The first thing you notice stepping into Café Red is the warmth. Not the manufactured ambiance of a chain restaurant pumping out focus-grouped playlists and recirculated air, but the genuine, radiating warmth of a place that knows exactly what it is. At 107 Main Street in Kings Park, on a stretch of road that New York State has earmarked for a $10 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative, a family-owned restaurant has been doing something quietly revolutionary for over a decade: proving that refined New American cuisine does not require a Huntington Village address or a Manhattan zip code. Café Red is putting Kings Park on Long Island’s culinary map, and the story of how it got there is as layered and complex as the Thai curry broth steaming beneath its Prince Edward Island mussels.
I have spent twenty-five years running The Heritage Diner on Route 25A in Mount Sinai, and if that tenure has taught me anything, it is that the restaurants which endure are never merely selling food. They are selling a covenant—a promise between kitchen and community that the meal on your table was considered, not assembled. Café Red understands this covenant intuitively. It is a place where the chefs hand-select seafood straight from the Fulton Fish Market at Hunts Point in the Bronx, where the meat arrives from small farms committed to humane and organic practices, and where the eggs and seasonal produce come from Makinajian Farms in Huntington, a third-generation certified organic family farm that has been working Long Island soil since 1948 (New York Cork Report, 2011). That is not a marketing tagline. That is a sourcing philosophy, and the difference between the two is the difference between a restaurant and a brand.
The Antuzzi Legacy: From Sardinia to the North Shore
To understand Café Red, you must first understand the culinary empire from which it emerged. The restaurant is part of a family of establishments built by Chef Nino Antuzzi, a Sardinian-born restaurateur who began working in the hospitality industry at the age of thirteen in his native Italian village. Antuzzi honed his skills across London, Paris, and New York City before planting his flag in Huntington Village in the fall of 2000 with Red Restaurant at 417 New York Avenue (Boxerbrand, 2014). Red earned immediate acclaim for its sophisticated New American fare built on local and organic ingredients, leading Newsday to note that the restaurant had “battled recessions, resisted ‘trendlets’ and improved dramatically” over the years.
From that original seed, the Antuzzi family cultivated a trio of beloved establishments: Osteria Da Nino in 2003, a rustic Italian restaurant featuring the recipes of Nino’s mother and sisters; and Sapsuckers Hops and Grub in 2010, a craft beer gastro pub that anchored the opposite side of Huntington’s Main Street (Huntington Patch, 2010). Together with his wife and business partner Kelley Danek, Antuzzi built what amounted to a culinary ecosystem—each restaurant feeding off the energy and reputation of the others.
Café Red represents the family’s expansion into Kings Park, bringing with it the same exacting standards and farm-to-table philosophy that defined Red Restaurant for a quarter century. Under the stewardship of Orlando and Nora—who oversee daily operations with the kind of personal investment that only owner-operators can muster—Café Red has become the standard-bearer of refined dining in a community historically underserved by upscale options. When patrons speak of Nora greeting them at the door with genuine warmth, they are describing a restaurant culture that cannot be franchised or replicated (OpenTable, 2025). The restaurant carries a 4.8-star rating across 583 reviews on OpenTable, a testament to the consistency that distinguishes professional operations from hobbyist ventures.
The Kitchen Philosophy: Provenance Over Convenience
The culinary approach at Café Red is rooted in a principle that is becoming increasingly rare in American dining: ingredient-first cooking. Rather than building a menu and then sourcing whatever fits the budget, Café Red works backward from its suppliers. The kitchen team makes regular trips to the Fulton Fish Market in Hunts Point—the largest wholesale seafood marketplace in the United States, handling upwards of 200 million pounds of fish annually at a valuation exceeding $1 billion (Wikipedia, Fulton Fish Market). The chefs hand-select their seafood with the same discernment a Marcellino craftsman applies when selecting a hide of English bridle leather: every piece is evaluated for quality, freshness, and the particular characteristics that will define the finished product.
The partnership with Makinajian Farms is equally deliberate. The Makinajian family has been farming their four-acre property on Cuba Hill Road in Huntington since Joseph Makinajian, an Armenian immigrant, began cultivating the land in 1948 after leaving Queens. Three generations later, grandson Michael Makinajian continues the tradition of certified organic farming, producing everything from seasonal vegetables and herbs to the farm’s legendary roasted chickens and fresh eggs (New York Cork Report, 2011). The restaurant uses Makinajian’s organic eggs year-round and sources seasonal produce directly from the farm when available—a supply chain so short you could practically walk it.
This sourcing philosophy extends to the protein program. All meat at Café Red comes from small farms committed to organic, humane practices. The grass-fed filet mignon arrives with a red wine reduction, mashed potatoes, steamed vegetables, and crispy onions. The Steak Frites features a grilled fourteen-ounce Painted Hills shell steak with spicy gorgonzola au poivre sauce, french fries, and asparagus. Even the organic chicken—offered in four distinct preparations from Milanese to Cacciatore—reflects a kitchen that refuses to cut corners.
