Day trip to Long Island's Three Villages: Top dining, New England vibes

Before we explore the singular allure of the so-called Three Villages, you should know there are four or five of them: Old Field and Poquott (both entirely residential), Stony Brook and the Setaukets. But "the Setaukets" encompasses both Setauket and East Setauket, neighboring hamlets that share a ZIP code and, perhaps more significantly, are considered one place by Google Maps. (If you talk to the locals about this, their primary concern is that you do not lump in South Setauket, which, they say, "is really part of Centereach.")

Let’s focus on the charmingest bits of Stony Brook and the Setaukets that lie between Route 25A and the Long Island Sound. With its nationally ranked university, Stony Brook is the best known of the villages. But the Setaukets are the most notable. Established in 1655 — only 15 years after Long Island’s oldest towns, Southold and Southampton—Setauket was the home of the Culper Spy Ring, which, according to the Three Village Historical Society, was organized by Major Benjamin Tallmadge, George Washington’s director of military intelligence. The ring provided General Washington "with critical information that helped turn the tide of the American Revolution." (This once-obscure piece of history was famously dramatized in the 2014—17 AMC series "Turn: Washington’s Spies.")

The society’s permanent exhibition, "Spies!," features interactive software and the opportunity to write with quill pens and invisible ink and decode letters with Tallmadge’s spy code. There’s a mother lode of pamphlets, maps, guides and suggestions for walking, biking and kayak tours.

Back on 25A (here called North Country Road), the "business district" (it’s about two blocks long) of East Setauket stretches out. The 250-seat space that long housed Mario’s Italian restaurant has been transformed into Culper’s 1778, a modern steakhouse that opened its bar and lounge last month. It will join a culinary revitalization kicked off last year by Elaine’s, owned by Elaine and Enzo Micali.

Elaine is a familiar Three Village face from her tenure at Pentimento, the Italian spot that closed in 2021 after 27 years in Stony Brook. She brought along many of that restaurant’s staff, including chef Josue Trejo, who has resurrected Pentimento favorites such as pollo al mattone, chicken grilled "under a brick" for juicy meat and crispy skin, and panelle, the chickpea-flour pancakes that are a common street food in Sicily.

"Per tutti" ("for everyone") starter selections, designed to be shared, are inspired by Enzo’s childhood memories of eating on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx: meatballs with peppers and onions, fried calamari, clams oreganata and a Bronx Antipasto Platter.

The rest of the menu is a combination of Italian and New American: Among the small plates are arancini, burrata and blistered shishito peppers, for instance, and mains range from chicken Milanese to salmon with orange and braised fennel, skirt steak with salmoriglio sauce (a robust blend of herbs, lemon zest and olive oil from Calabria and Sicily) and an "Elaine" burger with caramelized onion, American cheese, special sauce, pickle and fries.

Down the block and across the street you’ll find Madiran The Wine Bar, one of the Island’s best places to drink and learn about wine. No other wine-bar owner is more knowledgeable and passionate than Jacqueline Malenda, who opened the place in 2016 with the goal of introducing customers to quaffs "that The Wine Guy and Total Wine don’t have. It’s not the stuff on every menu."

Malenda delights in expanding her customers’ drinking horizons and she’s gotten very good at it. Say a couple comes in looking for Kendall Jackson Vintner’s Reserve chardonnay, a mass-market California wine from Sonoma. "What is it you like about it?" she’ll ask. Then she might pour a glass of Château Bouscassé Les Jardins Philosophiques from Madiran, in the French Pyrenees. (The town is so dear to her, she named the wine bar after it.) The Château Bouscassé is crafted from petit courbu and petit manseng grapes. It displays the golden color and rich body of Kendall Jackson but is drier and more structured. "I’ll tell them I know the winemaker, that he was born where he makes the wine. The story unlocks something in them, and they begin to understand they want to try more."

Malenda pours more than 50 wines by the glass (most of which are between $12 and $16), and stocks more than 350 vintages; it was one of fewer than a dozen Long Island spots to receive Wine Spectator’s "two glasses" Best Award of Excellence in 2024. The wines, almost exclusively European, are complemented by a menu from chef Reuven Jenkins. Whether you feel like a charcuterie board, asparagus wrapped in prosciutto, octopus salad or lamb chops, wine pairings are always available. Wine pairs well, too, with the live jazz on Friday and Saturdays (and some Thursdays) and a monthly book club that also steers clear of mass-market chardonnay territory: Previous reads have included Joseph Conrad’s tale of man’s inhumanity, "Heart of Darkness" and Kate Chopin’s seminal feminist novel, "The Awakening."

