Somewhere between the bocce courts of Spaghetti Park and the fluorescent hum of the 7 train, a restaurant has spent more than six decades refusing to become a memory. Park Side Restaurant — anchored on Corona Avenue like a limestone cornerstone set into wet cement — is not merely an Italian-American dining room. It is a cultural archive, a neighborhood autobiography written in marinara and veal piccata, and one of the last sovereign territories of old-world Queens hospitality still operating at full capacity. For those of us who have built our lives around the daily discipline of feeding people, Park Side represents something close to scripture: proof that a restaurant can outlive trends, outlive generations, and outlive even its own mythology.
Peter from the Heritage Diner has spent twenty-five years understanding what it takes to keep a neighborhood fed and a dining room honest. At Marcellino NY, that same obsession with longevity — the reverence for materials that age rather than decay — defines every hand-stitched seam. And as Paola and I prepare to launch Maison Pawli in 2026, we study places like Park Side the way architecture students study load-bearing walls. This is a restaurant that carries the weight of an entire community on its kitchen line.
From the Corona Supper Club to a Queens Institution
The story begins in 1960, when a pair of Calabrian immigrants opened a modest seven-table establishment called the Corona Supper Club on the stretch of Corona Avenue that faces William F. Moore Park (Wikipedia, 2025). The menu was rooted in peasant cooking — pasta e fagioli, pasta e lenticchie, sufrite made from organ meats fried with peppers and tomatoes in the old Calabrian tradition. The dining room was functional, the ambitions humble, the audience strictly local.
By 1966, their son Anthony Federici had become deeply involved in the family operation, and his purchase of the building that year — motivated in part by his desire to install pigeon coops on the roof — gave the restaurant something most New York City establishments never achieve: freedom from a landlord (Cosa Nostra News, 2022). That single real estate decision, made nearly sixty years ago, insulated Park Side from the rent escalations that have shuttered thousands of otherwise thriving restaurants across the five boroughs. It is a lesson in property ownership that resonates deeply with anyone in the restaurant or real estate business: control your overhead, and you control your destiny.
Anthony Federici formally relaunched the establishment as Park Side Restaurant in 1980, expanding it from those original seven tables to more than fifty and transforming the menu from Calabrian home cooking into a comprehensive southern Italian and Sicilian operation (Queens Name Explorer, 2023). The restaurant’s name itself was a tribute to the park across the street — William F. Moore Park, the beloved triangle of public space known to generations of Corona residents as Spaghetti Park.
Spaghetti Park and the Soul of the Neighborhood
You cannot understand Park Side Restaurant without understanding Spaghetti Park. William F. Moore Park, originally named Corona Heights Triangle when the city acquired the land in 1924, was dedicated to a Marine killed at the Battle of Belleau Wood during World War I (NYC Parks Department, 2023). But its cultural identity was forged by the Italian-American community that made Corona their home throughout the twentieth century.
The park’s bocce courts — among the only lit outdoor courts in the city — became the gravitational center of Corona’s Italian enclave (City Lore, 2023). Strung with red, green, and white Christmas lights, the courts drew players from across the boroughs who would gather in the evening to roll wooden balls over gravel while the smell of garlic and olive oil drifted from the restaurant directly across the street. Federici himself collaborated with the New York City Parks Department to revitalize the park, installing a bocce court, cleaning up the grounds, and transforming what had been a refuge for vandalism into a community gathering place (Queens Name Explorer, 2023).
Adjacent to Spaghetti Park sits the Lemon Ice King of Corona, serving Italian ices in paper cups since 1944, and just down the block, Corona Pizza — the three establishments forming a triangle of Italian-American commerce that defined the neighborhood’s identity for half a century. Park Side watched over the park’s west end like a guardian, and regulars would finish dinner and stroll to the bocce courts for a few frames before heading home (Narratively, 2013). That symbiosis between restaurant and park, between table and public square, is precisely the kind of “third place” dynamic that sustains neighborhoods. It is the same philosophy that has kept the Heritage Diner relevant in Mount Sinai for twenty-five years: a restaurant is not just where you eat, it is where you belong.
The Menu: Southern Italian Tradition Without Compromise
Park Side’s kitchen has never chased trends. The menu is a comprehensive document of southern Italian and Sicilian cooking executed with the kind of consistency that only comes from decades of institutional memory. Starters include baked clams, stuffed mushrooms, stuffed zucchini, and fried calamari that regulars describe as among the best in the city. The bread basket — accompanied by a complimentary cheese and charcuterie plate — is legendary, setting a tone of abundance before the first course even arrives (Yelp, 2026; TripAdvisor, 2025).
Pasta dishes run the full southern Italian repertoire: linguine with clam sauce in red or white, rigatoni Bolognese, penne alla vodka, fettuccine in truffle and wild mushroom sauce, and ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta in light marinara. The veal program is particularly celebrated — veal marsala, veal piccata, veal parmigiana, and the veal spiedini that veteran diners single out as a signature. Chicken parmigiana, eggplant parmigiana, and the mozzarella in carrozza round out a menu that rewards repeated visits with new discoveries (OpenTable, 2026; TripAdvisor, 2025).
