Garden City Restaurants in 2026: Franklin vs. Seventh Street

"Everybody has said the same thing, that Garden City has been wanting and needing a restaurant of this caliber."

That's Andrew Affa, one of the partners behind The James, describing the reaction after his group opened its Garden City location this summer. He's talking about Franklin Avenue. He's not talking about Seventh Street, and that distinction matters more than it sounds.

If you've lived in Garden City through 2026, you've felt the churn without necessarily mapping it. A longtime dinner spot closed. A Greek restaurant showed up out of nowhere. A steakhouse became something else entirely. It would be easy to read all of this as one general wave of restaurant turnover, the kind every suburban downtown goes through every few years. But look at where each change actually happened, and a pattern emerges that a scattered list of openings and closings won't show you: Franklin Avenue got upgraded this year. Seventh Street got emptied out. And the mall quietly absorbed the difference.

Two Streets, Two Very Different Years

Franklin Avenue and Seventh Street sit two blocks apart in the village center, and for years they've functioned as parallel dining strips, each with its own anchors. In 2026, that symmetry broke.

Two upgrades landed on Franklin. One long-running anchor disappeared from Seventh Street with no like-for-like replacement announced as of this writing. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's a reshuffling with a direction.

What Happened to the Old Primehouse Space

Primehouse had run at 910 Franklin Avenue since July 2019 under chef-owner Art Gustafson, who also owns Chadwick's and Salsa Mexicana in Rockville Centre. Late last year, the space caught the attention of Steve Squitiro and Andrew Affa, the hospitality team behind Arlo Kitchen & Bar in Northport and The James in Babylon Village. They closed on the deal in November, kept Primehouse running with its existing chef and staff through the holidays, then shut the doors in January to rebuild the space into a second location of The James.

The turnaround was fast. The Garden City Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon cutting on June 17, with the restaurant open to the public the following day. What opened is a modern American brasserie, the same menu and design language as the Babylon original, scaled down to a dining room that seats roughly 130 guests. For now it runs dinner Wednesday through Sunday, with lunch service slated to start this month. If your only visits so far have been evening ones, that's about to change.

The ownership group hasn't hidden its ambitions either. Squitiro has said they're looking to bring the brand to more towns, possibly one more on Long Island before expanding further down the East Coast. Garden City, in other words, wasn't a one-off. It was a deliberate pick.

The Greek Newcomer Started With a Fundraiser

Meli-Estiatorio's arrival at 815 Franklin Avenue in January was a quieter story, but it says something about how these openings land in a village this size. Owner Jimmy Tsoumas, who grew up in Queens and spent time around Garden City's Novita and Waterzooi before deciding to open his own place, chose to introduce the new location with an invitational preview benefiting Life's WORC, a nonprofit headquartered nearby on Franklin Avenue. The connection wasn't random. A friend of Tsoumas's serves on that organization's board, and the two conversations, opening a restaurant and supporting a local nonprofit, merged into one event.

It's a small detail, but it's the kind that tells you a new restaurant is trying to become part of the neighborhood rather than just occupy a storefront in it.

The Seventh Street Silence

Seventh Street Cafe closed after 33 years, and it closed on its own terms. Owners Victor and Brooke Scotto opened the Italian restaurant on December 7, 1992, and served their final meals on Christmas Eve 2025, retiring after an unsolicited offer to buy the building came in earlier that year. Brooke Scotto said at the time that she had no idea what the new owners planned for the space.

Eight months later, that space is still an open question. No restaurant announcement has surfaced to fill it, which means the block that anchored Garden City's sit-down Italian dining for three decades currently has a gap where its biggest name used to be. That's the flip side of Franklin Avenue's momentum. One street added two ambitious new concepts in the same stretch of months that the other lost its longest-running one.

Seventh Street hasn't gone quiet in every sense, though. The block still carries the village's civic calendar. On June 19, the Garden City Chamber of Commerce brought its 2026 Summer Promenade Series back to Seventh Street for the second event of the season, featuring the Big Pineapple Circus and its trapeze performers, drawing families out for an evening of shopping, dining at whatever's currently open, and outdoor entertainment. The street is still where the village gathers. It's just not where the village's newest restaurant news is happening.

The Mall Picked Up What the Sit-Down Restaurants Didn't

While Franklin Avenue was adding destination dining and Seventh Street was losing its dinner-and-a-date-night option, Garden City Center was working a different angle entirely: fast casual. The shopping center has announced four new food tenants moving in through the year, according to its own retailer updates:

• Anna's Taqueria
• PopUp Bagels
• Lanner Noodles
• Sally's Apizza

None of these are competing with The James for a Friday night reservation. They're built for a different kind of meal, the grab-a-bagel-before-work or split-a-pizza-with-the-kids errand that doesn't need a hostess stand. That's the third piece of this year's puzzle. The village isn't just trading one restaurant for another. It's sorting itself into distinct occasions, with Franklin Avenue handling the sit-down evenings and the mall absorbing the quick, casual ones.

What This Means for Your Rotation

If your old routine ran through Seventh Street Cafe, the honest answer is that its replacement hasn't shown up yet, and there's no confirmed timeline for one. Your closest equivalent right now sits two blocks over on Franklin, where The James is just settling into its first full season and Meli has had roughly eight months to work out its rhythm. If your weekly habits lean more toward something quick between errands, that's the gap Garden City Center is actively filling, one storefront at a time.

None of this is really about restaurants in isolation. It's about how a small downtown reorganizes itself when a legacy business exits and new operators with real track records move in behind it. Garden City's version of that story happened to split itself cleanly along two streets this year, which makes it easier to read than most. Watch Seventh Street for whatever comes next. Whoever bought that building has yet to say what they're planning, and in a village this size, that answer will matter more than any single opening has this year.

If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, beyond the listing photos, that's the kind of texture worth knowing before you ever look at a for-sale sign. Richard Baumel has spent years watching how Garden City and the surrounding villages change block by block. Let's Connect if you want a read on what's happening near a home you already own or one you're considering.