Jimmy Fallon visits Funchos, Snowflake Ice Cream in Riverhead
After dining at Funchos in Riverhead, Jimmy Fallon took a photo with his server, Carlos Ordonez. Credit: Snowflake Ice Cream Shoppe
Affable “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon, who keeps a home in Sagaponack in addition to a Manhattan abode, visited two Riverhead food spots recently with one of his and wife Nancy Juvonen’s two daughters.
First stop: Funchos on West Main Street. Al Zavala, owner of the 22-year-old Tex-Mex grill, said that on Nov. 11, he was working at home in Ronkonkoma when “one of my employees that night texted me, ‘Jimmy Fallon is here,' ” Zavala, 53, told Newsday on Monday. “He came with [a] daughter.”
As Zavala later learned, the NBC late-night host and former “Saturday Night Live” star ordered a Mexican pizza — ground beef, salsa roja, Monterey Jack and Cheddar cheese, sour cream, jalapeño peppers and guacamole — and two pork tacos al pastor.
Both his staff and the fellow customers respected his family time, Zavala said. “We’re usually cranked out on the weekend and sometimes it gets crazy, but it wasn’t too busy that night.” Fallon “finished dinner and I guess that’s when other customers came over to say hi. He took a couple of pictures with my employees,” Zavala added. “He was really nice; he was cool.”
Fallon, 49, and his daughter afterward walked across the parking lot to the Snowflake Ice Cream Shoppe for dessert.
“We do have a number of celebrities come in,” owner Stu Feldschuh, 72, of Hampton Bays, told Newsday, mentioning Chevy Chase, Michael J. Fox and Paul Simon as examples, “but for some reason it really struck a chord this time that Jimmy Fallon was there. We put a post on social media and it got a big reaction,” he said of the Instagram post, showing Fallon with Funchos employee Carlos Ordonez. “Jimmy Fallon came by for a taco and an ice cream yesterday. Party on!” the post reads.
The star ordered “a plain soft vanilla ice cream cone,” said Feldschuh, who, like Zavala, was elsewhere when Fallon came in. “It’s the simplest thing we make” at the 70-year-old homemade ice-cream store, which Feldschuh and his wife bought and took over a quarter-century ago.
Fallon, who with his producer wife has daughters Winnie, 10, and Frances, who turns 9 next month, is a familiar face on the East End. In 2018, he showed his appreciation to a group of weekending New Yorkers sitting near his table at Il Mulino in Wainscott and taking care to respect his and his family’s privacy. General manager Enzo Lentini told Newsday at the time that after dinner, "He went up to them and said, 'I appreciate you guys not wanting to disturb us. I knew you wanted to say hello.' So he picked up the tab. With tip it was $1,136."