The restaurant space at 843 Fort Salonga Road has been looking for its keeper. The recent history runs in two acts: Nocello Ristorante held the corner from 2018 until 2020, and Vespa Italian Chop House ran it from early 2022 until the start of 2024. Two Italian restaurants, two exits.

The third act is Greek, and it just planted a flag. As of the end of August, Symi, the Greek restaurant now holding down the address on the Route 25A corridor west of Fort Salonga, pours a full bar, cocktails and wine included, under its own company, Symi Northport LLC. The bar is set up for the long haul, not a season.

An island name and a fish-first menu

Symi takes its name from a small Greek island north of Rhodes, a place known for its harbor and its seafood, and the menu leans into that inheritance. The restaurant's calling cards are the Aegean standards done properly: grilled octopus, whole lavraki, and lamb, alongside dishes with more play in them, like a sesame-crusted feta finished with fig and walnut, and a watermelon salad built for the tail end of summer.

The drinks program the bar anchors is not an afterthought. Symi advertises handcrafted cocktails and a wine list alongside the food, with a happy hour running Tuesday through Friday from 4 to 6 p.m. The restaurant serves lunch and dinner straight through, opening at noon Tuesday through Sunday, staying open to 10 or 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, and closing Mondays.

The corridor between the harbor and the beach

Fort Salonga Road is an in-between stretch, the run of 25A that connects Northport village to the Fort Salonga hills, and it plays by different rules than a village main street. There is no foot traffic to catch. Every table is a decision somebody made in a car, which means restaurants out here live or die on being a destination, not a convenience.

That is exactly why the history at this address matters. A corner that turns over twice in six years is a corner where destination status never quite took hold. Symi's bet is that a focused Greek menu gives people a reason to make the drive that two chop-and-pasta menus did not.

What a full bar changes

A full bar is the difference between a dining room and an evening. It covers the cocktails and the wine list, it makes the happy hour a real draw rather than a soft one, and it lets a restaurant host private parties, which Symi books, without asterisks. On a drive-to corridor like this one, the drink is often the deciding vote: a table that comes with a proper cocktail is a destination, and a table that does not is a stop.

For the neighborhood, the practical translation is simple. The stretch of 25A between Northport and Fort Salonga now has a Greek restaurant with its bar squared away, pouring alongside octopus off the grill, through the end of summer and well past it.

Worth the drive

Long Island does not lack Greek food, but most of it clusters in a handful of hamlets and leans diner-adjacent. A sit-down Greek room on the North Shore corridor, with a happy hour and a fig-topped feta, is a rarer thing. The corner that could not keep an Italian restaurant may have found its match in an island three seas away.