Owner of Huntington's Golden Globe Diner, aka the Golden Dolphin, pledges to reopen

Another decades-old diner has closed its doors on Long Island, but its owner said he will “fight tooth and nail” to reopen.

Huntington’s Golden Globe Diner, formerly the Golden Dolphin, closed on May 17 amid a yearslong dispute with the landlord, owner Peter Tsadilas told Newsday Friday night. He plans to continue the legal battle while the grill remains cold in the hopes of heating it up once again.

“It was my dream to buy a diner,” Tsadilas, 55, of Syosset, said. “I had been going there since I was a little kid. We ended up going in there and truth of the matter is from day one there’s been problems.”

Tolou Realty Associates, the Great Neck-based landlord of the diner and the adjoining H&R Block location, could not be reached late Friday.

Tsadilas became a partner in the diner under its former name in 2017 before a falling out left him in control. He renamed the eatery in 2019, though he never changed the signage. He since planned to expand the diner’s physical footprint into the connected H&R Block, a matter he said is central to the legal disputes with his landlord. During arrangements to expand, he said his rent was raised to $23,000, which “is a lot of money to sell pancakes and eggs at a local village diner.”

With more space, Tsadilas hoped to balance his restaurant’s “coffee shop diner” roots with “a pancake concept” with specialty offerings.

“Today’s kids are not into diners,” he said. “When we were young, we used to go to our diners all the times, that’s where we’d meet our friends. But diners have lost a lot of their luster, a lot of them have been closing down because they can’t pay the high rents. It just keeps going on and on until there’s going to be five diners left at some point.”

About 40 diners across Long Island closed their doors for good between 1990 and 2019, Newsday previously reported. More than a dozen others closed since the pandemic.

Although the Golden Globe’s future remains uncertain as Tsadilas continues his legal battles, he continues to run another, similar eatery: Diner Dash in Kings Park.