In 1959, two brothers from Queens opened a hamburger stand in Levittown. Herb Wetanson was 21. His brother Errol was 18. They called it Wetson's, and they picked Levittown for the most obvious reason available at the time, which was that Levittown was where everyone was moving.

Sixty-seven years later, the third generation of that family is coming back to Long Island. Tony's Di Napoli, the family-style Italian institution the Wetansons have run in Manhattan since 1990, is opening on Manhasset's Miracle Mile, in the building that used to be a TGI Fridays at 1445 Northern Boulevard. It will be the restaurant's first location outside the five boroughs.

The burger chain Long Island forgot

The Wetson's story is one of the better pieces of Long Island commercial history, and it starts with a road trip. Herb Wetanson, who had grown up working in his father Carl's restaurants, stopped at the original McDonald's drive-in in California and understood immediately what he was looking at. He came home and built his own version of it on Long Island before the national chains had gotten anywhere near New York.

It worked. By 1964 there were 14 Wetson's. At its peak the chain ran 72 stands across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The signature burger was the Big W. Burgers went for fifteen cents and fries for a dime, and the advertising is still lodged in the memory of anyone who grew up here in the sixties: Look for the Orange Circles. Buy a bagful.

Then McDonald's and Burger King arrived in the New York metropolitan market in the late sixties and early seventies with national advertising budgets behind them, and a regional chain with orange circles could not hold the line. In 1975, Wetson's merged into Nathan's Famous and the name disappeared.

The family did not. They went on to build Dallas BBQ in Manhattan, which is now co-owned across three generations, and in 1990 Herb and his son Greg opened the first Tony's Di Napoli on the Upper East Side.

Loosely inspired by a place in Ozone Park

Tony's has never pretended to be anything other than what it is, which is part of why it has lasted thirty-five years in a city that eats restaurants alive. By the family's own account it was loosely inspired by their go-to Italian spot, Don Peppe's in Ozone Park, and built around a specific idea: an elegant but value-oriented take on the classic family-style menu, in a big room, with red sauce done properly and portions meant to be passed around.

In 2002 they opened a second location in Times Square, at 147 West 43rd Street, in the space that had been Rosoff's, decorated with oil-painted caricatures in keeping with the theater district. That room and the Upper East Side original at 1081 Third Avenue are the two the family runs today.

What is coming to the Miracle Mile

The Manhasset project has been in motion since last year and has picked up pace. Third-generation owner Stuart Wetanson has said the target is now around Thanksgiving, and has described a space of more than 400 seats with several dining rooms of distinct character, an open kitchen, a bar and lounge, private dining areas, a dedicated takeout counter and a coat check. The food and service are meant to match the Manhattan rooms; the decor is being pitched toward Long Island rather than transplanted from Midtown.

The site itself is a familiar one. The Miracle Mile stretch of Northern Boulevard has spent the last decade adjusting to what happened to retail, and a shuttered chain restaurant with a large footprint and a big parking field is exactly the kind of building that either becomes something substantial or sits empty for years. A 400-seat restaurant is a substantial answer.

Why family-style is the interesting bet

Long Island has no shortage of Italian restaurants. What it has comparatively few of is genuine family-style Italian at scale, the format where a table of eight orders four things and shares all of them, and the bill per head lands somewhere reasonable because nobody ordered their own entree.

That format lives or dies on room size. It needs large tables, a kitchen built for volume, and enough seats to absorb a Sunday when three generations show up at once. It is a difficult thing to retrofit into a converted storefront, which is why it tends to happen in buildings like this one.

There is a neatness to it that is hard to miss. The family that figured out how to feed postwar Long Island fast and cheap, and then lost that market to the national chains, is returning to the same island with the opposite proposition: sit down, stay a while, and pass the platter.