For such a tiny hamlet, Setauket has a deep bench of global cuisines. Two blocks west of Madiran is Ixchel. Named by owners Daphnee and Juan Munar for a Mayan goddess, Ixchel (pronounced "EE-shell") blends an appreciation for pre-Colombian cuisine with a swank design, a crowd-pleasing repertoire and a cocktail menu based on the Mayan calendar. Chef Amelia Sanchez was born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and you can taste the country in her food. A dish that predates the conquistadors is mole Bacalar, boneless chicken thighs in a deep, dark, haunting sauce named for a town near the border with Belize. And don’t pass up cochinita pibil, a Yucatecan Maya dish made from slow-roasted pork flavored with oranges and achiote seeds (which give it its vibrant color) and wrapped in banana leaf.

West of the Setaukets proper lies a string of gustatory pearls. First is Ichi Sushi & Ramen, a long-standing traditional Japanese restaurant with simple, authentic fare. Next is Sichuan Garden, a Newsday Top 50 restaurant and probably Long Island’s best Sichuan.

By now, there are so many authentic Sichuan restaurants on Long Island, intrepid diners have a good idea of what regional specialties they’ll find on the menu, including mapo tofu, wontons in chili oil, dandan noodles and braised or stewed fish. Sichuan Garden excels at all of them. The mapo tofu, with big, fluffy tofu cubes lightly veiled in a sauce of enviable clarity, is a standout. Stew fish is an enormous bowl filled with shards of tender fish in an opaque broth, soured with pickled vegetables and strewn with green Sichuan peppercorns. For a mellow counterpoint to all the spice, order the yam noodles with sliced cabbage. (And for an overview of the wealth of Chinese restaurants in the area, see the map below.)

Farther west still is Taj Crown of India, with a menu that ranges all over the subcontinent, and then Mo’s Island Spice, a sliver of Caribbean sun that opened last November. "Even though there are not a lot of Jamaican people up here," said owner Mo Green, "people will smell the food and wander in, that’s how it starts." Most of the food is takeout but there are a few tables where you can sit and enjoy your food piping hot. Along with the falling-off-the-bone stewed oxtail, popular items include jerk chicken, brown stew chicken or beef, curry chicken or goat.

It’s fair to say there are two destination-worthy fine-dining restaurants in Stony Brook — Sora Omakase and Luca. Sora Omakase opened last year and promptly blew all of Suffolk County’s other sushi bars away. This is not a spur-of-the-moment dining proposition: The $125 14-course tasting menu is reservation-only and there are only a dozen seats at the counter.

Chef Osan Weng makes magic with pristine fish that has been expertly cut and garnished with exactly the right ingredients to enhance (and never mask) its essence. He might start you off, for instance, with a traditional maguro yamaimo kake — bluefin tuna blanketed with grated mountain yam and then sauced with a broth of soy, dashi and wasabi root that has been freshly grated on sandpaper-fine sharkskin — and a huge (we’re talking cannolo-sized) Pacific oyster napped with tomato salsa and sansho pepper before he even launches the parade of nigiri sushi.

Sora is in a little strip mall on 25A that also holds SUP Vietnamese (easily approachable pho and more) and Druther’s Coffee (well-crafted drinks using Counter Culture beans) but the heart of Stony Brook is a mile west, adjacent to the harbor and centered around, of all things, a shopping center. But what a shopping center!

Stony Brook Village Center was the brainchild of Ward Melville. According to the Ward Melville Heritage Organization, about a century ago, his parents, Frank and Jennie Melville, got on the wrong train from Brooklyn to the Hamptons, alighted in Stony Brook and fell in love with the area. Through development and civic engagement, they tried to mitigate the worst effects of the Great Depression in what they named "the Three Villages." Ward deepened his family’s commitment, and his crowning achievement was the construction of the Stony Brook Village Center. Completed in 1941, it is one of the oldest planned shopping centers in the country. (Today, the organization oversees numerous historic sites, nature preserves and cultural venues such as the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame and The Jazz Loft.)

