Long Island Restaurants

Love Lane Kitchen

UPDATE (5/21/09): There's a new chef at Love Lane Kitchen, which serves both lunch and dinner. Ben Warner, who cooked at Flying Fish in Seattle, offers a changing market-driven menu with a different tagine (Moroccan stew) every week. Neighborhood cafe by day, destination restaurant by night, Love Lane Kitchen is serious about everything it does - making its own pastrami and corned beef, roasting its own coffee. The dinner menu, New American with Italian North African and Asian accents, changes daily but might include Sicilian cauliflower salad, short ribs with harissa and quinoa, duck tagine. Food is prepared with care and forethought. Early in the day, you can get steel-cut oatmeal porridge with crème fraîche and wildflower honey. For lunch, garlic fried potatoes were hand-cut. A grilled hanger steak sandwich featured succulent slices of beef, arugula and red onion on a focaccia roll. Another success was a grilled pressed Cuban sandwich made with house-roasted pork, ham, Swiss, dill pickle, yellow mustard and garlic butter. I was partial to the "Parma," a summery sandwich of prosciutto di Parma, arugula, roasted pepper and fresh mozzarella. And then there was a big fat Kobe beef hot dog served Chicago style, with yellow mustard, sweet India relish, chopped tomato, chopped onion, dill pickle, hot peppers and a sprinkle of celery salt. Why make a hot dog from Kobe beef? "It's richer and juicier," owner and chef Mike Avella said. "And not every part of a cow has to be steak."

Reviewed by Joan Reminick, 8/10/07.

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