Don Pollo is coming to Carle Place. The Peruvian rotisserie chicken group the Salazar family has been building out of Ozone Park for the better part of two decades is preparing to open its next kitchen at 11 Old Country Road, and the name is the whole story: this is the pollo a la brasa that Queens neighborhoods line up for, headed to Nassau County.

Nobody has reported this yet, because the restaurant does not exist yet. The plans do, and they are specific. State records show the corporation behind the project, Don Pollo Carle Place Inc., was formed on May 26 of this year, with the company's chief executive listed at the Old Country Road address, and the group intends a full dining room where drinks are served at the table rather than a takeout counter.

The family behind the chicken

Don Pollo started in the early 2000s when the Salazar family, who came to Queens from Lima, opened a small pollo a la brasa restaurant in Ozone Park. The dish is Peru's national comfort food: whole chickens marinated overnight, then roasted over charcoal until the skin lacquers, served with green aji sauce that regulars buy by the extra cup. It is the kind of food that builds lines out the door and almost never gets written about, and Don Pollo has been building those lines for twenty years.

The group has grown patiently, one neighborhood at a time. Its kitchens run across Queens, in Ozone Park, Woodhaven, Forest Hills, Ridgewood and Astoria, and last year the family crossed the county line, incorporating a Mineola location on Old Country Road that brought the group to Nassau for the first time. The company's own site counts six kitchens and says two more are coming by the end of the year. Carle Place looks like the answer to which two.

A storefront built for exactly this

There is a small irony baked into the address. The storefront at 11 Old Country Road most recently held Chimichurri Charcoal Chicken, a rotisserie concept that has since closed. Which means the space Don Pollo picked was already fitted for charcoal-roasted birds, and Carle Place is trading one version of the dish for the version people drive to Queens for.

The location also says something about how the family expands. The Mineola Don Pollo sits on Old Country Road. So will Carle Place, a couple of miles east along the same corridor, in the retail stretch that feeds off the Roosevelt Field orbit. Rather than scattering across the Island, the group is doubling down on a single road it already knows, where the traffic from the offices and stores along Old Country Road never really stops.

What has to happen before the doors open

An opening is months out, not weeks. The space still needs its buildout, and the group still has steps to complete before anything gets poured, so the realistic window for a first roasted chicken in Carle Place is later this year, which happens to match the timeline the company has published for its next openings.

The plan for a full bar is worth reading as a menu hint. Don Pollo's existing locations are casual, family-table places, and a dining room where something gets poured alongside the rotisserie counter points at more than a takeout line with a soda case.

Why this corner of Nassau keeps winning

Carle Place is a hamlet of about 5,000 people that hosts one of the busiest retail corridors on Long Island, which means it collects restaurant openings the way bigger towns collect traffic. For residents, the practical news is simple: the chicken that Queens neighborhoods have queued for since the early 2000s is coming to a storefront most people here drive past weekly, and the trail from the May incorporation to this month's preparations says the family is not window shopping. When the last details fall into place, the birds go on the coals.