Crabtree's, the restaurant that has anchored 226 Jericho Turnpike in Floral Park for roughly four decades, is dark right now. Its own website says so in four words: closed for two weeks. What the website does not say is why, and for that you have to look at what became official this month: the restaurant has a new owner. The keys at Crabtree's now belong to a company called Our Gang Jericho LLC, and if that name makes you smile, you already understand what kind of hands the place has landed in.

The new company's name is an inside joke, and it is a promise

Crabtree's has never explained itself to first-timers. The name comes from Miss Crabtree, the young schoolteacher of the Our Gang comedies, the Hal Roach shorts of the early 1930s that reran for generations as The Little Rascals. The dining room has long worn the theme on its walls, with black and white photographs of the Gang watching over dinner service since before many of its regulars were born.

So when the new owners formed their company in October 2025, they had a choice of any name in the world, and they chose Our Gang Jericho LLC. A buyer who intended to gut the place and hang a new sign would not name the holding company after the schoolhouse joke the restaurant is built on. It is the corporate equivalent of promising the regulars that somebody got it.

Who bought it

The new owner is not a mystery, at least not in Floral Park. The village's own board report from this spring invited residents to the Floral Park Chamber of Commerce dinner on May 7, held at Crabtree's, to meet the restaurant's new owner: Peter Hewitson, the man behind Uncle Bacala's in Garden City Park. State records point the same way, listing Hewitson as the contact for Our Gang Jericho LLC at the Uncle Bacala's address on Jericho Turnpike.

Uncle Bacala's has been serving Italian seafood and red sauce a few miles up that same road since 2004, long enough to become the kind of institution people drive past and plan a birthday around. Which means the corner is passing from one long-haul operator to another rather than to a group that flips concepts every two years.

The handoff, in plain terms

The story comes in two chapters. The old Crabtree's operated under Princeton Commonwealth Inc, the corporation doing business as Crabtree's Restaurant, formed two days before Christmas in 1986 with the restaurant's own address as its home and John Hatgidimitrou as its chairman. That chapter has now closed.

In its place, Our Gang Jericho LLC has taken over the restaurant, dining room and bar alike, with a horizon that runs well past this season. Nobody sets up an arrangement like this for a wind-down. It is the setup of a restaurant that intends to be pouring wine on this corner well into the next decade of its life.

Two weeks of quiet, then the next chapter

Which brings us back to the closed sign. A restaurant that changes hands almost always goes dark for a stretch while the new operator takes possession, retrains, refreshes the room and switches the accounts over, and the timing here lines up: the handover became official in early September, and the website's two-week notice is up right now. Nothing public spells out what diners will find when the doors reopen, whether the menu keeps its Mediterranean spine, whether the staff stays, or whether the photographs stay on the walls.

But every signal that exists points the same direction. The buyer showed up at the chamber dinner in May to introduce himself to the village. The company he formed to hold the place is named for the restaurant's own founding joke. And the operator taking over has spent more than twenty years running exactly one other restaurant, a few minutes away, without ever letting it slide.

For anyone who grew up on the Nassau-Queens line, Crabtree's is one of those places that has simply always been there, the room where communions, retirements and Tuesday dinners all blur together. Places like that usually end with a for-lease sign and a rumor about a bank branch. This one appears to be ending its first era the better way: with the lights off for two weeks, a new name on the keys, and a company in the wings that literally named itself after the gang.