On September 1 the State Liquor Authority issued two licenses to the company behind Mighty Fine, the all-day cafe and pie bar at 43 Green Street in Huntington village. One is a full restaurant license for the cafe itself. The other covers the patio behind it, the garden bar the cafe calls The Upper Crust. Both run through August 31, 2028.

It is the quiet kind of paperwork that changes what a place is. The backyard bar that carried Mighty Fine through its first summer now has a two-year license of its own, and the cafe heads into fall able to pour with dinner rather than winding down when the garden does.

The cafe in Finley's old home

The address matters in Huntington. For 33 years, from 1992 until August 2025, 43 Green Street was Finley's of Greene Street, the bar and restaurant the Finley family ran for so long that it anchored a generation of village nights out. People met there in their twenties and brought their kids back decades later. When it closed last summer, the family pointed to the math every independent restaurant now faces, rising food and labor costs and a nightlife that ends earlier than it used to.

What happened next is the interesting part. The property did not become another bar. It was split in two, and each half became something the village did not have: Published, a bookstore with an espresso bar and a full cocktail program, and Mighty Fine, which held its grand opening at the end of April. The two operate side by side and treat each other as neighbors rather than rivals, which has turned a party-centric property into a corner you can reasonably spend a Tuesday morning on.

Mighty Fine is restaurateur Daria Lamb's all-day answer to the space, run as a family business and open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day. The centerpiece is a design-your-own-pie bar, where the crust, the filling and the style are yours to call, on the logic that a custom pie takes the kitchen no longer than a standard one and everybody gets exactly what they came for. Around it sits a menu of quiches, sandwiches, including a rib eye that has developed a following, and a bakery case of cookies and loaf cakes. Newsday's food critic has counted the pies among the best on Long Island. The renovation even kept a piece of the address's deeper history: a 1986 mural from the years when the space was Garvin's, uncovered during the buildout and worked into the redesign rather than painted over.

The Upper Crust

Behind the cafe sits the part of the operation the new paperwork secures. The Upper Crust is a backyard garden bar with cocktails and live music, running Thursday through Sunday from noon into the evening, and it has become a booking target for private events in its first season. Through the summer the cafe has stretched its Friday and Saturday hours to 10 p.m. to keep the garden going after dinner.

An additional bar license is exactly what it sounds like: a second licensed bar on the same premises, in this case listed by the SLA specifically as the patio. That is the difference between a garden that hosts a summer pop-up and a garden that is part of the building's permanent equipment.

What changes now

For the reader deciding where to go, the practical version is this. The pie bar on Green Street can now serve you a proper cocktail with dinner inside, twelve months a year, and the garden out back is licensed in its own right through the summer of 2028. The corner Finley's left behind has quietly become one of the more interesting food blocks in the village: a bookstore pouring espresso martinis on one side, a pie counter with a garden bar on the other, both busiest in daylight on a street once known for last call.

Summer technically has a few weeks left in it. A custom pie and a drink under the trees in Finley's old back lot is a reasonable way to spend one of them.