Walk the four blocks between Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Park and the corner of South Street and Audrey Avenue and you will pass five restaurants that did not exist in downtown Oyster Bay five years ago. That is not an accident of individual entrepreneurs picking the same zip code at the same time. It is two hospitality operators, working independently, making the identical bet on the identical few blocks. One is a family that started with forty seats in 2022 and kept going. The other is a chef who built his name in Manhattan kitchens and brought two concepts here instead of one. Neither coordinated with the other. Both landed on South Street.
If you live in Oyster Bay, you have felt the shift without necessarily naming it. Here is the shape of what actually happened, and what it means for a weekend that is about to send close to 200,000 people through the same four blocks.
The Building That Sat Empty for Sixteen Years
The clearest evidence of the pattern sits at 108 South Street, inside a building with a longer memory than almost anything else downtown. Snouder's Drug Store opened there in 1884 and became the town's first telephone connection three years later, the only line in Oyster Bay for years afterward. Theodore Roosevelt's children rode their ponies in from Sagamore Hill for the soda fountain the Snouders installed in 1889, and once Roosevelt became president, the phone booth in the back of the drugstore carried messages between the Summer White House and Washington before Sagamore Hill had its own line installed.
Snouder's closed for good in December 2010. The building then sat vacant for almost sixteen years, a fact the Stellina Hospitality Group's Sabrina Milana has pointed to directly when explaining why her family took it on: the history and the renovated bones of the space made it, in her words, an opportunity they could not refuse. The Milanas partnered with the building's owner, Tim Lee, kept the original Snouder's signage and much of the interior woodwork, and opened L'Étoile, a French bistro, inside it last year. On September 3, 2025, the Town of Oyster Bay unveiled a historic marker on the building to mark 141 years since Abel Conklin first opened his drugstore there. Town Historian John Hammond, a direct relative of Roosevelt, attended, along with Judith Colwell, the daughter of Snouder's longtime pharmacist.
A building that once carried the only phone line in town is now the reservation line for one of the hardest tables in it.
One Family, Three Rooms, Two Streets
L'Étoile did not appear out of nowhere. It is the third concept the Milana family has opened within two blocks of each other since 2022, when they debuted Stellina Ristorante at 76 South Street with forty seats and Chef Fabrizio Facchini in the kitchen. From there came The Audrey at 30 Audrey Avenue, an all-day kitchen and bar that runs coffee service through late dinner and stays open seven days, including Sundays, when a good share of the village's other dining options close. The Audrey also keeps a handful of bar seats and high tops that never go on a reservation list, a detail that matters more than it sounds like it should once you understand what is coming to town in October.
Three concepts, three different registers of dining, all inside a two-block radius, all under one ownership group. That is not how restaurant rows usually form. Most build one storefront at a time, from different owners, over years. Stellina Hospitality built theirs on purpose.
A Second Operator Made the Same Bet
Here is the part that turns a nice local story into an actual pattern. The Milana family is not the only group that decided South Street was worth building more than one restaurant on.
Chef Jesse Schenker, who built his reputation at Recette and Gander in New York City, opened Four's Chef's Counter downtown in 2021, an intimate tasting-menu experience built around watching the kitchen work up close. He followed it with Gioia at 94 South Street, on the corner of South and Audrey, serving handmade pasta and Emilia-Romagna-style cooking. Two chef-driven concepts, same few blocks, same operator, arriving on a timeline that overlaps almost exactly with the Milana family's buildout a few doors down.
Two operators. Five restaurants. One small stretch of village. That concentration, more than any single opening, is why downtown Oyster Bay feels different than it did in 2021. It was not a slow drift of independent openings filling empty storefronts. It was two groups racing to plant multiple flags on the same short street.
What Didn't Get Replaced
None of this came at the expense of what was already there. The Bonanza Stand, the small hot dog and refreshment stand near Audrey Avenue Park that regulars have been stopping at for decades, is still standing. Oyster Bay Brewing Company has been pouring pints at 36 Audrey Avenue since 2012, well before either restaurant group arrived, and its beer garden is still one of the more reliable seats in town on a Friday night.
The newest additions outside the two main groups fill gaps rather than compete directly. Dough & Co. Pizza, which built a following in Huntington starting in 2022, opened its Oyster Bay location at 25 East Main Street in early 2026. Southdown Coffee, a Long Island roaster that has been in business since 2014, opened on Audrey Avenue as a straightforward morning stop, coffee and espresso before a walk to Sagamore Hill or a train into the city.
What's actually new to downtown Oyster Bay right now, in rough order of arrival:
- Four's Chef's Counter (2021) — tasting-menu counter seating from Chef Jesse Schenker
- Stellina Ristorante (2022) — 76 South Street, forty seats, Chef Fabrizio Facchini
- Gioia (South Street corner) — Chef Jesse Schenker's second concept, Emilia-Romagna pasta
- The Audrey (30 Audrey Avenue) — all-day kitchen and bar, open Sundays, walk-in bar seats
- L'Étoile (108 South Street) — French bistro inside the former Snouder's Drug Store building
- Dough & Co. Pizza (25 East Main Street, early 2026) — Huntington-born pizzeria's Oyster Bay debut
- Southdown Coffee (Audrey Avenue) — specialty coffee, morning through afternoon
Why This Matters the Weekend of October 17
All of this sits directly in the footprint of Oyster Fest, which returns to Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Park and Audrey Avenue on October 17 and 18, 2026. Past editions of the festival have drawn as many as 200,000 visitors over the weekend, and the town runs a shuttle between the park and Audrey Avenue because the crowd genuinely fills both.
That means the same four blocks that just absorbed two competing restaurant buildouts are about to absorb a crowd larger than the population of most Long Island towns, all at once. If you have been meaning to get a table at L'Étoile or Gioia, book it well before the third weekend of October, not the week of. If you would rather skip the wait entirely, The Audrey's bar seats stay walk-in only, and Dough & Co. and Southdown are built for exactly the kind of casual, no-reservation stop that a festival weekend demands. Oyster Bay Brewing's beer garden will be part of the festival programming itself, so that one takes care of itself.
None of this required a single new building downtown. It required two groups deciding the same few blocks were worth betting on more than once, and a hundred-and-forty-one-year-old building finding a third act nobody expected when the drugstore closed in 2010.
If you're already living in Oyster Bay and wondering what your own home might be worth in a village where South Street keeps proving there's still room to grow, the team at Raquel Knoell knows this stretch of the North Shore block by block. Reach out for a conversation, or start with an instant home valuation to see where things stand.
