They were the stuff that memories are made of, these long-gone gathering places of Long Island. Because by form and by function, catering halls are designed to be one thing: a spot to hold memorable events.

Besides the usual wedding receptions and bar/bat mitzvot, they were where high school reunions gathered; where the New Year was greeted; where clubs of all sorts elected officers annually. Proms, quinceañeras, sweet 16s … in the days before Instagram, these places were Instagrammable.

Some catering halls began as restaurants or country inns that expanded. Other defunct venues were behemoths built from the ground up. However they originated, they hold a special place in the hearts of Long Islanders in a way few businesses do — they're the settings of those big moments in life. Here are some memories about a few of the fabled catering halls that are no more.

MANOR EAST CATERERS

201 Jerusalem Ave., Massapequa

Manor East opened in 1970. Its co-founder Joseph Falcone was, according to a 1978 Newsday report citing the Justice Department, a member of the Carlo Gambino crime organization. The place was run by one Tommy Ocera, whom the feds called a loan shark and who was assassinated in a mob hit in November 1989.

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On the other hand, “many cops and firemen held their events at Manor East,” recalls Elizabeth Colantonio, 65, of Garden City. “And my dad was FDNY, so when my husband and I got married in 1985 we chose Manor East for our reception.”

The hall’s “signature course and the standout of the meal,” she says, was their Viennese Table, a term for a dessert buffet that, to hear people tell it, reached its apotheosis at Manor East. “It was so large it needed to be set up in another room, with everything you could possibly imagine displayed elegantly on many tables: Italian pastries, numerous tiered layer cakes, cookies, chocolate mousse, petit fours, puddings and flan, along with a cappuccino and espresso bar with chocolate cups and liqueurs.” It was, she remembers, “very impressive and decadent.”

President of catering John DeJohn at Manor East Caterers in Massapequa in 2012.

For Colleen Mangan Allen, 48, who spent her childhood in Levittown and Westbury and now lives in Dallas, Georgia, one thing that made her 2003 wedding reception there memorable was a drink she had learned of at her bachelorette party elsewhere — a Dirty Girl Scout, made with vodka, crème de menthe and other ingredients, and tasting like Thin Mints cookies.

It wasn’t the drink per se that was memorable. It was seeing her grandfather, retired Nassau County police inspector Jack Mangan, whom she describes as a tough old bird, “being the only man with all the bridesmaids downing Dirty Girl Scouts at the bar!”

Manor East had a troubled history. There were run-ins with the Town of Oyster Bay over the owners, without permits, having demolished adjacent buildings to build a parking lot, among other illegal construction, according to a 1970 Newsday report.

It all eventually got straightened out and Manor East operated successfully for decades before filing for bankruptcy four times between 2008 and 2012, and closing abruptly on June 13, 2013, leaving clients in the lurch. The empty husk of the building remains.

HUNTINGTON TOWN HOUSE

124 E. Jericho Tpke., Huntington Station

As great as the Viennese Table was at Manor East, Evan Gould says the one at Huntington Town House was a show in itself.

“The DJ would stop the music, there'd be big drum rolls and they'd say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen! The Huntington Town House's famous Viennese Table!’” remembers the 57-year-old Jacksonville, Florida, middle-school music and drama teacher who grew up in Holtsville and was bar mitzvahed at the Town House in 1979. “And they'd wheel out table after table with lights and everything — chocolate fountains, every pie and cake you can imagine, cookies, an ice cream bar, everything wheeled onto the dance floor. And for 30 to 45 minutes, it was grandmas pushing over people,” he jokes, “everyone getting over to the Viennese Table!”

A 1978 catering hall billing agreement from Huntington Town House.

The venue originated as the eponymous restaurant Leo Gerard’s in 1937, became the Georgian Inn in 1953 and was renamed the Huntington Town House in 1957 under new owner Thomas Manno. He expanded it to include 11 banquet rooms, and the 5-acre property grew to 20 acres, with parking for a reputed 2,000 cars.

Touring the place with his parents, Gould remembers, “You saw all these rooms, each with a different theme. And each room had anterooms for the cocktail hours and dessert bars. … The place was so big, there would be five or six affairs going on at the same time and you’d never know unless you purposefully walked around the main hallways. There wasn’t just the one entrance in the front where they had the big staircase — they had many entrances, so you had your own where your guests came in.”

Manno died in November 1995 and his widow, Jean, sold the venue to Rhona Silver, who turbocharged the business. “She specialized in creating spectacle and fantasy: a bride and groom arriving in the grand ballroom in a coach drawn by two white horses, or a couple landing on the lawn in a hot-air balloon,” wrote an archivist for the Huntington Historical Society in an article last year, adding, “It was even the site of a concert by the rapper 50 Cent.”

Top: Fern Shatunoff, Nancy Kramer, Joyce Halpern, Steven Persoff, William Kramer, Rebecca Persoff and Craig Persoff attend a celebration at the now-defunct Huntington Town House circa 1985. Bottom: Adam Yahre, Evan Gould and Jimmy Koslosky attend a celebration in 1985.

