Stone Street Wood Fired Grill opens in Garden City

Art Gustafson thinks about opening a restaurant the way a composer thinks about writing a song.

“People always want to know what came first, the lyrics or the melody,” said the owner of the new Stone Street Wood Fired Grill in Garden City. “With a restaurant, sometimes it's the food, sometimes it’s the space, sometimes it’s the location, sometimes it’s the people you hire.”

Gustafson's Primehouse Steak & Sushi was location-driven. “Garden City needed a steakhouse,” he observed before making it so in 2019. Rockville Centre’s Salsa Mexicana (2015) was inspired by the tin ceiling and brick walls that Gustafson and his team discovered during the construction phase; the space, he said, “cried out to be Brooklyn-style modern Mexican.”

For Stone Street, the impetus was a colleague, chef John Brill. “We had known one another forever,” he said, “he’s my culinary soul mate.”

Brill had most recently been running the kitchen at Primehouse but, in the two decades prior, he had cut a swath through Long Island, serving as chef of a long line of restaurants — Salted on the Harbor in Northport, BLVD25 in Manhasset, Olde Trading Post in New Hyde Park, Ayhan’s Fish on Main in Port Washington.

Last year, Gustafson, who also owns Chadwick’s American Chop House in Rockville Centre, started looking for a space that would hold his friend’s interest, and the search ended when he saw the abandoned Hurricane Grill & Wings on Stewart Avenue that had closed in 2021.

At 5,700 square feet, it was the largest space he’d ever leased. “What’s going to fill those 187 seats? American food.” He thought about all the national chains that do American food on a large scale — from T.G.I. Fridays to Cheesecake Factory — and decided to model his restaurant on the best of them.

The fun at Stone Street, named for the eatery-rich neighborhood in Manhattan’s financial district, is largely due to Gustafson’s design, a sort of industrial chic meets Hard Rock Cafe. The vast dining room is decorated with electric guitars and murals, by D. Burkel, of classic cars and other Americana. A 5-foot-round table, sure to be a hot seat, bears painted renderings of the tattoos on chef Brill’s extravagantly inked forearms.

At one end of the dining room, there’s a bar with 16 taps (one of which is dedicated to a Stone Street Kölsch from South Shore Craft Brewery in Oceanside) where you can watch sports on huge screens suspended from the ceiling. The open kitchen has an industrial rotisserie front and center issuing rib roasts (sliced to order) and whole chickens that are either served simply or slathered with Korean barbecue sauce and finished on the wood-fired grill.

That grill is also responsible for skirt steak with chimichurri, cedar-planked salmon with agave glaze and mango-onion salsa, wood-grilled shrimp tacos, a 14-ounce cowboy pork chop with roasted peach jam, and a handful of flatbreads.

 Their version of a burger features two griddled patties stacked with cheese and bacon on a sesame bun. Starters include peanut-butter-chipotle spareribs, tuna nachos, chicken soup with ramen, wood-fired wings with sriracha-honey sauce and a salad of fried calamari with cabbage, orange segments and wonton chips.

Prices are gentle, with only the steaks topping $30.

Stone Street Wood Fired Grill, 630 Stewart Ave., Garden City; opening hours are 3 p.m. daily for dinner with lunch coming soon; 516-280-9414, stonestreetgrill.com