Peconic Bay Diner closes year after death of owner Angelo Stavropoulos

The earliest memory Eleni Stavropoulos has of Peconic Bay Diner dates back to when she was just 3 years old and her parents hadn’t yet opened the doors to their Riverhead business.

Inside those doors, the eatery, which most recently had been called Neptune Diner, was just a whole lot of “rubble,” she remembers of the days before her family’s establishment opened in 1991.

“We walked in and the whole place was trashed,” Stavropoulos recalled 32 years later. “Everything was ripped off the wall. There were no booths. There was nothing.”

Over the next three decades, Stavropoulos’ father, Angelo, and his wife, Chrissy, would build up their Route 58 restaurant to be one of the longest-running family businesses in town. On Sept. 30, more than a year after Angelo’s death at age 68 in a single-vehicle crash in Laurel, his wife and two daughters closed the Peconic Bay Diner for good.

Days earlier, the Stavropoulos family was notified by their landlord that he found a tenant to take over the space for a new family-run diner. Eleni said that if Peconic Bay Diner had remained open, it would not have made it through another winter without her father’s heart and soul running things.

“That place was his dream,” Chrissy Stavropoulos said of her husband. “It became all of our dreams, but after he passed away, it was really hard to continue. Without him, every time I would go in there, it just broke my heart.”

Angelo arrived in the United States from Greece at 28 years old and not understanding a word of English, his family said. To make ends meet, he started as a busser at diners elsewhere on Long Island before heading with his family to Riverhead to open a place of his own. He met his future wife while they both worked at her uncle’s Sea Coral Diner in Hauppauge in 1981.

The couple’s three children — eldest child Lazaros worked at the diner before moving off Long Island — always knew him to be working, doing what he could to make sure the business survived. During his rare moments of leisure, he liked to fish.

Eleni said she worried as a kid when her father took time from his busy schedule to attend one of her events, knowing how much he meant to the diner, which was open 24 hours in those days. When she couldn’t sleep at night, he would take her to work with him and she would sit in the first booth helping out in whatever way she could. She was mostly just there to keep him company, she now figures.

“We’ve had good times, bad times, all of our times at that diner,” said Eleni, now 35. “It was basically our home.”

With their parents getting older, Eleni, who had begun a career as a teacher, and her younger sister Chloe Cangro, now 31, went to work at the diner to lend a hand more than a decade ago.

Chrissy said despite the efforts of their daughters and a hardworking staff, the family couldn’t make things work since Angelo died in July 2022. It wasn’t just that her husband was such a presence in the restaurant, as he filled it each day with his loud voice and laughter, but also the timing of his death. The diner was still climbing out of a hole from the COVID-19 shutdown and the costs of running such a business continued to escalate, Chrissy said.

They began prepping longtime customers for the possibility they might close and during their last few days in operation informed as many of them as they could that the end was imminent. A regret is that the family couldn’t thank all their clientele, Eleni said.

Chrissy grew emotional talking about those final days.

For Eleni, the end was “bittersweet,” as she now has a 3-year-old of her own to take care of.

“I get to be home now with my [son] and I don’t have to worry about the phone ringing or what’s needed at the diner,” she said.

Her son’s name?

“Angelo,” she said. “Named after my dad.”

By Grant Parpan

grant.parpan@newsday.com@GrantParpan

Grant Parpan covers Suffolk County courts and federal courts for Newsday. A Long Island native, he joined Newsday in 2022.