Galleria Ristorante in Westbury closes after 40 years

Westbury’s Galleria Ristorante, a standard-bearer of Northern Italian cooking, has closed. The website is down, phone calls are fielded by an anonymous mailbox and, according to social media reports, an eviction notice was posted on the door in August.

Dominick Zelko opened the "ristorante" at 238 Post Ave. in 1984, but that was the year after the original Galleria, at 216 Post Ave., burned down. In the 1980s, "Northern Italian" was code for a cuisine that was inspired both by Italy and continental cuisine and was largely devoid of tomato sauce. To give you an idea of how long ago that was in restaurant years, in her 1981 review of the first Galleria, Newsday’s Barbara Rader explained that capellini is a "pasta, which almost resembles strands of hair" and "is sometimes called angel’s hair."

In 1997, Newsday’s Peter Gianotti gave Galleria three stars, noting that "It does the continental better than almost any Long Island restaurant."

The restaurant was variously known as Galleria Ristorante, Galleria and Galleria Dominick, perhaps because Zelko was not always the owner. In 2009, he sold the restaurant but was back in 2014.

According to the husband of Zelko’s daughter, Dianne Amato, the family sold the restaurant in 2020. The most recent liquor license, which went into effect in December 2022, listed Jose Taveira as the owner. He could not be reached for comment.