The anchor space at Wheatley Plaza in Greenvale spent almost two years as a dark storefront with a supermarket-shaped hole behind it. On Friday morning, August 14, Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace cut the ribbon at 130 Wheatley Plaza and opened the doors on its thirteenth store, and the shopping center at the foot of Glen Cove Road has a grocery anchor again.

For anyone in Greenvale, Roslyn, Old Westbury or East Hills, this ends a specific daily annoyance. When the Stop & Shop here closed in November 2024, the nearest full supermarket run became a drive down Northern Boulevard or up Glen Cove Road. Now the milk run is back where it used to be, in a store that treats a grocery trip as something closer to a food hall visit.

Two years dark, three grocers in a decade

The space Uncle Giuseppe's now occupies has a history that tracks the whole story of Long Island supermarkets. It was a Pathmark until that chain's parent, A&P, collapsed into bankruptcy in 2015, when Stop & Shop took over the lease along with two dozen other A&P-family stores across the region. Stop & Shop ran it for nine years, then put Greenvale on the list of 32 underperforming stores it announced it would close by early November 2024.

That left Wheatley Plaza, an upscale center that fills the triangle where Glen Cove Road meets Northern Boulevard, without the tenant that brings people in weekly rather than occasionally. Uncle Giuseppe's agreed to take the space, and the buildout ran through this summer. A filing with the New York State Liquor Authority on August 12, two days before the ribbon cutting, covers the last piece of a full supermarket: Uncle Giuseppe's Greenvale LLC applied for the license that lets a grocery store sell beer.

What is actually inside

Uncle Giuseppe's stores are built around food made on the premises, and the Greenvale store follows the pattern. There is a fresh mozzarella bar, a station rolling house-made pasta, a butcher counter cutting Sterling Silver beef, a seafood market, a scratch bakery, an in-store pizzeria, an Italian deli counter, an espresso bar, a sushi counter, an old-fashioned candy shop, and a prepared foods kitchen the company says turns out more than 130 dishes. The store runs long hours: 7 in the morning to 10:30 at night Monday through Saturday, and 7 to 9:30 on Sundays.

None of that is novel to anyone who shops the Smithtown or Port Washington locations. What is new is having it on this stretch of the North Shore, where the alternative for Italian specialty shopping has been a patchwork of small delis and a drive to somewhere bigger.

250 jobs now, a thousand in the next year

The company hired roughly 250 people for the Greenvale store, across the deli, meat, seafood, bakery, prepared foods, produce, grocery, cashier, customer service and management departments. It is still hiring: the store runs walk-in interviews on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9 to 4, and the company has said select deli positions pay up to 25 dollars an hour, with a 25 percent employee discount and a 401(k) match in the package.

Greenvale is also not the end of the expansion. Uncle Giuseppe's has said it plans to hire about a thousand people across the chain over the next twelve months, and the next Long Island store already has a target: Levittown, planned for late this year.

A Long Island name that started with 7,800 square feet

Uncle Giuseppe's is a genuinely local success story. The first store opened in East Meadow in November 2001 in 7,800 square feet, a fraction of the footprint the chain builds now. Twenty-five years later the family-owned company, led by co-founder and chief executive Carl DelPrete, runs stores across Long Island, Westchester and New Jersey and employs more than 2,700 people, and its expansion lately has run through spaces other grocers gave up: the chain has made a habit of reviving dark supermarkets rather than building new boxes.

That is what makes the Greenvale opening land differently than a national chain arriving. The store that closed here was a casualty of a Dutch-owned conglomerate pruning its weakest locations. The store that replaced it is run from Long Island, staffed by 250 new local hires, and betting that the same building that could not sustain a conventional supermarket can sustain a specialty one.

What it means for your Saturday

Greenvale has its anchor back, and the weekly shop on this part of the North Shore no longer requires leaving the neighborhood. If you have been driving to Port Washington or Westbury for fresh mozzarella and prepared dinners, the trip just got shorter. And if you know someone who needs work, the interviews are walk-in, three days a week, at 130 Wheatley Plaza.