As Long Island Press reported, Howard Kroplick had nine cars sitting in the bay at Haute Durvo on the night of September 24, three of them the kind of vehicles that get shown at Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance and win. Guests walked past the cars before they ever reached a tasting station. Inside, eleven kitchens had set up along a wraparound table, and by the time the night ended, roughly 300 people had come through a sold-out room to sample dishes from restaurants that most of them already knew by name.
What made the evening worth paying attention to wasn't the guest list or even the cars. It was what Kroplick said afterward: organizers could have sold another 150 tickets if they'd had the room for them. A village of Roslyn's size doesn't usually generate demand that outpaces supply by half. When it does, it's worth asking what changed.
A Gala the Landmark Society Retired
As Long Island Press reported, the Taste of Roslyn wasn't an annual tradition getting a refresh. It was new this year, and it replaced something specific: the Roslyn Landmark Society's usual gala-style fundraiser, the kind of seated dinner-and-speeches format that historical societies have run for decades. Rosanna Wolff, the Society's co-vice president and chair of its events committee, described the shift plainly when the event was announced back in August. The idea came from Kroplick himself, a longtime Landmark Society board member who pitched it to Wolff earlier in the year.
What they built instead was a walk-around format, restaurants staffing their own stations, guests moving table to table, live music and lighting handled by the venue itself. Haute Durvo, the space that hosted it, sits at 55 Lumber Road next to Kroplick's own garage, and its name is shorthand for its location: Down Under the Roslyn Viaduct Overpass. It's not a venue built for real estate marketing photos. It's a garage-adjacent event space that a car collector happens to co-own, which is part of why the vintage automobiles weren't a gimmick tacked onto a food event. They were the reason the venue existed in the first place.
The event was presented by Rallye Motor Company, a name that will be familiar to anyone who has bought a car on Long Island, and organized jointly by the Landmark Society and the Roslyn Chamber of Commerce. That pairing matters. A chamber of commerce promoting its member restaurants is expected. A historical preservation society doing the same thing, and treating a sold-out dinner crowd as a fundraising mechanism, is a newer move.
What the Money Is Actually For
Proceeds from the Taste of Roslyn go toward the Landmark Society's ongoing restoration work, specifically the Roslyn Grist Mill and the Van Nostrand-Starkins House. These aren't abstract line items. The Grist Mill has been the subject of a multi-year preservation effort that predates this event by several years, and the Van Nostrand-Starkins House is one of the village's oldest surviving structures. A sold-out room of 300 people, with demand for 150 more, translates into real dollars for buildings that don't generate their own revenue.
Jordan Fensterman, who spoke at the event, called it a reflection of the village's growing reputation as a dining destination. That's a claim easy to make and harder to prove, but the math backs it up here. When a first-year event could have sold roughly 150 tickets beyond its capacity, that's not a fluke. It's evidence that the appetite for Roslyn's restaurant scene as a shared identity, not just a collection of individual spots, was already there and hadn't been tapped.
The Newest Table in the Room
One of the eleven kitchens at Haute Durvo hadn't existed as recently as this past winter. As Long Island Press reported, Griffin Kitchen & Bar, at 1512 Old Northern Boulevard, went before the Village Board of Trustees on February 17 as a proposal from chef Pasquale Abbatiello, a Long Island native who had been running multiple restaurants in Westchester County and wanted to be closer to home after the birth of his twins. At that meeting, Mayor John Durkin and Deputy Mayor Marshall Bernstein asked about parking and traffic flow, given the space's history of congestion in the municipal lot it shares. Abbatiello's answers were specific: employees would park in the lower garage, deliveries would route to the rear and basement, and the restaurant would run primarily on reservations to control flow. Seating capacity came in at 94, including bar seats, a reduction from the previous configuration at that address, because the tables would be larger than standard.
The address itself carries some local memory. 1512 and 1514 Old Northern Boulevard was the former site of Limani Mezze, a Mediterranean seafood spot that had operated there for years. What Abbatiello proposed in February was described as farm-to-table and contemporary American, leaning on Long Island's agricultural supply chain for seasonal, locally sourced ingredients and elevated brunch service seven days a week.
By April, Newsday had it under a different name and a different pitch. Griffin Kitchen & Bar's opening was described with a global concept spanning buttermilk biscuits and mussels a la plancha to Wagyu meatballs, schnitzel with chicory-arugula salad, and dry-aged steaks. By September, the restaurant's own materials describe it as a Michelin-recognized elevated American concept with seasonal tasting menus and craft cocktails in an intimate dining room. The throughline from a February permit hearing to a September tasting menu is the kind of detail that only shows up if you were paying attention the whole way through, and it says something about how a restaurant concept gets refined in real time between the paperwork and the opening. Griffin is currently taking reservations, open Monday through Thursday from 4 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday until 11, and Sunday from noon to 9.
Eleven Kitchens, One Village
The full roster at Taste of Roslyn mixed restaurants with decades of history against ones that opened this year. Trattoria Diane, a name tied closely enough to the Landmark Society that the group held its 2022 annual meeting dinner there, staffed a table alongside Hendrick's Tavern, 388, Sweet Harbor Coffee, Gino's Pizza, and Ilios Frozen Yogurt, which itself opened on Old Northern Boulevard within the past year. Okaru, Mim's, Alto Enoteca, Delicacies, and Felice rounded out the lineup.
What's notable isn't any single name on that list. It's that the village's dining scene, spanning a coffee shop, a frozen yogurt counter, an Italian trattoria with roots going back years, and a restaurant that didn't exist eight months ago, all sat in the same room as parts of one event, funding the same preservation projects. Roslyn's restaurant identity has never really needed a unifying occasion before. This year it got one, and the response suggests the village had more appetite for it than the venue could hold.
If You Missed It
The Taste of Roslyn was billed as an inaugural event, which means there's no guarantee of a fixed annual date yet, but the demand numbers make a repeat likely. Anyone who wants updates on a second year can follow the Roslyn Landmark Society directly, since that's where the event originated and where restaurant lineups get announced as they're confirmed.
In the meantime, Griffin Kitchen & Bar is open for dinner service now, reservations recommended given the smaller seating count the Board of Trustees signed off on back in February. The Roslyn Grist Mill and the Van Nostrand-Starkins House restoration work continues in the background, funded in part by a dinner that sold out faster than the people running it expected.
Dalia Elison spends as much time tracking what opens, changes, and sells out in Roslyn as she does tracking what closes on North Shore listings, because the two aren't separate stories. A village's character shows up at a sold-out tasting event under a viaduct overpass just as clearly as it does anywhere else. For more on what's happening across Roslyn and the rest of the Gold Coast, visit Dalia Elison.
