The biggest touring act on the planet spent the run-up to his two New Jersey stadium shows eating dinner on Long Island, and by the end of the week half of Smithtown seemed to be in on the joke.

Ed Sheeran, in the area for back-to-back Loop Tour dates at MetLife Stadium on Friday and Saturday nights, was at Osteria Umbra on Terry Road in Smithtown on Tuesday evening, where he stayed roughly two hours and posed for photographs with the owners. The next night he turned up a few minutes up the road at eatMOSAIC, the 30-seat tasting room on North Country Road in St. James, and then did something no amount of advertising money can buy: he told his tens of millions of Instagram followers that it was the best meal he has eaten all year, and tagged the restaurant by name.

A blind menu that changes nightly

If you have never been, eatMOSAIC is one of the most unusual restaurants on Long Island, and one of the smallest. Chefs Tate Morris and Jonathan Contes, who met working at Mirabelle, serve a five-course tasting menu that changes every night and is deliberately kept blind: diners do not know what the courses are until they arrive. The room seats about 30 people. The menu runs $118 a person, with wine pairings on top, and weekend seatings routinely book out weeks ahead.

The timing of the visit is its own detail. By the restaurant's posted September schedule, the dining room only runs Thursday through Saturday this month. Sheeran ate there on a Wednesday.

The night before belonged to Osteria Umbra, the 6,000-square-foot Italian restaurant that chef Marco Pellegrini and his wife, chef de cuisine Sabrina Vallorini, opened in 2020. The two come from Foligno, in the Italian region of Umbria, and Pellegrini first cooked on Long Island at Caci North Fork in Southold after arriving from Italy in 2013. The restaurant shared photos of the visit on its own pages and thanked the singer for spending the evening. The dish that reportedly stopped him was not the house-made pasta but the Italian cheesecake with blueberry compote, which he told his hosts was the best he had ever had.

Then the spoofs started

What happened next is the part Long Island will remember after the tour trucks leave. Within a day of the real photographs surfacing, businesses and organizations across the Island began posting fake ones.

The Smithtown Fire Department led the charge with a clearly labeled AI-generated image of Sheeran posing at the firehouse alongside its chief, under a caption strung together almost entirely out of his song titles. The post was marked as AI content, fooled nobody, and was not trying to: it racked up reactions and shares all morning. Pizzerias, a paving company and a dance studio followed with their own labeled spoofs, each one putting the singer to work in whatever the business happens to do, from tossing dough to standing proudly beside a dump truck.

It is the most Long Island possible response to a celebrity sighting: one part pride, one part self-deprecation, and a genuine round of free advertising for every business quick enough to get the joke in before the weekend.

What it means if you want the same meal

Both restaurants are exactly as bookable as they were two weeks ago, though probably not for long. Osteria Umbra serves nightly on Terry Road in Smithtown, and the cheesecake is a standing menu item rather than a special. eatMOSAIC takes reservation requests by phone and through its website, with seatings Thursday through Saturday for the rest of September, and its five courses will not be the five courses Sheeran ate, because they never repeat the night before, let alone the week.

Sheeran plays the second of his two MetLife Stadium shows Saturday night. Whether he makes a third trip up the Northern State for dinner before leaving town is anyone's guess, but on the evidence of the week, no restaurant on Long Island should rule it out. The AI spoofs, presumably, will keep coming either way.