benefiting Life's WORC, a nonprofit headquartered at 1501 Franklin Avenue, after a conversation with a friend who sits on the organization's board turned into a fundraiser. That's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing that tells you a restaurant is planting itself in a community rather than just leasing a storefront in it.
Put Meli next to The James and the pattern gets hard to miss. Neither is a startup concept betting on Garden City as untested ground. Both are known quantities, arriving from somewhere else on Long Island where they'd already built a following, choosing this stretch of Franklin Avenue specifically because Novita, Waterzooi, and the corner that used to be Primehouse had already proven people would show up.
Two Different Import Strategies, One Square Mile
That's actually the more useful thing to understand about Garden City's food scene this year, because it isn't only happening on Franklin Avenue. A short drive away, Garden City Center has confirmed four new food additions of its own: Anna's Taqueria, PopUp Bagels, Lanner Noodles, and Sally's Apizza. These are a different tier of import entirely. Where Franklin Avenue is importing single-location, chef-driven concepts with a track record in Babylon or Forest Hills, the mall is importing recognizable, faster-casual names built for grab-and-go traffic between other errands.
The distinction matters if you live here and are deciding where to eat on a given night. Franklin Avenue, from Novita and Waterzooi through Meli and now The James, is building itself into the sit-down, make-a-reservation strip. Garden City Center is building the quick-bite counterpart, a bagel or a slice you can grab between stops rather than a meal you plan an evening around. Neither is replacing the other. They're solving different problems for the same residents, and the fact that both are expanding in the same year isn't a coincidence so much as a sign that Garden City's food economy has enough demand right now to support growth in two directions at once.
It also happens to be the Garden City Chamber of Commerce's centennial year, and the Chamber leaned into it with its 2026 Summer Promenade Series on Seventh Street, which drew families downtown on June 19 for an evening built around iFly trapeze performers, with kids getting a supervised turn on the rig themselves. A hundred years of the Chamber and a full reshuffle of Franklin Avenue's anchor restaurants landing in the same twelve months is the kind of overlap that tends to mean a downtown is being reinvested in, not just refreshed.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall
None of this is retrospective. The next six weeks give residents a reason to see the new lineup in person, and the fall calendar is already set.
| Event | Date | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Martini Mingle at The Patio Bar by David Burke | September 10, 2026 | The Patio Bar, Garden City Hotel |
| Dinner in the Dark with Chef David Burke | September 17, 2026 | The Red Salt Room, Garden City Hotel |
| Fall Fest | September 19, 2026, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. | Main Street |
| The Gilded Age Gala | October 3, 2026 | Cathedral of the Incarnation |
| Long Island Family Day | October 4, 2026 | Cradle of Aviation Museum |
Fall Fest is run by Downtown Vision, the same group that organizes Main Street's foot traffic all year, and vendor booths will line up back to back down the center of the street to keep the flow moving. It's the kind of event where you'll walk past The James and Meli in the same afternoon you're sampling from a dozen other tables, which is probably the fastest way to see how much has actually changed on this block since January.
The Gilded Age Gala in October ties into the village's broader recognition of America's 250th anniversary, and it's worth noting that a Chamber turning 100 the same year the country turns 250 gives this fall's calendar an unusual amount of civic weight behind it. None of that requires you to do anything differently this weekend. It just means the next few Saturdays on Franklin Avenue and Main Street are going to be busier than a typical September, and worth building a plan around rather than discovering on the way to somewhere else.
Garden City's restaurant corridor didn't grow this year by taking a chance on something new. It grew by giving proven names a smaller, better-suited room to work in, and by letting a shopping center and a walkable Main Street each specialize in what they're actually good at. That's a more interesting story than "new restaurants opened," and it's the kind of detail you only notice if you're paying attention to the block, not just the menu.
If you're weighing a move in or around this stretch of Nassau County and want a read on the neighborhood from people who actually track it block by block, Yadlynd Cherubin and The Legacy Team would be glad to talk it through. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
