Luca Steak to open in Huntington
David Tunney and his team have taken over Red in Huntington and plan to open Luca Steak there in the spring. Credit: Newsday/Erica Marcus
The last customers were ushered out of Huntington's Red after dinner service on Sept. 21 and, 10 days later, work began on the 25-year-old restaurant’s successor: Luca Steak.
"Luca" is a name familiar to local Italophiles — it’s the Stony Brook restaurant that’s one of Long Island’s very best. Now, said partner David Tunney, "we want to do for steak what we’ve done for Italian."
Luca, he said, "will not be a Peter Luger’s clone with the same cuts, the same sides. And it’s not going to be a huge steak-and-sushi hot spot either." Nor will this be another entry in the "Italian steakhouse" category. "That’s not to say we won’t have a pasta dish, but we really want to do something different." The spot will accommodate 50 to 60 diners inside and the plan is to source meat "from farms and purveyors all over the world — the U.S., Australia, Italy and more" — and lavish attention on each plate.
The whole team from Luca is involved here: Tunney, Rory Van Nostrand, Anthony Argiriou and executive chef Luke DeSanctis. Also on board is Scott Goldstein, the executive chef at another Tunney eatery in Huntington, the top-rated Old Fields Barbecue; he is a man who knows his way around a side of beef.
Luca Steak will open across New York Avenue from Besito, the Mexican restaurant David Tunney opened with his brother, John Tunney, in 2006. It’s John who now solely operates Besito, as well as the Huntington venues The Farm Italy and The Shed. (Insert joke about renaming the town Huntingtunney.)
The former Red space appealed to the partners because it was one of a very few in Huntington village that has a dedicated lot. In between the lot and the restaurant’s back door is an outdoor space that will either become a patio (as at Luca) or a glassed-in atrium. Right now, the kitchen and dining room are completely blank canvases because Red’s owner, Nino Antuzzi, took many of the fixtures and furnishings to refresh his gastropub, Sapsuckers, a few blocks away. Team Tunney is hoping to be open by April, but luca-steak.com is already live.
