New Restaurants in Commack, NY: Openings, Plans and Closures

Four chain restaurants have plans in motion in Commack right now: Raising Cane's, White Castle, Shake Shack and McDonald's. Each one is built around a drive-through or a new building at a busy corner. As of early October 2026, none of the four is serving customers from its new site. The one major opening Commack actually got this year was a bookstore. Meanwhile, a coffee shop, a longtime Greek restaurant and the expected end of a seafood spot have shown how quickly the other side of the ledger moves.

This is the state of that ledger, corner by corner, and why the waiting has run so long.

Why every new building is shaped like a pickup lane

The White Castle at Commack Road and Jericho Turnpike explains the logic better than any of the others. The restaurant opened in the early 1980s. For years its drive-through used a "Vittleveyor," a conveyor belt that carried each order in a basket to the left side of the car. White Castle spokeswoman Kerelle Sampson told Newsday the system "took up lots of space in the parking lot and drive thru area." After it was removed in 2017, Sampson said, sales went up and the company decided to replace the building entirely.

White Castle went back to Huntington's zoning board in 2024, according to town spokeswoman Christine Geed, "to demolish the building so that the entire site could be developed with a standard drive-through lane format." The plans call for a one-story, 2,788-square-foot restaurant with 50 seats on the 1.3-acre lot, and the new drive-through will have a "hospitality door" for handing out orders.

The old building was razed in March 2026. In May, White Castle was aiming to reopen in late summer or early fall. Fall has now started, and we found no local report that the doors have reopened. Treat that target as the company's estimate until the lights are on.

The other three projects follow the same pattern. Raising Cane's is building a drive-through restaurant with 45 indoor seats and 17 outdoor seats. Shake Shack's approved plan is a 3,553-square-foot building with outdoor seating and a drive-through. McDonald's plans a 4,130-square-foot building with 43 seats.

What a drive-through costs in time

A building like this needs more than an empty lot. It needs a traffic pattern, curb cuts and approvals from more than one agency. Shake Shack is the clearest example of how long that takes.

Shake Shack applied for site plan review with the Town of Smithtown in February 2024. The town board approved it 5-0 on April 1, 2025, on a 19.4-acre property at the southwest corner of Crooked Hill Road and Henry Street that already holds a 166,000-square-foot Lowe's. That approval came with conditions. Shake Shack still needed building permits from the town and permits from the Suffolk County Department of Public Works for highway work, including a new curb cut on Crooked Hill Road. In May 2025, Newsday reported that "In 2026, a Shake Shack will open in Commack." We found no 2026 report of construction starting. With three months left in the year, that forecast looks increasingly hard to meet.

McDonald's is at an earlier stage of the same process, close by on Crooked Hill Road. The Smithtown Town Board voted 5-0 on Oct. 23, 2025, to approve a 43-seat restaurant in a 173,863-square-foot shopping center. The approval carries 10 conditions, including fire marshal sign-off before a building permit is issued and a permanent easement granted to the nearby Lowe's. Nearly a year later, we found no public construction timeline.

When the McDonald's approval passed, Smithtown Supervisor Ed Wehrheim explained why the town welcomes these projects:

"Where we site these restaurants, those locations are all busy."

The one corner with a fresh opening date

Raising Cane's is the only one of the four with construction confirmed this summer and an opening season the company restated in September. It will also be the Louisiana chain's first restaurant on Long Island. The company told Newsday in September that Commack would open early next year, ahead of planned sites in East Farmingdale and Carle Place that were still in permitting.

The project did not get there in a straight line:

1. August 2024. Raising Cane's Restaurants LLC submitted plans to Smithtown's building department to demolish the McDonald's at 2 Vanderbilt Pkwy. and replace it.
2. September 2025. McDonald's closed that location, according to town planning officials.
3. Late October 2025. Smithtown planners said a Raising Cane's application for the site was pending. The chain issued a statement saying it had "no confirmed plans to open a restaurant in Smithtown, NY."
4. November 2025. Raising Cane's confirmed it would build a 3,500-square-foot restaurant on the site, with Newsday projecting a late-2026 opening.
5. December 2025. The town board approved the plans.
6. Summer 2026. Construction began, and the opening moved to early 2027.

From first filing to the expected opening is about two and a half years. That is close to how long Shake Shack has already been waiting since it applied. For Commack, that span looks like the normal pace for this kind of building.

There is one detail to keep straight. Newsday's 2025 coverage describes the closed McDonald's as the Motor Parkway location, and its 2026 coverage gives the address as 2 Vanderbilt Pkwy. Both describe the same restaurant, and the new McDonald's on Crooked Hill Road is its planned replacement.

The other side of the ledger moves in a day

New buildings take years. Closings come with a sign on the door.

The Starbucks at 125 Crooked Hill Rd. closed permanently on the evening of Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026. It was one of about 250 North American stores Starbucks closed in its second round of closings in a year, roughly 1% of its company-operated and licensed shops on the continent. No replacement for the space has been reported.

That puts Crooked Hill Road in an odd spot this fall. The road has two approved burger drive-throughs with no construction updates, and it just lost the coffee stop that was already open.

Earlier in the year, Athenian Greek Taverna announced a sudden closure on Friday, May 1, 2026, after more than three decades in Commack. Catfish Annie's at 116 Commack Rd. went the opposite way. An August post said the owner planned to close by the end of the month. A Sept. 1 update clarified that the business was not permanently closing and was being sold. No buyer has been reported yet, so it is too early to say what the next version of Catfish Annie's will look like.

What actually opened in 2026

The new places Commack residents can walk into this year are not drive-throughs.

Frankie's Table is open in the former Woodhull Tavern on Veterans Memorial Highway and serves scratch-made, pub-style comfort food, according to Newsday's February update.

The biggest arrival came on Aug. 5, when Barnes & Noble opened at 58 Veterans Memorial Hwy. in Veterans Memorial Plaza. The store took over the former Party City space near Michaels and holds more than 10,000 square feet of books, toys, games and gifts. It sits about 2 miles from the Jericho Turnpike Barnes & Noble that closed in 2024 when its lease ended. Local author Jen Calonita cut the ribbon at the grand opening. CEO James Daunt said the company was glad "to return a major bookstore to the Commack community after an absence of two years."

The bookstore also connects to the White Castle story. Veterans Memorial Plaza, on the site of the old Long Island Arena, sits directly across from the White Castle lot at Commack Road and Jericho Turnpike. One side of the intersection had its opening in August. On the other side, Newsday reported excavators working behind a chain-link fence in May, and White Castle has not yet confirmed a reopening date.

The next date with a company commitment behind it is Raising Cane's in early 2027. Until then, the changes Commack can count on this fall are the new bookstore on Veterans Memorial Highway, Frankie's Table, and the closed Starbucks on Crooked Hill Road.

When a corner in your neighborhood changes, it changes how people talk about that part of town, and that matters to anyone thinking about a sale or a purchase nearby. If you'd like to talk through how projects like these fit into a move in or around Commack, Nancy Rosen is glad to share what she's seeing on the ground. Let's Connect.