The announcement Babylon Village has been refreshing its feed for finally landed. Whiskey Down Diner opens its second location Monday, September 28, at 175 East Main Street, and the family behind it spent this week filling the new room with its first plates during a run of soft openings.

The date came from the source that matters

The diner told its 37,000 Instagram followers weeks ago to save the date, and this week the account posted scenes from the soft opening: familiar faces from the Farmingdale original, new ones from the neighborhood, and a dining room that is no longer a construction site. After a year of watching the old Ristorante Gemelli building change shape, the village gets its turn at the counter on Monday morning.

What Babylon is actually getting

Whiskey Down opened at 252 Main Street in Farmingdale on June 5, 2019, a family business run by the Kanaras family that set out to rethink the Long Island diner rather than photocopy it. The menu skips the encyclopedic 20-page book for a tighter list of comfort food done carefully, the room runs first come, first served with no reservations, and weekend brunch has a reputation that extends well past Farmingdale, disco ball included.

The name is a piece of real diner history. In old-school counter slang, calling whiskey down to the kitchen meant an order of rye toast, and the family kept the phrase as a nod to the trade they grew up in.

A bigger room than the original

The Babylon project has been public since the family revealed it on New Year's Eve, and construction on the former Ristorante Gemelli building began in the spring. The buildout produced a space larger than the Farmingdale original, with a full bar, and the operation runs under a company whose name is a quiet family signature: the Farmingdale diner operates as AKJ Diner Corp., while Babylon was formed as JKA Diner Corp., the same three initials in a different order.

The diner held open hiring calls at the Babylon location in late August, so the house that greets Monday's first wave has been staffing up for a month.

East Main Street gets its anchor

The opening caps a year in which Babylon Village's dining strip kept regaining momentum. The Pizzeria on Deer Park Avenue reopened in August after rebuilding from a floor collapse, and the Sea Breeze, the village's late-night mainstay since 1985, drew a line of would-be buyers when it went up for sale over the summer.

What the corridor did not have was a high-volume, all-day diner, the kind of room that holds a family birthday at 9 a.m. and a post-shift burger at 9 p.m. That is the gap Whiskey Down was built to fill, and it arrives with a following that already extends well beyond the village line.

If you are going Monday

Plan like a regular. There are no reservations at either location, the line moves on a first come, first served basis, and opening week at the Farmingdale original in 2019 drew crowds that wrapped the block. A Monday grand opening for a diner with this large a built-in audience will not be a quiet one, and the smart play is the same as at any diner worth the trip: go early, or go at the odd hours the crowds skip.

For Babylon, the wait that started on New Year's Eve ends with eggs on the table Monday morning.