For two years, the front windows at 553 Main Street sat dark. The space had been Treme, a jazz club and small-plates bar that opened in 2014 and built a following on Sunday night jam sessions and a New Orleans-leaned menu, gumbo, tapas, a well-reviewed pecan pie. Then it closed, first as a "temporary" pause that stretched on long enough that people started calling the number just to ask if the rumors of reopening were true. They weren't, not for a long while. The awning stayed up. The phone number stayed listed. Nothing happened.
What finally moved into that storefront says more about where Main Street is headed than any single new restaurant could on its own.
In January 2024, Bar Clementine opened in the old Treme space. The concept came from Matthew and Eileen Connors, along with Jason Gut, the trio behind The LakeHouse on the Great South Bay in Bay Shore, one of the more consistently praised restaurants on Long Island. Matthew Connors had run the farm-to-table restaurant Veritas in Manhattan's Flatiron District before the Connors moved out from Brooklyn in 2006 to open The LakeHouse. Bar Clementine is smaller and different by design, a 40-seat cocktail bar with a French-inspired menu and a signature drink named for the fruit, built around a long bar as the visual centerpiece when you walk in.
Walk out Bar Clementine's front door and head south and you're at Bayberry in about 119 yards, a seafood-forward restaurant at 501 Main that's been drawing its own steady crowd. Keep walking a few more doors and you pass Americano Pie Bar, roughly 82 yards from the old Treme address on the same side of the street. None of this is a coincidence of geography. It's what happens when three or four blocks become the place where a hamlet decides to eat.
The Corridor Didn't Stop at Two New Places
Main Street's dining stretch keeps going past Bayberry and Bar Clementine. At 605 Main sits Tellers, An American Chophouse, a restaurant that turned an old bank building into a dining room, keeping the original Mosler Vault as a centerpiece and running dinner service under 25-foot ceilings and the bank's original windows. The kitchen builds its menu around USDA Prime, 35-day dry-aged beef, and the dress code still asks for business casual, no baseball caps except for religious or medical reasons. It's the kind of detail that tells you the room takes itself seriously without needing to say so.
None of this has pushed out the restaurants that were already doing the daily work of feeding Islip hamlet. Il Piccolo Villaggio Ristorante keeps serving Insalata Caprese and Linguine alle Vongole to regulars who don't need convincing. Da Noi, which traces its recipes back to a family's start in Manhattan before landing on Main Street, runs the kind of dining room where the tables are set with care and nobody's in a hurry. The Pizzeria of Islip, a few doors down at 591 Main, is open seven days and closes early on Sundays, the way a neighborhood pizza place should. These places aren't competing with Bayberry or Bar Clementine for headlines. They're part of what gives the street its everyday Islip hamlet feel.
That's the actual shift worth naming. Main Street didn't get gentrified into something unrecognizable. It got dense. The same few blocks now hold both the everyday counter order and the reservation you make two weeks out, and residents move between them without treating either as the more legitimate choice.
The Parade Closed This Stretch on September 20
On Sunday, September 20, that same stretch of Main Street shut down to traffic for the second annual Islip Irish Day Parade, a celebration built around Irish heritage and community that's fast becoming a fixture rather than a one-off. It ran the length of the corridor that now includes Bayberry, Bar Clementine, and the rest of the dining strip, meaning the same sidewalks that fill up for Friday dinner reservations spent a Sunday afternoon filled with marching bands and folding chairs instead.
A neighborhood's Main Street earns that kind of dual use, dinner destination on a Friday, parade route on a Sunday, only when it's actually the center of things rather than a strip that gets visited occasionally. Islip hamlet's version of Main Street has been doing double duty for a while now. The Town of Islip's own Movies on Main series set up its screen at 401 Main Street this year, a few addresses down from the restaurant cluster, turning the same general stretch into a free outdoor theater on select summer nights.
Why the Neighborhood's Oldest Civic Group Holds Its Big Night in Bay Shore
Here's the part of Islip's fall calendar that doesn't happen on Main Street at all, and understanding why tells you something about how the hamlet actually thinks of itself.
On Sunday, September 27, the Historical Society of Islip Hamlet hosted its 5th annual Oakwood Cemetery Tour, a two-hour walking tour with actors in period costume delivering monologues as some of the area's more notable, and occasionally infamous, former residents. The tour has featured a Civil War figure accused of helping John Wilkes Booth flee after the Lincoln assassination, a three-time America's Cup contender, and the woman who voiced Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, all buried at the same cemetery. This year's tour tied into the nation's 250th anniversary.
Oakwood Cemetery isn't in Islip hamlet. It's in Bay Shore, at 3 Moffitt Boulevard. The cemetery's shared history with Islip hamlet traces back to 1880, when 13 businessmen from Islip and Bay Shore each put in a hundred dollars to buy 40 acres straddling the two hamlets' border, solving a shortage of burial ground that had built up after the Long Island Rail Road brought enough growth that churchyards and family plots weren't cutting it anymore. Islip and Bay Shore built that cemetery together on purpose, and 146 years later the group that keeps Islip hamlet's history alive still holds its biggest night of the year on that shared ground.
That's worth sitting with if you think of Islip hamlet as a self-contained little downtown radiating out from Main Street. Its civic identity has always leaked a little into Bay Shore, by design, since before either place looked anything like it does now.
What's Left on the Fall Calendar
The Town of Islip's Apple Festival is close behind, in its 46th year running, a free, all-ages event with craft vendors, amusement rides, a Family Fun Zone, fresh apple desserts, and contests for the best scarecrow and the best apple dish. Vendor space for 2026 sold out before the festival even opened, according to the Town's own announcement, a small but real sign of how much this one draws.
None of this reads like a coincidence once you've watched it happen in sequence. A parade closes Main Street on a Sunday. A cemetery tour a week later pulled the hamlet's civic memory out to the town line it shares with its neighbor. A long-running apple festival closes out the season for the whole town. In between, the same few blocks of Main Street keep filling reservation books on Friday nights. Islip hamlet doesn't have a single event or a single restaurant carrying its identity. It has a short stretch of street that keeps getting asked to do more than one job at a time, and so far it's kept up.
If you're weighing what it would actually mean to live within walking distance of this stretch of Main Street, The Newsom Team can talk you through what's currently on the market in Islip hamlet and how close it sits to all of it.