The wine program further distinguishes Café Red from its peers. The award-winning wine list features exclusively small-production, family-owned wineries—the vinous equivalent of choosing bespoke craftsmanship over mass production. It is the same philosophy I champion at Marcellino NY: when you know who made it, where it came from, and how much care went into the process, the final product speaks a different language entirely.
The Menu: A Study in Restrained Ambition
Café Red’s menu is a masterwork of range without bloat. It opens with a carefully curated selection of appetizers that demonstrate both Italian reverence and global curiosity: mozzarella-filled arborio rice balls breaded and crisped with tomato dipping sauce; pancetta-wrapped scallops with wilted baby spinach and truffled balsamic aioli; P.E.I. mussels steamed in a savory Thai curry broth; crispy calamari with wasabi-honey vinaigrette. Each dish occupies its own territory on the palate without crowding the next.
The pasta program pays homage to the Antuzzi family’s Sardinian roots. The linguine with crabmeat, capers, cherry tomatoes, basil, and white wine is a study in Mediterranean restraint. The fresh semolina and spinach pasta with mushrooms, cream, and white truffle oil nods directly to the beloved Paglia e Fieno that made Osteria Da Nino famous. House-made ricotta gnocchi arrives with tomato basil sauce so clean it practically glows. And the pappardelle, tossed with butter and topped with Nona’s veal meatballs, tomato sauce, Parmesan, and parsley, carries the unmistakable signature of family recipes passed through generations—the kind of dishes you cannot learn in culinary school because they require not technique alone but emotional memory.
The entrée selection ranges from a house-ground blend burger on brioche with gorgonzola and crispy onions to slow-braised osso buco with white wine, mirepoix, tomato, and herbs over mashed potatoes. The seafood preparations—including a pan-seared yellowfin tuna and seared sea scallops—demonstrate the quality dividends that come from sourcing directly at Hunts Point. The prix fixe dinner, available Sunday through Thursday at $37.95 per person for three courses, represents one of the most compelling value propositions on Long Island’s North Shore dining scene.
Weekend brunch brings its own revelations: ricotta pancakes that reviewers have called among the best they have tasted, alongside shrimp tempura tacos, cubano sandwiches, and a Bloody Mary that patrons describe as essential to the experience. The signature Kings Park Lemonade and craft cocktails like the Dock Cucumber Martini have cultivated their own following, while desserts—crème brûlée, coconut tiramisu, and the classic tiramisu—provide endings worthy of the meals that precede them.
The Space and the Experience: Where Intimacy Meets Occasion
Café Red occupies a corner of Kings Park’s Main Street with the quiet confidence of a restaurant that has nothing to prove. The interior is intimate without being cramped, casual without being careless. Outdoor seating under a sided tent with string lights provides an alternative atmosphere during warmer months, complete with heaters extending the season. The restaurant is wheelchair accessible and offers a small parking lot on-site, with additional street parking available along Main Street.
What distinguishes the Café Red experience is the human element. Review after review—across Yelp, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, and Restaurantji—returns to the same theme: the owner’s presence. Nora’s role as host, curator of atmosphere, and guarantor of quality transforms each visit from a transaction into something approaching hospitality in the European sense. Diners describe being greeted warmly, accommodated thoughtfully, and attended to by a staff that clearly takes its cues from ownership that cares. One OpenTable reviewer summarized the sentiment that recurs across hundreds of reviews: this is a place that “never disappoints” (OpenTable, 2025).
The restaurant has become Kings Park’s preferred venue for private celebrations—from christenings and communion parties to birthday dinners and funeral luncheons. Orlando and Nora host events for parties of various sizes, offering prix fixe menus tailored to the occasion, available any day of the week from noon to three o’clock with a minimum of forty adults. The restaurant also offers both in-house and off-premise catering, extending the Café Red experience beyond the walls of 107 Main Street.
A Restaurant in a Renaissance: Kings Park’s Downtown Revival
Café Red’s trajectory is inseparable from the broader transformation unfolding along Kings Park’s Main Street. In 2023, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that Smithtown-Kings Park had been awarded $10 million through the seventh round of the Downtown Revitalization Initiative, funding eight transformational projects designed to create a walkable, mixed-use business district centered around the Long Island Rail Road station (NY Governor’s Office, 2023). The $101 million sewer infrastructure project currently underway—a massive undertaking that has literally ripped up and repaved Main Street—represents the kind of foundational investment that precedes genuine neighborhood reinvention (Citizens Campaign for the Environment, 2025).