Seafood occupies a prominent position: South African cold-water lobster tail, shrimp scampi, swordfish, and the Park Side seafood deluxe over linguine. The filet mignon, described by multiple reviewers as steakhouse quality, demonstrates the kitchen’s range beyond traditional Italian preparations. Portions are famously generous — a philosophical commitment to abundance that Peter from the Heritage Diner recognizes as foundational to the Italian-American dining contract. You do not leave Park Side hungry. It is not permitted.
Celebrity, Community, and the Federici Legacy
Park Side’s celebrity clientele reads like a casting call for a Scorsese film and a Vanity Fair cover shoot simultaneously. Johnny Depp, Robert De Niro, and Dolly Parton have all dined in the restaurant’s main room or the upstairs Marilyn Monroe Suite — a private dining space adorned with large-format paintings of the Hollywood icon, all of them gifted to Federici by admirers who knew of his appreciation for Monroe (Amuse/Vice, 2019). The atmosphere, described by diners and journalists alike as evoking the energy of old-world Italian-American culture with contemporary polish, features wooden accents, crisp white linens, contemporary pendant lighting, and servers in crisp white button-downs who address guests as “famiglia” (The Infatuation, 2025).
Anthony Federici’s philanthropic footprint extended well beyond the restaurant. He organized fundraisers that generated over $100,000 in donations for Flushing Hospital, distributed hot meals to elderly residents through partnerships with the RAICES Senior Center of Corona and St. Leo’s Golden Age Club, and was honored by Queens Borough President Helen Marshall for his sustained community service (Wikipedia, 2025; Queens Name Explorer, 2023). In 2021, Queens residents voted Park Side the borough’s “Best Fine Dining” establishment, a testament to its enduring reputation across generational lines (Grokipedia, 2025).
The restaurant has received the Five Star Diamond Award from the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences annually since 1995, a recognition of consistent excellence in cuisine and hospitality that few independent restaurants can claim over such a sustained period (Park Side Restaurant, 2025). When Federici passed away on November 9, 2022, at the age of 82, the outpouring from the Corona community — described as a “sea of humanity” at his funeral — confirmed what regulars had always known: Park Side was not just his restaurant, it was the neighborhood’s living room (Cosa Nostra News, 2022). The street adjacent to the restaurant was subsequently named Anthony Federici Street, a permanent civic acknowledgment of his contribution to Corona’s identity.
The Dining Experience Today
Park Side continues to operate seven days a week, serving lunch and dinner with the same commitment to quality and hospitality that defined Federici’s tenure. The restaurant offers valet parking — a practical necessity given Corona’s notoriously challenging street parking — and maintains private dining areas with flexible banquet packages for birthdays, bridal showers, christenings, corporate events, and holiday celebrations (Park Side Restaurant, 2025).
With over 1,100 reviews on Yelp, 500-plus on TripAdvisor (where it holds the number-one ranking among all Corona restaurants), and a 4.7 rating on Facebook based on more than 1,200 reviews, Park Side’s reputation is sustained by volume and consistency rather than novelty (Yelp, 2026; TripAdvisor, 2025). The service staff, led by the frequently praised maître d’ Alfredo, maintains the kind of attentive, old-school professionalism that makes guests feel individually recognized in a packed dining room.
For those ordering remotely, Park Side is available on DoorDash for delivery and takeout, bringing southern Italian tradition to doorsteps across Queens and beyond (DoorDash, 2025). But the true experience — the bread basket, the complimentary antipasto, the valet pulling your car around while you settle the check — requires a reservation and a physical presence at 107-01 Corona Avenue.
A Living Testament to the Hundred-Year Restaurant
What Park Side represents, ultimately, is the possibility that a restaurant can become permanent architecture. Not a pop-up, not a concept, not a brand extension — but a building that feeds people the same way, in the same place, decade after decade, until the restaurant and the neighborhood become indistinguishable from each other. Federici understood this instinctively when he bought the building in 1966. He understood it when he cleaned up the park across the street. He understood it when he hired servers who would stay for twenty years and cooks who would memorize the marinara by feel rather than recipe.
At the Heritage Diner, Peter operates under the same conviction: that longevity is not a byproduct of luck but a discipline practiced daily, in the quality of the ingredients, in the warmth of the greeting, in the refusal to cut corners when nobody is watching. At Marcellino NY, that philosophy translates into leather goods built to outlast their owners — English bridle hides hand-stitched with the same patience that Park Side applies to its Sunday sauce. And as Paola and I develop Maison Pawli for the North Shore real estate market in 2026, we carry this same conviction: that the businesses which endure are the ones rooted in place, in community, and in an unshakable commitment to doing the work properly.
Park Side Restaurant is open for lunch and dinner, seven days a week. Go for the veal. Stay for the history.
Contact Information:
Address: 107-01 Corona Avenue, Corona, NY 11368
Phone: (718) 271-9871 / (718) 271-9274
Website: www.parksiderestaurantny.com
DoorDash: Order Park Side on DoorDash
Facebook: Park Side Restaurant
Hours: Monday–Saturday: 12:00 PM – 10:00 PM Sunday: 1:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Valet Parking Available
Private Dining & Banquet Packages Available — Call to Inquire
