Pasquale Abbatiello spent years running restaurants in Westchester County before he decided to bring his own concept to Long Island. When he pitched the Village of Roslyn's Board of Trustees on a new farm-to-table spot in February, he didn't talk about foot traffic or rent comps. He talked about milk.
"There are a lot of farms. You can buy milk in Riverhead. You can get local ingredients from the North Fork."
That's the kind of reasoning that doesn't show up in a listing description, but it's the reason Griffin Kitchen & Bar now occupies 1512 and 1514 Old Northern Boulevard, the storefront that used to be Limani Mezze. Abbatiello is also a new father of twins, which shaped the move as much as the sourcing math did.
"Now that I have a family, I want to be close to home."
If you live in Roslyn and haven't walked down Old Northern Boulevard in a few months, that single storefront is worth paying attention to, because it's not an isolated swap. It's one piece of a strip that's rewriting itself in real time, on the same few hundred feet of street, in two directions at once.
The Space Where Limani Mezze Used To Be
The Village Board approved the application on February 17, and the restaurant opened its doors that April under the name Griffin Kitchen & Bar, per Long Island Press coverage of the board meeting. The concept is contemporary American: buttermilk biscuits, mussels a la plancha, Wagyu meatballs, schnitzel with chicory-arugula salad, braised short ribs, and a brunch menu, open seven days a week from noon to 10 p.m.
The detail that tells you something about how tight this particular block actually is: Mayor John Durkin's board pressed Abbatiello specifically on parking, because the municipal lot serving that stretch already runs congested. His answer was that staff would park in the lower garage, not the main lot. That's not a footnote. It's a sign that a new kitchen opening on this strip has to negotiate real estate constraints most residents never see, because there's no room to add capacity. Old Northern Boulevard isn't expanding. It's turning over.
Two Doors Up, Kyma Just Picked Up A Michelin Mention
While Griffin was settling into its new space, Kyma, the Greek and Mediterranean restaurant at 1446 Old Northern Boulevard, was getting a callout in the Michelin Guide's coverage of NYC Summer Restaurant Week, which ran July 20 through August 16 this year. The Michelin Guide's writeup leaned into the Aegean design of the space and singled out the pikilia spread trio and the whole grilled fish as reasons to book a table.
Kyma opened in 2013, so this isn't a new arrival finding its footing. It's an established Roslyn business getting national press attention more than a decade in. Put next to Griffin's opening, the contrast is the point: one restaurant on this strip is a brand-new bet from a chef who just moved his family here, and one is a long-running local fixture just now catching wider recognition. Both are evidence of the same thing, a commercial strip with enough gravity to attract new investment and enough consistency to keep building a reputation for the businesses already there.
What Didn't Move
Not everything on this stretch is in motion, and that matters just as much. Limani, the seafood-forward Greek restaurant that predates Griffin's arrival at that address, is still operating and still keeping its menu live. Thyme, the New American restaurant at 8 Tower Place overlooking the Roslyn Duck Pond, is still serving lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch with live music on the porch. If you've eaten at either in the last year, nothing about your evening changed.
That's worth saying plainly because it's easy to read a story about restaurant turnover and assume the whole street flipped. It didn't. What happened is more specific: one storefront changed hands, one long-standing business got a spotlight, and the rest of the block kept doing what it's always done. That's a healthier pattern than wholesale replacement, and it's a different story than the generic "Roslyn has great restaurants" write-up you've probably already seen elsewhere.
The Free Calendar Nobody's Consolidated Into One Place
The restaurant strip isn't the only part of downtown that's been active this year. The Roslyn Downtown Association runs a farmers market every Sunday through September 13 on Pennsylvania Avenue, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and a free outdoor movie series at The Roslyn Yard on Saturday nights at sunset. The remaining August lineup:
- August 15: School of Rock
- August 22: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
- August 29: Encanto
Separately, the Roslyn Landmark Society hosted Dancing on the Docks on August 4, a sunset event on the Roslyn waterfront, and has been promoting its new Roy W. Moger Memorial Greater Roslyn Heritage Trail Network, a self-guided trail connecting the village's historic sites. The Landmark Society is also the organization behind The Taste of Roslyn, an annual food event presented with Rallye Motor Company that draws from the same restaurant row this post is about.
None of this lives on one calendar. The farmers market and movie nights come from the Downtown Association. The waterfront event and heritage trail come from the Landmark Society. If you're only checking one group's page, you're missing the other half of what's happening within a few blocks of your own house.
The Pattern Worth Noticing
Put the restaurant story next to the events calendar and a shape emerges that's easy to miss if you only look at one or the other. A chef with Westchester experience chose this specific stretch of Old Northern Boulevard for his first owner-operated restaurant, citing access to Long Island's farms as part of his reasoning. A restaurant that's been here since 2013 is getting picked up by the Michelin Guide during the same season. Two civic organizations, working independently, are running a weekly farmers market, a free movie series, a waterfront dance night, and a new heritage trail, all within the same few months.
None of these things required each other to happen. But taken together, they describe a downtown that's attracting new investment while its established anchors hold steady, and where the civic organizations are expanding programming at the same time the private businesses are expanding their footprint. That's a different story than "Roslyn is a nice place to live," which is true but tells you nothing you didn't already know. The more accurate version is that this particular stretch of Old Northern Boulevard, and the blocks around it, are in an unusually active season right now, and most of what's changed is small enough that you'd only catch it by walking the strip block by block.
If you're already doing that walk most weekends, you've probably noticed pieces of this. If you haven't been down there in a while, this is the season to go.
Questions about what's happening with property values in downtown Roslyn, or curious what a home near this stretch might be worth given the changes on the strip? Pat Gaglio knows this neighborhood block by block. Schedule a free consultation to talk through what's next for your Roslyn home.
