The room at 6005 Jericho Turnpike in Commack has been quiet since the last Sunday in September of last year, when Jackson's served its final dinner after 19 years. A gastropub that lasts that long on a highway this busy leaves a hole you can feel driving past it. That hole is about to close. A new Italian restaurant called Bar Franco is going into the space, and the partners behind it are aiming to have the doors open by the end of October.

The name to pay attention to here is not the new one. It is the three restaurants the same two men already run, because that is the best available preview of what Commack is getting.

Who is opening it

Bar Franco comes from Chris Perrotta and Frank Ubriaco, who have opened or taken over three restaurants in the last ten years, all of them still running. Perrotta is the chef. Commack will be the fourth, and their first in Suffolk County.

The first was Blackbird Kitchen & Cocktails, which opened at 3026 Merrick Road in Wantagh in 2016 and has stayed there ever since, doing seasonal small plates and a cocktail program with actual ambition behind it. In 2021 they took over Rustic Root at 7927 Jericho Turnpike in Woodbury, an American restaurant that describes itself, fairly, as chef driven. In the spring of 2023 they added Uncle Frank's Pizza & Cocktails at 3274 Railroad Avenue in Wantagh, within sight of the train, which put pizza and a bar under the same roof.

What three restaurants tell you about the fourth

Read that list in order and a shape appears. This is a group that takes an existing room in an established downtown or on a working highway, rather than building something from nothing in a new development. It is a group that puts a real bar in every project, which is the through line from Blackbird to Uncle Frank's and is sitting right there in the new name. And it is a group whose most recent opening was a pizza and pasta restaurant, which is the clearest signal available about where the Commack kitchen is headed.

An Italian restaurant with a bar in it is a different proposition from what the corner had. Jackson's was a gastropub, and a gastropub is a place you go for a burger and a beer after work. Commack has that. What this stretch has less of is the kind of room where a table of six can sit for two hours over pasta and a bottle, and where the bar is somewhere you would actually choose to sit alone on a Tuesday.

The Jericho Turnpike math

There is a geography here worth noticing. Rustic Root sits on Jericho Turnpike in Woodbury. Bar Franco will sit on Jericho Turnpike in Commack, a straight shot east on the same road. Running two restaurants on one highway is not an accident of real estate. It means one set of purveyors, one kitchen culture, and two dining rooms a manager can reach in a few minutes without touching a parkway.

It also means Commack is being treated as its own market rather than as an overflow from somewhere else. That stretch of Jericho Turnpike pulls from Smithtown, Dix Hills, Hauppauge and Huntington, and it has enough traffic to fill a room on a weeknight, which is the part of the restaurant business that is hard everywhere else on Long Island right now.

You can eat the chef's food before the doors open

If October feels like a long wait, there is an earlier way to find out whether this is a group worth being excited about, and it is for a good cause besides. Perrotta is cooking one of the nights of Chefs Against Hunger, the benefit dinner series that raises money for Long Island Cares. His night is Monday, October 12, at 6:30, at Tellers Next Door at 599 Main Street in Islip.

The series puts a different Long Island chef in the kitchen each night, and every dollar goes to the food bank. It is a rare chance to eat a chef's cooking on his own terms, off his own menu, before you decide whether to book a table in his new dining room.

What happens between now and October

A target of the end of October is a target, not a date on a door, and anybody who has watched a restaurant open on Long Island knows the last four weeks are the ones that slip. Finishing a dining room, getting equipment delivered and hiring a full staff in a market where kitchen labor is genuinely scarce are all still ahead of this one.

What is not in doubt is that the corner is spoken for. A building that sat through a full year of people wondering what would go in it now has an answer, and the answer is a group with three restaurants already open and a reputation built quietly enough that most of Commack has eaten their food without knowing whose it was. For a Jericho Turnpike address that has been dark since last September, that is about as good a result as a neighborhood gets.