The most watched empty corner in downtown Bay Shore has a name attached to it again. On Thursday, the New York State Liquor Authority issued a temporary retail permit to an outfit called The Corner at 10-12 Fourth Avenue, the storefront where Tullulah's fed the village for nearly two decades before packing up for a bigger room down the block.

The permit is the fast-track document the SLA hands an applicant so it can operate while a full license application works its way through Albany, and The Corner has two of those applications pending. Both were filed at the end of July, and together they sketch an operation bigger than the corner itself: one covers the Fourth Avenue storefront, and the other covers 19 West Main Street, a second address around the corner in the middle of the village's restaurant row.

A party license, not a restaurant license

The detail that separates this filing from the usual restaurant turnover is the license class. Both applications are for a catering establishment license, the category the SLA reserves for venues that host private events rather than walk-in dinner service. That is the license a wedding hall carries, or a space you rent for a shower, a fundraiser or a fortieth birthday.

Read together, the paperwork points to an events operation planting itself on two of downtown Bay Shore's most visible addresses, not a new tapas bar sliding into Tullulah's old dining room. Bay Shore's Main Street has plenty of places to get dinner and a drink. A dedicated private-events venue in the middle of the strip would be something the village does not currently have.

The company behind it keeps its cards close. The applicant is BLMBHS LLC, a limited liability company formed in Florida and registered with New York's Department of State in March 2024, with its papers served to a Bay Shore address. It has made no public announcement, hung no signage that explains itself, and left no trail of social media accounts to read. For now, the licenses are the whole story, and they say: two storefronts, private events, ready to pour.

The corner Tullulah's built

The address means something in Bay Shore. Tullulah's opened at 10 Fourth Avenue in the mid-2000s, back when a full night out downtown was a shorter list of options, and it spent close to twenty years turning a side-street corner a few steps off Main into a destination of its own. The restaurant's eclectic small-plates menu and its farm-sourced kitchen earned it a following that outgrew the room, which is exactly what its owners eventually decided to do something about.

In January 2023, the restaurant announced on its own social channels that it would move to 56 West Main Street, the ground floor of a larger building across from Salt & Barrel. The old corner served its last plates, and the restaurant's liquor license at the Fourth Avenue address lapsed at the end of June 2025 and now sits inactive in the SLA's records.

The new Tullulah's is not open yet. The restaurant's Facebook page, 5,300 followers strong, still lists its status as opening soon, and its most recent post, from early May, teased an invite-only preview event. Bay Shore, in other words, is currently waiting on two openings at once: Tullulah's second act on West Main, and whatever The Corner turns out to be on the block the restaurant left behind.

Downtown Bay Shore does not stay empty

The larger pattern here is the one Bay Shore has been demonstrating for a decade. Storefronts in the village's downtown core do not linger. The Fourth Avenue corner never showed up on a listing site with a for-lease banner across it; the first public evidence that anyone had claimed it was a license application, filed quietly in Albany in July and surfacing in state data this week.

That is how it tends to go on Main Street and the avenues that feed it. The paperwork moves before the press release does, and by the time a sign goes up, the lease has long been signed. Anyone who wanted to know what was coming to Tullulah's old corner had exactly one place to look, and it was a state database.

What happens next

The temporary permit means The Corner can legally operate while the SLA reviews its applications, so activity at either address could start before the full licenses are granted. The applications themselves will pick up hearing dates and, eventually, decisions, and somewhere along the way the operator will have to introduce itself to the neighborhood it has already committed to.

For Bay Shore residents, the practical takeaway is simpler. The corner that went dark when Tullulah's moved out is about to have the lights on again, the space next to it on West Main is part of the same plan, and the village's downtown is adding a kind of venue it did not have. Who is throwing the parties remains the open question. The state's files will answer it before anyone else does.