Aside from Sora, the other big-deal restaurant in town is Luca, which opened three years ago and quickly distinguished itself as one of the best Italian restaurants on Long Island. The garden patio is a wonderful setting for a summer meal; the refined room and bar are year-round delights. If executive chef Luke DeSanctis’s elegant, modern menu features many tweezer-precise platings, there’s also a soulfulness to his food, with bold flavors that draw inspiration from regional Italian cuisine. Dishes change with the season, but you might find a refreshing Sicilian orange and fennel salad, gussied up with dates and pistachios; braised calamari with ’nduja (spicy sausage) and a Carpaccio of Montauk tuna in which the richness is cut by a garnish of capers, Fresno chilies and crunchy chickpeas. Pastas include a classic northern Italian (i.e., light on the tomatoes) Bolognese, cappelletti stuffed with stracciatella and corn and torchietti (twists) with almond jalapeño pesto. All the pasta here is made in-house, except for the gluten-free (available for every preparation). Composed mains tend to skew more New American than Italian but are no less delicious for it. Desserts are excellent, particularly the lemon tart.

Luca is in the newer "market square" section of the Village Center along with the beer hall — wurst emporium Schnitzels and the extraordinary Camera Concepts & Telescope Solutions, one of the leading telescope shops in the country. Stroll over to the original "Harbor Crescent" where the Stony Brook Post Office is surmounted by a mechanical eagle that has flapped its wings every hour on the hour since 1941.

Flanking the post office are two of the village’s most exciting new culinary landmarks: the second location of Georgio’s Coffee Roasters and Little Cheese. While Georgio’s founders (in 2006), Georgio and Lydia Testani, hold down the fort in their bare-bones shop in Farmingdale, their partner Rich Cummins is captaining the sleek new venture, and the mission has not changed. "It’s all about staying true to the bean," Cummins said. "We want to show people that they can buy some of the best, rarest coffees in the world and prepare them at home cheaper than buying your coffee from Dunkin’, let alone Starbucks." They also make a mean cup of coffee to savor on the spot. Testa d’Oro espresso is pulled into the familiar lineup of espresso, macchiato, cortado and cappuccino, plus seasonal concoctions such as Elder Merry Bliss, espresso with rosemary-infused elderberry syrup.

Coffee sorted, it’s time for a little cheese. Owners Krystal and Christopher Abate had decades-long hospitality careers before they conspired to come up with something they could build together and that would accommodate raising their two children. Little Cheese’s bestseller is Alp Blossom, made in the Bavarian Alps from cows’ milk and aged with fragrant Alpine herbs and flowers. Among the excellent small-format cheeses are Kunik, a nuttier take on Brie from the Adirondacks; earthy Harbison from Vermont; mini Taleggios from Italy. Or take home a slab of Shawondasee from Bridgehampton’s own Mecox Bay Dairy, or your pick of Italian Parmigiano-Reggianos that have been aged 18 months or 5 or 10 years. This is also the place to pick up a cheese or charcuterie board to go, a freshly pressed grilled cheese sandwich such as Alpine Bliss (Gruyère with blueberry preserves) or perhaps a Caprese or New Orleans — style muffuletta.

Heading downhill from Little Cheese, you’ll come across Sweet Mama’s, a ’50s-style luncheonette — ice cream parlor, and Premiere Pastry, which sells French, American, Italian and Greek confections. The enigmatically named Lake Side Emotions Wine Boutique is one of Long Island’s very best wine shops. Owner Christophe Lhopitault, a former restaurateur and wine salesperson, has tasted every one of his 1,000-plus bottles and, like Malenda at Madiran, is passionate about matching wines with customers.

Adjacent to Town Center are two cultural sites of note: All Souls Episcopal Church, a jewel box of a sanctuary designed by Stanford White in 1889, and the worthwhile Reboli Center for Art and History (its gift shop specializes in the work of local artisans).

Stony Brook’s sloping, shaded Village Green is a great spot for a picnic (you know where to buy the coffee, cheese, pastry, ice cream, wine, etc.) and on summer Sunday evenings at 7, there are free concerts. That rambling structure you’ll spy was built in 1751 as the Hallock homestead and, by 1939, had evolved into Three Village Inn, now operated by Lessing’s Hospitality Group, where you can book a room or dine at the organization’s flagship restaurant, Mirabelle Tavern.

On your way in and out of the village, you won’t be able to miss the half-mile-long earthen gash running along the west side of Main Street. This is the aftermath of last August’s torrential rainstorm that washed out the dam at the Stony Brook Grist Mill (now closed to visitors), destroying the bridge and emptying the chain of manmade ponds that formed the backdrop to many a picturesque stroll. It’s not a pretty scene, but it offers a window into the past: Like Three Village Inn, the mill and its dam were built in 1751, before the coffee shops and restaurants, the university, the shopping center, the railroad, the Revolution. Before this collection of villages coalesced into three (or four or five).