But in 2006, after failing to persuade the Town of Huntington to change zoning and allow her to demolish the Town House to build condominiums, Silver prepared to sell the property to a developer. Then came lawsuits, countersuits, a different buyer. And then Town House management in early 2007, after assuring clients the place would stay open through 2008 at least, announced that due to “major reconstruction” it was all over. Disappointed families were left scrambling for new venues and to get their deposits back.

The Huntington Town House on Jericho Turnpike circa 1975.

The building came down in 2011. Silver died in 2017. Today there’s a Target there.

CHATEAU BRIAND

440 Old Country Road, Carle Place

There's always something there to remind you that songwriter Burt Bacharach once owned the business that became the Chateau Briand. So say a little prayer for that restaurant and catering hall, which closed in 2022 and has since been demolished to make way for a Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers.

Items from the beloved Chateau Briand catering hall, a Carle Place institution, were auctioned.

Chateau Briand began life around 1948 as the Clam Box restaurant, advertised as being opposite the West Gate of Roosevelt Raceway. By 1959 it was owned by Leo Aronsohn, who spent $700,000 expanding the place for catering and changed its name to the Olde Colony, according to state records.

In 1967, Milton Cohen, a vice president of the now-defunct Hills Supermarkets chain, bought the place and renamed it the Dover House. The following year, subsequent new owner Bacharach — who would also own the East Norwich Inn and the adjacent steakhouse Rothmann's — held a gala opening on Sept. 23, 1968, with his wife, actor Angie Dickinson. Other celebrities there that night included Broadway producer David Merrick and “Tonight Show” bandleader Doc Severinsen. Dickinson told a Newsday reporter in 1968 she had never been to Long Island before, and said snarkily, “It looked OK in the dark.”

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Dover House lasted a decade before Bacharach closed it in July 1977, citing high rent on the leased property. Then Long Island restaurateurs the Scotto brothers — Italian immigrants Anthony, Victor and Vincent — took it over, operating briefly as the discount-steak place Steer Manor and in June 1978 rebranding it as the Chateau Briand.

Among the many who made memories there is Sylvia Gomes, 38, of Carle Place.

“My husband and I started dating during the summer of 2007,” she remembers. William Gomes, who worked for the State Department of Taxation and Finance, invited her to his employer’s holiday party that year at the Chateau Briand. “We were both 22,” says Sylvia Gomes, now an auditor with Nassau Financial Federal Credit Union, “so you can imagine how excited we were to go to such an upscale place.”

Sylvia Gomes and her husband at Chateau Briand.

The couple married two years later, albeit not at Chateau, and in 2014 bought their first home — on the block behind the venue. “We would often hear the music playing on summer days,” she says. “Sometimes we would just sit in front of our house and listen to it.” After becoming parents, they would take their two young children strolling or bike riding past the place, “reminiscing with them about Mommy and Daddy's first fancy date.”

The 16,000-square-foot catering hall ended its 44-year run at the end of 2022, auctioning off its thousands of items the following October.

NARRAGANSETT INN

244 E. Montauk Hwy., Lindenhurst

An earlier Narragansett Inn had opened in Amityville in 1907, burning down at some point after February 1924. It’s unclear if it was related to the Narragansett Inn in Lindenhurst, known to generations of Long Islanders and first advertised by its original owner, Carl Fuchs, in May 1924. The site, a farmhouse built in 1811, had been the Annawanda Inn and the Red Post Inn previously.

Tony Grasso, Ric Mango (also bottom), Greg Pascucci and Al Cumia perform at the Narragansett Inn Imperial Room in Lindenhurst in the 1970s.

Phil Orlando and Tommy Chiarenza were the owners by the mid-1970s, when the by-now 70,000-square-foot building could hold eight affairs at once. Gus Colletti was manager and music director. And local-legend singer-guitarist Ric Mango — who served as an unofficial member of the doo-wop group Jay and the Americans and is the grandfather of Shoreham’s “The Voice” winner Carter Rubin — became one of the Narragansett Inn’s regular performers.

“I was attending my sister-in-law’s wedding,” Mango, 78, of Mount Sinai, recalls, “and Gus knew me from Jay and the Americans and asked me if I would get up and sing a song. And I did and then he called and asked me if I wanted to do catering gigs. And so he'd bring me in to different rooms every night, and I would sing a couple of songs.”

The response was positive enough that he put together the nine-piece Ric Mango Orchestra, “and we did lots of weddings and parties and dinner dances and fundraisers. It was just a great time. Everybody in the building, from the waiters to the stock boys to the bartenders, became like family, because we used to do six, seven parties a week there.”

His favorite rooms were the Celestial and the Victorian Embassy, he says. “And then they could open the walls for large catering, like when we did an Italian feast with almost a thousand people. The whole building was magical as far as I was concerned. It was my favorite catering hall I ever worked in.”

