Walk the stretch of Franklin Avenue between Seventh and Eleventh Streets on a Friday night this August and the corner at Ninth Street stops you. Six months ago this was Primehouse Steak & Sushi, a place that had been quietly full for years. Now it's The James, an American brasserie with a semi-open kitchen and a patio that fills up by 6:30. A few doors down, Meli-Estiatorio has been serving whole grilled Lavraki and Saganaki since January, in a space that used to be something else entirely.
Two new restaurants on one short block in one year sounds like a boom. It isn't quite that. Look closer at how each of them got their address, and a different pattern shows up: Franklin Avenue doesn't grow by filling gaps. It grows by taking over places that were already working.
The Pattern Nobody Names
Primehouse wasn't a struggling restaurant waiting for a buyer. Chef-owner Art Gustafson, who also runs Chadwick's and Salsa Mexicana in Rockville Centre, had run what the incoming ownership group itself called a well-oiled operation for six years at 910 Franklin Avenue. When Steve Squitiro and Andrew Affa, the partners behind Arlo Kitchen & Bar in Northport and the original James in Babylon Village, went looking for a Nassau County location, they didn't scout vacant storefronts. They bought a busy one.
The deal closed in November 2025. Squitiro and Affa kept Primehouse's chef and staff in place through the holiday season, then closed the doors in January to gut-renovate the space. The James reopened in mid-June, with the Garden City Chamber of Commerce holding a ribbon-cutting on June 17. The new dining room seats roughly 130 guests, smaller than the group's Babylon location, which holds more than 220.
This is not a new habit for Franklin Avenue. Mesita, the Mexican cantina now anchoring 825 Franklin, opened in the space vacated by Asian Moon back in 2021. The street's turnover has always worked this way: a restaurant proves itself, then someone with more capital and a bigger concept takes the lease.
Here's how the two headline flips line up against that older pattern:
- 2019: Primehouse Steak & Sushi opens at 910 Franklin Avenue
- 2021: Mesita takes over the former Asian Moon space at 825 Franklin Avenue
- November 2025: SAF Hospitality Group acquires Primehouse
- January 2026: Meli-Estiatorio opens at 815 Franklin Avenue
- June 17, 2026: The James opens at 910 Franklin Avenue with a Chamber ribbon-cutting
Two openings, one address recycled, one street that keeps trading up rather than filling in.
Why an Owner With Two Restaurants Already Picked This Street
Jimmy Tsoumas didn't stumble onto Franklin Avenue. He'd spent time there before he owned anything on it. Tsoumas opened the original Meli in Forest Hills the previous January, and when he looked for a second location, he picked Garden City specifically because of the restaurants already anchoring the block. He's said plainly that he spent time hanging out at Novitá and Waterzooi, the Italian and Belgian mainstays at 860 and 850 Franklin, before deciding to open his own place nearby.
That's a different kind of market signal than a vacancy rate. An owner choosing a street because its existing restaurants are strong, not because rent is cheap or a storefront is empty, tells you the street's value is in its cluster. Grimaldi's, Calogeros, Revel, Kaji Sushi, Sushi Ya. None of that lineup opened in a vacuum, and none of the new arrivals are trying to be the first thing on the block. They're trying to be next to the things that already work.
Two Miles Away, Growth Looks Different
Garden City Center, the retail complex on Old Country Road, is having its own food moment this year. Anna's Taqueria, PopUp Bagels, Lanner Noodles, and Sally's Apizza are all landing there as new tenants. It's worth noticing how differently that growth happens compared to Franklin Avenue. The mall isn't displacing anything. It's adding tenants to a retail footprint built for expansion.
Franklin Avenue doesn't have that luxury, and it doesn't seem to want it. The street is built out, block to block, in fixed-footprint storefronts from a village planned more than a century ago. When a new concept wants in, something established has to move first. That's not a weakness. It's the reason the street's food scene stays sharp instead of sprawling. Only the operators willing to buy their way into a proven spot get to try.
Andrew Affa put it plainly after The James opened its doors:
"Everybody has said the same thing, that Garden City has been wanting and needing a restaurant of this caliber."
That's a confident thing to say about a street that already had Novitá, Waterzooi, and a six-year-strong Primehouse on it. It's also a bet that only makes sense if you understand the street doesn't reward newcomers who show up first. It rewards the ones who show up next.
The Centennial Backdrop
None of this is happening in isolation from the rest of the village calendar. The Garden City Chamber of Commerce is marking its 100th anniversary in 2026, having incorporated in 1926, and the centennial branding is showing up everywhere from lamp post banners downtown to the ribbon-cutting ceremonies themselves. When the Chamber cut the ribbon for The James on June 17, it was doing so as part of a year it has explicitly framed as a celebration of a century of shepherding the village's business district.
That same civic muscle is behind the Summer Promenade Series on Seventh Street, six themed Friday nights that the Chamber funds and staffs at no cost to residents. The Belmont Festival kicked things off on June 5, timed to the Belmont Stakes even though the race itself ran in Saratoga again this year while Belmont Park in Elmont finishes its rebuild. The Big Pineapple Circus followed on June 19, complete with iFly trapeze performers letting kids try the rig themselves. Nashville Night closed out the series on August 21.
The throughline is that Franklin Avenue's restaurant turnover this year didn't happen alongside the Chamber's centennial programming by coincidence. The same organization stitching together promenade nights on Seventh Street is the one standing at the ribbon for a new restaurant on Franklin. The street's identity gets curated as much as it gets earned.
What's Next on the Calendar
The Garden City Historical Society has one more centennial-adjacent event on the books before the year turns. The Gilded Age Gala is set for October 3 at the Cathedral of the Incarnation, the church built around 1885 by Cornelia Clinch Stewart in memory of her husband, village founder Alexander Turney Stewart. The evening is designed by Spaeth Design and framed as a nod to both the nation's 250th anniversary and the opulence of the era that built the village's oldest landmarks in the first place.
It's a fitting bookend to a year that started with a restaurant named after honey opening in a space with no prior identity, and is ending with a black-tie evening inside the building that gave Garden City its architectural signature. Somewhere in between, a six-year-old steakhouse became a brasserie, and nobody on Franklin Avenue seemed to think that was strange.
If there's one thing this year makes clear, it's that Franklin Avenue doesn't measure its health in vacancies filled. It measures it in how often somebody with real money decides an existing tenant isn't ambitious enough for the address. That's a strange kind of growth to explain to someone who doesn't live here, and a completely normal one to anyone who's watched this stretch of the village for a while.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a street this closely, whether it's a restaurant lease or a house that just changed hands three doors from your own, that's exactly the local read the McCooey-Olivieri Team builds every neighborhood guide around. Schedule a complimentary local market consultation whenever you want to talk through what's actually happening on your block, not just what the listing photos show.
