Drive up Corporate Drive on a Thursday night and you'll find a valet stand outside The Vanderbilt, guests in dinner clothes waiting for a table at a restaurant designed to look like a 1920s Havana supper club. Drive to Post Avenue that same night and you'll find people picking up takeout from a family-run spot they've ordered from for a decade, on their way home from soccer practice. Both of these are Westbury. Neither one knows the other happened.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live here. Westbury hasn't gained a new downtown or lost an old one. It's running two separate restaurant economies at the same time, about a mile apart, built for two different reasons, and drawing two different kinds of nights out. Understanding which one you're actually walking into changes how you plan a week here.
A Corridor Built Around Two Buildings, Not a Block
Corporate Drive and the stretch of Merrick Avenue near it didn't grow a dining scene the way Main Streets usually do, one storefront lease at a time. It got one because two large residential buildings needed ground-floor tenants. The Vanderbilt, developed by the Beechwood Organization, anchors the Corporate Drive side of the corridor at 990 Corporate Drive. A few blocks over on Merrick Avenue, Beechwood's other property, The Selby, is a six-story, 386,000-square-foot building with 237 residences, in units ranging from 500-square-foot studios to 2,200-square-foot three-bedrooms, with rents running from roughly $3,200 to $9,500 a month, and a 6,000-square-foot restaurant space built directly into the plans from the start. Beechwood principal Steven Dubb has described the target resident for these buildings as "young couples or professionals with dynamic lifestyles who want turn-key living" close to the city without committing to buying.
That restaurant space is filling up fast this year. The anchor tenant is The Comet Club, which opened inside The Vanderbilt at 990 Corporate Drive on April 13, 2026. It's a collaboration between two-time James Beard Award nominee Chef Jesse Schenker and Claudia Taglich of Lush Life Group, styled around the Gilded Age and 1920s Havana, with a 12-seat bar and piano lounge, private dining rooms, and an outdoor patio. Down the road, City Cellar Wine Bar & Grill has been serving brick-oven pizza and steaks out of a 500-label wine cellar at 1080 Corporate Drive for years, and Juniper at the Vanderbilt runs a smaller private event space built for cocktail receptions and corporate mixers rather than walk-in dinners.
At The Selby, The Shed has already opened its all-day brunch concept at 685 Merrick Avenue, the same scratch-made omelets and burger menu it runs in Huntington, Plainview, and West Sayville. A few doors down, The Farm Italy, whose original Huntington location was named one of OpenTable's Top 100 Restaurants in the U.S., has opened its second Long Island location at 725 Merrick Avenue, serving the same seasonal Italian menu six days a week.
None of This Was Built to Be Walked To
What separates this corridor from a downtown revival is that it isn't designed for foot traffic from anywhere else in Westbury. It's designed for the people who live upstairs and for diners who are driving in specifically for a reservation. The Comet Club takes reservations and runs a valet. Juniper is a private event room booked in advance, not a place you wander into. The Farm Italy's menu, based on what's mirrored from its Huntington location, leans into a seasonal prix fixe feel rather than a quick bite between errands.
This is dining built around an address, not a street. If you don't live in The Vanderbilt or The Selby, or you're not specifically headed there for dinner, you have no organic reason to pass through this stretch of Corporate Drive on a Tuesday. That's a different relationship to a restaurant than most people have with the place they get a slice on a Wednesday.
Post Avenue and Old Country Road Never Stopped
Meanwhile, the Old Country Road and Post Avenue side of Westbury is still running exactly the way it always has, on foot traffic and repeat customers. The restaurant concentration around the LIRR station and Old Country Road remains genuinely multicultural and walk-in friendly, the kind of strip where you go because it's close, not because you booked it three weeks out.
The clearest expression of that difference lands later this month. The Westbury Business Improvement District's fall street fair takes over Post Avenue on Saturday, September 26, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with food trucks, live music, a children's market, and Zabo Circus performing at 1, 2, and 3 p.m. It's free to attend and free to park, the way these fairs always have been, run by the same BID that put on the spring fair back in May.
Westbury Arts, headquartered at 255 Schenck Avenue, also has fall programming. This year that includes:
- Arts on Schenck, a small art festival run in collaboration with the BID's street fair weekend
- Latinx Thriving, a juried exhibit presented with the Village of Westbury for Hispanic Heritage Month
- ERIDU: A Science Fiction Art Show, the next installment of the nonprofit's Featured Artist Series, opening in October
- Family fall workshops, including a planter-painting session and a paint-and-bedazzle birdhouse class
None of that requires a reservation. It requires showing up.
A Resident's Week, Split Between Both
If you actually live in Westbury this fall, your week might look something like this, and the two halves rarely touch:
- Thursday night: dinner at The Comet Club or The Shed, a drive to Corporate Drive or Merrick Avenue, valet or a short walk from parking
- Saturday morning: the BID street fair on Post Avenue, food trucks and a petting zoo, parked downtown
- Saturday afternoon: Arts on Schenck a few blocks from the fair, or the Latinx Thriving exhibit at Westbury Arts
- A weeknight in October: the ERIDU opening at Westbury Arts, no reservation needed
- Any given weekend: a walk-in order from a longtime Old Country Road spot, because it's close and you know the owner
Both halves are legitimately part of living here. But they don't overlap on a map or a calendar the way a single downtown would. One runs on bookings and valet stands. The other runs on foot traffic and a BID that's been throwing the same street fair for years.
What This Actually Changes
The mistake would be reading this as Post Avenue in decline while Corporate Drive rises, or the reverse. That's not what the research shows. Old Country Road's restaurant density hasn't shrunk. Westbury Arts isn't shutting down because a chophouse opened a mile away. What's actually happened is that Westbury picked up an entirely separate, apartment-anchored dining economy that didn't previously exist, running in parallel to the one that's always been here.
For anyone weighing what it's like to actually live in Westbury day to day, that distinction matters more than a single "best restaurants" list ever could. You're not choosing between an old Westbury and a new one. You're choosing, most nights, which Westbury you're driving toward.
If you're thinking about where you'd land in a market like this, whether that's near the Corporate Drive corridor, closer to Post Avenue, or somewhere else on Long Island entirely, Team Levine knows both sides of this town well enough to tell you honestly which one fits the life you're planning. Request a free home valuation or schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