For decades, the Narragansett Inn continued as a major event space. But by February 1996, its glory days behind it, it had become the Southwood Caterers and Conference Center. And even that shadow faded away by January 2000. The whole thing burned down on July 19, 2001. Its owners by then were the Passavia family, whose holdings also included the Southampton Inn and The Woodbury Country Club.

Today? It’s the 55-plus community The Villas at Narragansett.

GALAXIE CATERERS

1600 Round Swamp Rd., Plainview

The announcement in a Newsday ad of Oct. 20, 1962, heralded that the Rev. Nathan H. Friedman, “known to many thousands for the affairs he hosted as a former caterer in the Bronx,” and Rudy Lefkowitz of Rudy’s Restaurant in Plainview were opening a department-store sized catering hall called, in that era’s space-age lingo, the Galaxie.

Boasting “completely air-conditioned” banquet, reception and bridal rooms and a private chapel, with valet parking for up to 1,200 guests, it soon became one of the Island’s premier venues.

This ad for Galaxie Caterers ran in Newsday on Oct. 30, 1964.

Bruce Steiner, 74, a Manhattan tax attorney who lives in Springfield, New Jersey, grew up in Jericho and had his bar mitzvah there in April 1963. As luxe as the place was, “It was a simpler time. They didn't have all the separate side activities for kids” like many bar mitzvahs do today. There was a band, there were his friends. His bar mitzvah cake was “just one level” rather than tiered, as tmany are now. The cake “wasn’t really all that good,” he remembers, but that was all right with him. “When you're a kid, any dessert is good.”

The Galaxie had some hiccups. A couple of safecrackers came in through the roof in 1964, making off with $2,900 in cash. The U.S. Treasury Department in 1971 charged that the caterer’s bottles of Seagram’s VO whiskey didn’t contain Seagram’s VO and the purported J&B Scotch wasn’t J&B. More disastrously, an electrical fire on Oct. 20, 1984, gutted the place. (The Fire Marshal confirmed it did not appear suspicious.)

By that time it was owned by chef Albee Levine, who had come aboard with some fanfare eight years earlier as general manager and catering consultant, and the place was colloquially called “Albee’s.” Levine rebuilt and sold it in 1986 to Frank Martucci, owner of the Renaissance Country Club in North Hills, who redubbed the catering hall the Renaissance Galaxie. Five people were injured there in 1989 when concrete blocks fell through the ceiling during a wedding reception.

Martucci sold it sometime after 1995 and the venue would go through more owners and more names — the Vanderbilt, the Carlyle at the Palace. (Another Galaxie Caterers, of uncertain provenance, operated in Lindenhurst from at least 1998 to 2009.) The site today is now that of the Nassau Off-Track Betting Corporation’s Race Palace.

MILLER PLACE INN

195 N. Country Rd., Miller Place

The most recent of the fabled catering halls to close, this past February, the Miller Place Inn dates to 1926 when Charles H. Seifert joined together the barn and outbuildings of the Joseph Rowland property. Managed by Thomas Faturos, it advertised duck and chicken dinners as well as catering “for parties, social gatherings [and] weddings.” Popular Long Island chef Louis C. Lang came on as manager in 1929.

This ad for the Miller Place Inn was published in Newsday on Dec. 13, 1987.

But the 13-room inn was put up for sale the following year by Mrs. Anne Seifert — what happened to Charles is unclear — and with evidently no takers she operated it through at least 1937. It later was owned in succession by James Morrison, Robert Burke Jr., and, by 1952, James Kapsalis. It then appears to have gone dormant from 1956 to 1976.

Then that year, prominent Long Island restaurateur James Koutrakos turned the inn into a dedicated catering hall. When he died in 1986, his wife, Ellen, took over, running it with their son Eric. In 1990, the Town of Brookhaven approved a 2,300-square-foot expansion that led to the new James Room and Joseph Rowland Room.

Martin Maletta, a Bayport-raised chef and restaurant jack-of-all trades, bartended at Miller Place Inn in 1997 and 1998. “We used to do a wedding on Friday night and then two on Saturday and two on Sunday. It was a moneymaking machine, that place,” says the semiretired real estate agent, 71, who lives in Port St. Lucie, Florida.

And the owners spread the wealth. “All the workers did very well,” he says. “I only worked three days a week and I was making nice money. And I never heard a customer complain — everybody was always satisfied.”

In the mid-2000s, Donna and Christopher Regina and family members bought the venue and it continued its successful run. Then a sweet 16 party on Sept. 25, 2020, with 81 guests, far more than the 50-person COVID-19 limit of the time, became a superspreader event that infected 37 and led to more than 270 people in contact with them to be quarantined, officials told Newsday in 2020. Sachem High School North in Lake Ronkonkoma had to close temporarily because of infected students.

The venue never fully rebounded. In a letter to clients when it closed this year, the Reginas pointed to “the changing dynamics of the catering industry and the remnant effects of the pandemic lockdown.” The property’s fate is in limbo.

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