For anyone who studies the relationship between community culture and property value—as I do through my work in North Shore real estate with my wife, Broker Paola, preparing our 2026 boutique venture Maison Pawli—restaurants like Café Red are leading indicators. When a community produces a dining establishment that draws patrons from adjacent towns and earns a reputation that extends well beyond its immediate geography, it signals something about the area’s trajectory. Patchogue had its craft beverage and farm-to-table moment. Farmingdale experienced its Main Street renaissance. Kings Park, with Café Red as one of its cultural anchors, is positioned for a similar evolution—one where the sewers running beneath the freshly paved asphalt literally and figuratively carry the community toward a more dynamic future.
The fact that Kings Park’s most acclaimed restaurant shares DNA with Huntington Village’s legendary dining scene speaks to a kind of culinary diffusion: excellence does not stay contained. It migrates outward along the North Shore, following the same invisible trajectories that brought immigrants from Sardinia to Suffolk County, organic farmers from Armenia to Cuba Hill Road, and an ambition for quality dining to a hamlet that once defined itself primarily by a psychiatric center that closed in 1996.
Community Connections and Cultural Footprint
Café Red has attracted attention from notable Long Island personalities, including philanthropist Rosario S. Cassata of The Cassata Foundation, a privately funded nonprofit family foundation that supports causes ranging from childhood hunger to cancer research across Long Island (PR.com, 2023). Cassata, a regular presence at Café Red and its sister restaurants, represents the kind of community figure whose patronage both reflects and amplifies a restaurant’s cultural standing.
The restaurant’s commitment to dietary inclusivity further broadens its reach. Gluten-free options are prominently available and well-reviewed. Vegetarian selections are woven throughout the menu with genuine creativity rather than tokenism. And the kitchen’s willingness to accommodate allergies and dietary restrictions—noted by multiple reviewers with food sensitivities—reflects a hospitality philosophy that extends beyond taste to genuine care.
Café Red also participates in the broader Long Island farm-to-table movement, which has emerged as one of the region’s most important culinary and agricultural narratives. By maintaining direct relationships with producers like Makinajian Farms and sourcing from the Fulton Fish Market rather than through distributors, the restaurant helps sustain the economic ecosystem that keeps small-scale farming viable on an island increasingly defined by development pressure. Every plate of organic scrambled eggs at Saturday brunch, every order of seasonal vegetables from Huntington’s Cuba Hill Road, represents a small but meaningful vote for the preservation of Long Island’s agricultural heritage.
YouTube: For an exploration of the Fulton Fish Market—where Café Red sources its seafood—and its significance to New York’s culinary landscape, watch Zagat’s behind-the-scenes feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6dGqqm5jdI
The Enduring Promise at 107 Main Street
There is a passage in Heidegger’s meditations on dwelling that suggests we do not inhabit a place so much as a place inhabits us—shapes our routines, our expectations, our sense of what a community can become. Café Red, on a modest stretch of Main Street in a hamlet most Long Islanders drive through rather than to, embodies this reciprocity. It is shaped by Kings Park’s character—the small-town familiarity, the proximity to Sunken Meadow State Park’s woodlands and the Nissequogue River’s tidal marshes, the working-class ethic of a community that values substance over spectacle. And in turn, it shapes Kings Park’s trajectory, announcing to anyone who walks through its doors that this is a place where things are made with care.
In twenty-five years of feeding Mount Sinai from behind a diner counter, I have learned that a restaurant’s truest measure is not the complexity of its menu or the prestige of its address. It is the regularity with which people return—not because they lack alternatives, but because the alternative feels like settling. Café Red is the kind of establishment where regulars mark anniversaries and first communions, where a funeral luncheon can be arranged with grace on a holiday weekend, where a couple celebrating nothing in particular can share a plate of Thai mussels and a bottle from a small-production winery and feel, for an evening, that the world has been arranged in their favor.
That is not a business. That is a legacy being built in real time.
Café Red — Essential Information
Address: 107 Main Street, Kings Park, New York 11754
Phone: (631) 544-4500
Website: caferedli.com
Online Ordering: ordercafered.com
Reservations: Available via OpenTable
Hours: Monday–Thursday: 11:00 AM – 9:00 PM | Friday: 11:00 AM – 10:00 PM | Saturday: 10:00 AM – 10:00 PM | Sunday: 10:00 AM – 8:30 PM
Cuisine: New American, Italian, Contemporary
Price Range: $$–$$$ | Prix Fixe Dinner: $37.95 (Sun–Thu)
Features: Reservations, Delivery, Takeout, Catering (In-House & Off-Premise), Outdoor Seating, Wheelchair Accessible, Private Parties, BYOB (corkage fee applies), Gluten-Free Options, Vegetarian Options
Ratings: 4.8 stars (OpenTable, 583 reviews) | Ranked #4 in Kings Park (TripAdvisor) | 146 reviews (Yelp)
Sister Restaurants: Sapsuckers (Huntington Village)
Published on The Heritage Diner Blog — heritagediner.com/blog Peter from The Heritage Diner | Mount Sinai, New York
