For the three of you who happen to stumble on this post, I just wanted to provide an update.
I launched this site in 2011. I moved to Great Neck in 2007, and fell in love right away. Great Neck’s restaurant scene has always been incredible. Back in the 20th century when celebrities lived here, the best chefs in the world set up shop here. As a major stop on the LIRR, people would come from all over, attracted by anchor stores like Wanamakers, which gave way to Stern’s, Gertz, Foodtown, Edward’s, Waldbaums, and Best Market over the years, with long stretches of being vacant.
I was lucky to live here on the tail end of Great Neck’s greatness as a haven for foodies. And then, something changed. If you walked on Middle Neck Road, you’d see vacant storefront after vacant storefront. The only new businesses to occupy those stores were nail and eyebrow threading salons.
This blog was actually pretty popular in its day, but as you can see I kind of gave up in 2014, with a few weak attempts to restart it in 2016 and 2017. For one thing, I became a dad, and had no more time for blogging. But the other thing was, I got so tired of amazing restaurants like King’s Premium Seafood, Juliebelles, Royal Tea House, Bareburger, La Rotonda, Poultry Mart, and many others shutting down.
These were top quality restaurants that rivaled the best in the City, but they just couldn’t make it.
Why? I see three things: demographic shifts, terrible parking, and the loss of anchor stores.
Demographically, all you need to do is look at the schools to see what the makeup of the town is. We’re predominantly Jewish and Asian. And traditionally, these groups tend to be more family-oriented and budget-conscious. Eating out is a luxury, not a daily event.
Parking-wise, this town is horrific. There are a handful of meter spaces. The train station lots are impossible to figure out for an out-of-towner. If you dared to park at a lot like the old Best Market lot, instead of the idiot owners of that land figuring out how to monetize their parking lot, they’d have tow trucks sitting in the half-empty lot looking for people to tow and charging extoritionist rates of $200 to on the spot. Does anyone think a single person they towed from out-of-town ever came back to Great Neck?
From an anchor store perspective, time will tell if the new Aldi is enough to draw people back.
But things are changing.
The demographic shift is being reflected in the new restaurants coming into town. There are lots of new Asian restaurants, some second locations of iconic restaurants in places like Flushing and Taiwan, that are seeing success. Similarly, some of the best Kosher food on Long Island can be found here. And old-time favorites like Ginos and Peter Luger’s seem to continue to do great (yes, Asians and Jewish people love pizza, steak, and every other kind of food).
And so, I’ve decided to start this blog over. I’ll keep this blog up for historical purposes, but the new site will be one that I hope will be the definitive place to find out where to eat in Great Neck, without the pomposity of Yelp, the whiners on Google Business, or the “I ate there one time and here’s my definitive take” of Newsday.
Stay tuned 🙂