With Casa Rica gone, new restaurant planned

The owner of the building where Casa Rica Sports Bar Restaurant was located will be opening up a family-style restaurant at that location, according to Vic Prusinowski, a real estate agent working with the owner, Rich Gherardi.

“It will have an affordable price point,” Prusinowski said, “and a unique menu.” Since details are still being worked out, he said, he couldn’t divulge more.

Casa Rica, the scene of many arrests and several violent incidents including a recent bloody knife fight that spurred the State Liquor Authority to revoke the operator’s license to serve alcohol there, has vacated the premises.

“It’s all been cleared out and cleaned up,” Prusinowksi said.

Prior to Casa Rica, the premises were occupied by Michael’s on the Board Walk, a high-end restaurant featuring a continental cuisine. The space was a converted storefront that for many years had been home to Villella’s Shoe Store, which closed in 1998.

Tweeds Restaurant co-owner Dee Muma, who opened a new brasserie-style restaurant on the corner of East Main Street and Peconic Avenue this fall, said she envisioned downtown as a kind of restaurant mecca, on the order of downtown Huntington.

“I see people saying ‘let’s go downtown’ when they mean ‘let’s go out for dinner,'” Muma told RiverheadLOCAL just before opening the doors to her newly renovated restaurant. “That’s how many restaurants there should be down here,” she said. “And that’s how many I believe there will be.”

Muma’s vision may already be coming to pass.

The owner of Hy-Ting, a traditional Chinese restaurant on West Main Street, opened a new Sushi restaurant on East Main Street this year, next to the Suffolk Community College Culinary Arts Center. Kenny Lu is now working on a taco place in the rear half of the same building, which had been occupied by Blue Door Gallery before it moved around the corner to Roanoke Avenue.

The Riverhead Grill reopened on East Main Street almost two weeks ago, under the “old” new management of Liz Strebel, whose family operated the Grill for more than 40 years.

And last Thursday, the former owner of Frisky Oyster in Greenport announced he’ll be opening a new restaurant in the former Chase Bank building, across the street from where a Hyatt Hotel is currently being built by the owners of Atlantis Marine World.

The new eateries complement the eight existing full-service restaurants already dotting Main Street.

“Good things are happening downtown,” said Supervisor Sean Walter in an interview last week. “It’s really a very, very exciting time.”