If you had not been to Huntington Village in two years, the shock would not be that places closed. Restaurants close. The shock would be what moved in.

The building that housed Finley's, a bar that anchored the village's late-night reputation for decades, now holds an all-day cafe and a bookstore. The former Leilu is a pasta restaurant that teaches you to make the pasta. The old Babalu is Peruvian.

Four spaces, four completely different answers, and a pattern underneath them that says something about where Huntington Village thinks its next twenty years are.

The Finley's building, now two businesses

Finley's of Greene Street was the kind of institution that shows up in people's stories about their twenties. When it went, the space did not become another bar. It got split.

The restaurant side is now Mighty Fine, an all-day cafe from restaurateur Daria Lamb built around scratch-made sweet and savory pies, sandwiches and local beverages. It held a multi-day grand opening at the end of April.

The bar side is Published, a bookstore with a cafe, espresso bar and a full cocktail program, opened by Angela and Brett Jurow, a local husband-and-wife team. It debuted in March.

The two are next door to each other and collaborate rather than compete, which is the detail that makes this more interesting than a simple tenant swap. A party-centric property became a place you can reasonably spend a Tuesday morning, and it did so without either half being a compromise.

New Street: Leilu to Aunt Jake's

Leilu closed on New Street in 2024 after five years. The space is now Aunt Jake's, an expansion of the Manhattan handmade pasta restaurant founded by Nick Boccio, at 10 New Street.

It runs as a full-service Italian restaurant with dinner daily and weekend brunch, but the thing worth knowing about it is the pasta class. Aunt Jake's built its reputation in the city on a hands-on pasta-making session paired with a three-course meal, priced around $60 per person, and it brought that format to Huntington rather than opening a stripped-down satellite.

That is a meaningful choice. A restaurant that teaches is a restaurant that expects you to spend three hours there, book in advance, and come back with different people. It is the opposite of turning tables.

New York Avenue: Babalu to Urubamba

Babalu, the Cuban restaurant at 286 New York Avenue, is gone. Urubamba has the space now, serving Peruvian food including ceviche and lomo saltado, with a pisco cocktail program.

Peruvian is a genuine gap in Huntington's dining, and on Long Island generally. It is also a cuisine that rewards a room where people linger, which is consistent with everything else on this list.

And still coming

Pilar Coffee Bar, a Florida boutique coffee brand, is opening in Huntington Village this year as part of a three-location Long Island push that also includes Roslyn and Elwood. It will be the brand's first move outside its home state.

Kahani has turned the former Lasagna Ristorante space into a Punjabi-inspired cocktail bar.

On the retail side, M.Y.R. Makeup & Skincare, a boutique beauty studio from makeup artist Mallory Y. Rutledge, has opened offering personalized consultations.

The pattern

Line them up and the direction is unmistakable. A late-night bar became a bookstore and a pie shop. A New American restaurant became a place that runs cooking classes. A coffee brand is opening on a street that already has coffee. Almost every new arrival is oriented toward daytime, toward staying a while, and toward people who are not twenty-four.

Huntington Village spent years with a reputation as a nightlife destination, along with the parking arguments, noise complaints and enforcement debates that go with one. What is happening now is not a policy decision. Nobody voted on it. It is a dozen independent operators reading the same demand and reaching similar conclusions about who is actually walking down Wall Street and New York Avenue on a weekday.

The village's long-running parking problem does not get easier under this model, and arguably gets harder, since a daytime cafe crowd and an evening dinner crowd overlap in a way that a bar crowd never did with either.

But the complaint that Huntington Village was only worth visiting after 9 p.m. is now several years out of date.