What's New in Manhasset Right Now, and Why It's Happening in Two Different Ways at Once

Ask anyone who has lived in Manhasset for more than a few years what's changed lately, and you'll get two very different answers depending on which street they mean. Say "Miracle Mile" and they'll talk about construction fencing finally coming down after years of half-finished storefronts. Say "Plandome Road" and they'll bring up a bar that used to have a line out the door on a Tuesday night.

Both streets are filling back in this year. Neither is doing it the same way.

Plandome Road Said Goodbye to a Local Fixture

For a certain stretch of Manhasset's history, Publicans was the answer to "where do you go after work." The bar was documented in J.R. Moehringer's 2005 memoir "The Tender Bar" and later fictionalized in the 2021 film adaptation, which is a strange kind of local celebrity for a neighborhood watering hole to carry. It closed last fall.

What replaced it wasn't a chain looking for its next zip code. Angie's is the work of Stefanos Vouvoudakis, Tom Tsiplakos, and Joe Ragonese of the Balos Restaurant Group, the same team behind the Michelin-recognized Balos Estiatorio and For Five Coffee Roasters, which has run its flagship Long Island location out of Manhasset since 2018. In other words, the people opening Angie's weren't discovering Manhasset. They'd already been working the same few blocks for years.

Vouvoudakis told the Long Island Press the goal was straightforward: a gathering space "that celebrates that with the community has been important to us." Angie's now sits at 550 Plandome Road with a seasonal seafood menu, an expansive patio, and the kind of casual American menu built for a regular crowd rather than a destination one.

The lesson from Plandome Road isn't that a bar closed and a restaurant opened. It's that the operators who stepped in were already local before they signed the lease.

Miracle Mile Finished Something That Took Five Years

A mile or so away, on Northern Boulevard, a different kind of story wrapped up this winter. Manhasset Row, the stretch of storefronts between 1575 and 1595 Northern Blvd, sat in some state of transition for years after AJM Real Estate acquired the parcels in 2021. One building went for around $3.572 million, the larger strip for about $7.625 million, according to Long Island Business News reporting cited by the Long Island Press. Then came a multi-year renovation involving parking, circulation, and reconfiguring the space for tenants who hadn't been identified yet.

As of this year, they have been. Sweetgreen opened Nov. 25, 2025, at 1593 Northern Blvd, its fourth Long Island location after Garden City, Woodbury, and Huntington Station. LaserAway, an aesthetic dermatology clinic headquartered in Beverly Hills, opened next door on Jan. 12, its third Long Island outpost following Garden City and Woodbury. And on Feb. 2, Visual Comfort & Co., a Houston-based lighting and design brand, opened its first Long Island showroom at the same address, giving local homeowners and designers direct access to a line it hadn't previously carried east of the city.

None of these are debut concepts betting on an unproven market. Sweetgreen and LaserAway had already tested Long Island elsewhere and decided Manhasset was worth a fourth and third stop, respectively. Visual Comfort chose it as the entry point specifically because the corridor already reaches the design-minded homeowners the brand wants.

The Bigger Homecoming Is Still Ahead

The most anticipated opening on the Mile hasn't happened yet. Tony's Di Napoli is aiming for a Thanksgiving 2026 debut in the former TGI Fridays building at 1445 Northern Blvd, which will make it the restaurant's first location outside New York City's five boroughs. Third-generation owner Stuart Wetanson has described the project as gaining steady momentum, saying local excitement is spreading organically as the Town of North Hempstead works through the permitting process with the family.

There's a family history behind the choice that makes it more than an expansion. Before Tony's Di Napoli became a New York City institution, the Wetansons founded the Wetson's hamburger chain in Levittown. Opening in Manhasset, Stuart said, brings three generations of the family back to the island where the business started. "It's a full circle opening for the Wetanson family," he said.

The design leans into that history rather than around it. A grand staircase salvaged from the building's past will anchor the dining room, and gallery walls throughout the space will hold pieces from Herb Wetanson's decades-long collection of race car memorabilia. Wetanson has said the restaurant is meant to function as a genuine neighborhood spot rather than an outpost:

"It will be somewhere you inevitably run into someone you know, and where the community can build many memories."

If the Thanksgiving target holds, that would put the opening roughly three and a half months from today, which is close enough that the reservation system Wetanson mentioned holding back until timing is certain will likely open sometime this fall.

Two Corridors, One Pattern

Line these stories up and a pattern shows itself that isn't obvious from any single headline. Miracle Mile's new arrivals are proven operators completing a build-out that took half a decade to lease. Plandome Road's new arrival is a team that had already been running a coffee flagship two doors down for six years before it took over the bar next door. Tony's Di Napoli, the one true newcomer to the physical space, is arguably the least new of all of them, since the family that owns it built its first Long Island business seventy-some years ago in Levittown.

What none of this year's openings look like is a chain parachuting into Manhasset cold to see what happens. Every operator either already had Long Island locations to compare it against or already had roots in the town itself. That's a different mechanism than the one that usually gets credited for a commercial strip filling up, and it says something about where Manhasset sits in the pecking order for operators deciding where to plant a flag. It isn't where concepts get tested. It's where they get confirmed, or where they come home.

For residents, the practical version of all this is simpler: a bar with a literary footnote became a neighborhood bistro from a team you already know, a five-year construction project on the Mile is finally done, and by the time the leaves turn, there will be a family-style Italian dining room with a staircase worth noticing and a wall of vintage race cars worth a second look.

None of this is about buying or selling a house, and it shouldn't be. It's about what it's actually like to live somewhere. But if a shift in the neighborhood you already call home ever turns into a bigger question about property, Limor Karudo & Elimor Kochavi have spent years working these same blocks and the North Shore around them. Reach Out whenever that day comes.