Walk into L'Étoile on a Friday night and, past the white tablecloths and the wine list, you'll find something that doesn't belong in a French restaurant: a wooden sign reading SNOUDER'S, hung exactly where it hung when the building was a drugstore, as reported by the LI Herald. It's not decor. It's the only sign that was there in 1887, when Andrew Snouder installed the first telephone in Oyster Bay behind that counter and, for a few years, the only one in town. Theodore Roosevelt's press corps used it to file stories about him as governor and later as president. His own house, Sagamore Hill, didn't get a phone line until he reached the White House, and even then the number was a plain four digits: OB 67.
That sign is still up today because the people who bought the building decided not to take it down. That decision, more than any single menu, is the real story of what's happened to downtown Oyster Bay over the past decade.
Two Families, One Zip Code
If you've eaten out in the hamlet more than twice this year, you've almost certainly spent money at a property owned by one of exactly two hospitality groups. Lush Life Hospitality Group was founded in 2014 by Claudia Taglich and chef Jesse Schenker, an Iron Chef America champion. Stellina Hospitality Group followed in 2022, built by the Milana family and chef Fabrizio Faccini. Between them, these two operations now hold a meaningful share of the restaurants, bars, and specialty food shops on South Street and Audrey Avenue.
That's a different story than the one usually told about a downtown's revival, which tends to credit a wave of unrelated small businesses moving in independently. Here it's closer to two family companies, each building out a small constellation of properties, sometimes a block apart from each other, sometimes literally connected by a shared hallway.
What Lush Life Built
Claudia and her husband Michael Taglich bought a historic but rundown house in Oyster Bay in 2014 and moved the family there from Sag Harbor. A vacant corner lot nearby, once home to a bistro called Cafe Al Dente, became the site of their first restaurant. Since then, the group has kept expanding around that same stretch of South Street:
- 2 Spring, their modern American flagship
- The Chef's Counter at FOUR, a 10-seat tasting counter inside a restored shingle cottage, connected to 2 Spring through a winter garden modeled on the one at the Ritz Paris
- Gioia, a northern Italian spot
- Gimme Burger, the casual counterpoint to the tasting menus down the block
- Bull Moose, a members-only cocktail lounge
- The Comet Club, a steakhouse in nearby Woodbury
- Provisions Market and Provisions Bakery, the group's specialty grocery ventures
The Comet Club aside, nearly everything on that list sits within a few minutes' walk of the others, which is part of why the block reads as a single destination rather than a scattering of separate businesses.
What Stellina Built
The Milana family's story starts further back and further away. Adriana Milana's family emigrated from Italy in the mid-1900s and opened Stella's, a cozy Italian restaurant in Syosset, in 1960. It ran for 64 years. During the pandemic, the Milanas relocated to Oyster Bay and watched the hamlet's mom-and-pop storefronts thin out as businesses everywhere struggled.
Their answer was Stellina Ristorante in 2022, followed by The Audrey, a Mediterranean-leaning kitchen and bar on South Street, and most recently L'Étoile, the French restaurant inside the old Snouder's building. A Japanese concept called Hoshi is planned for South Street next.
Adriana Milana has said the hardest part of building L'Étoile was holding onto the building's history while still making it feel new. Her fix was simple: keep the sign, keep most of the original interior wood, and build the upscale French dining room around what was already there rather than over it.
The Building That Almost Came Down
The building at 108 South Street was built in 1855 and expanded in 1890. Snouder's Drug Store opened inside it in 1884 and ran, under one name or another, for the next 126 years, closing its doors in December 2010. It sat vacant for almost 16 years after that. A developer who owned it at one point wanted to tear it down, arguing it wasn't worth saving.
Cold Spring Harbor developer Tim Lee disagreed, bought the property with partners Claudia Taglich and Lenore Mahoney, and had the building formally examined. That inspection found something the demolition case had missed: an 18th-century timber frame buried inside the later construction, proof the structure was not only restorable but older than anyone had assumed. The Town of Oyster Bay marked the building with a historical plaque on September 3, 2025, just weeks after L'Étoile opened its doors.
That plaque sits a short walk from another one, at the Derby-Hall Bandstand on Audrey Avenue, the site where Roosevelt delivered public speeches and where a Civil War-era cannon, presented to the town by the Navy in 1903, still stands. In a LI Herald report, Jackie Cipolla, executive director of the Oyster Bay Main Street Association, said the bandstand's renovation and the redone seating near the post office were made possible by the momentum of the hamlet's revived business community: "We all want to walk around a town that's beautiful and thriving."
That's the connection worth sitting with. The public streetscape improvements you may have noticed over the past couple of years—the bandstand and the benches by the post office—are part of the same downtown story as the private restaurant investment on South Street.
How To Read South Street Now
None of this is purely commercial, either. The Audrey partnered with the Oyster Bay Boys & Girls Club this past summer on a promotion that donated a share of the restaurant's proceeds to the club. 2 Spring ran two "Dine for a Cause" nights in May 2026, sending 30 percent of the evening's proceeds to Blood Cancer United. Both groups also support Main Street Association events, including October's Oyster Fest.
So the next time you're walking South Street deciding where to eat, here's the shortcut. If the space feels European, minimal, and design-forward with an open kitchen at its center, it's likely Lush Life. If the space carries a sense of family history, warmth, and a story about the building itself, it's likely Stellina. And if you happen to notice an old sign that doesn't quite match the rest of the room, stop and read it. That's usually the part of Oyster Bay that was here before either family arrived, and the part they decided was worth keeping.
Farber Locke Team pays close attention to details like these because we work and live in these same North Shore towns every day. If you're weighing a move to Oyster Bay or just curious what your current home might be worth in a hamlet that keeps finding new reasons to walk its own Main Street, Get Your Instant Home Valuation from Farber Locke Team.
