Route 25A Miller Place New Stores Changing 2026
August 6, 2026
August 6, 2026
For years the shorthand on Route 25A through Miller Place has been "the strip." A Stop & Shop run, a slice at Branchinelli's, maybe McNulty's if the kids were in the car. Wikipedia's own summary of the hamlet notes that Route 25A is suburban in character, with most businesses being corporate chains in strip malls, plus multiple pizza parlors, a bagel store, a deli, and a local coffee shop and bar. That description was accurate. It stopped being complete around February.
Six months into 2026, one 1.5 mile stretch of 25A has absorbed a Trader Joe's, a Jimmy John's, a Hummus Fit, and a from-scratch restaurant taking over a long-standing kitchen, with a Sobol, a Mister Softee storefront, and a True Value all under construction behind them. If you live here, you have already noticed the traffic pattern shift. This is what actually changed, in the order it happened.
That is four openings in roughly three months on one road, with three more announced. For a hamlet that recorded a population of 11,723 at the 2020 census, that pace is not normal, and it is not evenly spread. It is concentrated.
If you have not driven past 691 Route 25A recently, do. The plaza that until 2025 was known mainly for Fusilli, The Bigger Bagel, and Tuscany Gourmet Market has, in the last twelve months, added Atomic Wings, Jimmy John's, and construction on both Sobol and Mister Softee. The Jimmy John's shop is run by the same franchisee behind Atomic Wings, which opened its first stand-alone Long Island location last year in the same shopping center. One operator is quietly stacking concepts in one plaza. That is a strategy, not a coincidence.
The Mister Softee piece is worth naming clearly. The soft ice cream icon is opening its third Suffolk brick-and-mortar store inside the Aliano Shopping Center, run by brothers Steven and Andrew Zoly, who for the last seven years have run Mister Softee ice cream trucks across Mount Sinai, Miller Place, Sound Beach, Port Jefferson Station, Coram, Rocky Point and Calverton. The truck route that has been circling your block for years is landing a permanent address on it. Steven Zoly told Greater Long Island he and his brother were targeting a May or June opening.
Sobol slots in next door. The chain has 20 stores operating in Suffolk and 40 across Long Island, and was originally founded in Sayville before growing to more than 100 locations across 11 states. Once it opens, the plaza will hold, in one continuous facade, a sandwich shop, a wing shop, a bagel shop, a bakery-market, an Italian restaurant, an açaí counter, and a soft-serve counter. That is a food court without the mall around it.
Breslin Realty's site sheet for the Trader Joe's parcel puts the traffic count at roughly 39,000 vehicles per day on Route 25A. That number was true before February. The shift is not raw car count. It is what those cars are stopping for.
Before this year, the 25A errand was single-purpose. You made a specific trip for a specific store, then drove home. The 2026 openings change the math. A Trader Joe's run is now a plausible anchor for a five-stop Saturday morning: grocery at 300, hardware at the True Value going in next door, lunch at Jimmy John's or Hummus Fit, açaí at Sobol, soft-serve for the kids at Mister Softee, all inside a two-plaza radius. Greater Long Island framed this directly: the Hummus Fit opening is part of a broader development surge along Route 25A, with Trader Joe's and Jimmy John's already open, a new True Value Hardware under construction next to Trader Joe's, and Sobol and Mister Softee planned for the Aliano Shopping Center later in the year.
For homeowners in the streets north and south of 25A, this compresses the errand loop. The trips that used to require Setauket for Trader Joe's, Port Jefferson for a walkable food stop, or Rocky Point for a hardware run are collapsing into the local strip. That is a livability change, not a retail one.
The new tenants did not arrive on the same street they moved into. The Mount Sinai–Miller Place Chamber of Commerce acquired a grant from Suffolk County to install street lamp posts along Route 25A near the former King Kullen shopping center in Mount Sinai, and as of June 2, 2026, 16 new lamp posts are in place along 25A. Sixteen lamp posts on a stretch of state highway that used to go dark between plazas is a real change to how the corridor reads after 6 p.m.
The chamber has layered other work on top of that. The current beautification project is repair, paint, new shutters, and landscaping on the exterior of the Mount Sinai post office, and PSEG grants have funded landscape improvement projects at three entry points to Mount Sinai, with the gazebo on Crystal Brook Hollow Road painted, re-roofed, and re-landscaped. None of this is glamorous. All of it explains why the strip is starting to feel less like a pass-through and more like a downtown-in-progress.
That framing is not new, either. A 2012 plan by the Town of Brookhaven aimed to comprehensively manage Route 25A between Mount Sinai and Wading River, and for Miller Place, it intended to transition the section at Echo and Sylvan Avenues into a traditional downtown center with new mixed-use development and an expanded Sylvan Avenue Park to complement the current town post office and senior center. The 2026 openings are the first stretch of 25A where that vision is visibly landing on the ground, even if the mixed-use piece has not.
A few things worth watching before the leaves turn:
The through-line across all of it is that these are not chains dropped into a random plaza. Two of them are Long Island operators expanding on their home turf. One is a Port Jefferson resident opening his first restaurant in the kitchen he already worked in. One is a franchisee doubling down in the same shopping center he already runs. The 25A that is emerging in 2026 is being built, in a lot of cases, by people who already live in your zip code.
None of this shows up on a portal price history. It shows up on the drive home. Homes north and south of 25A between Sylvan and Echo are now within a five-minute walk or a two-minute drive of a grocery, three quick lunch options, a hardware store, and two dessert stops that did not exist eighteen months ago. When buyers tour Miller Place in 2027 and 2028, that is the strip they will drive down. Sellers who understand what changed on the road in front of their house tend to price and market accordingly.
If you are thinking about listing in Miller Place, or you want a straight read on what these 25A changes mean for your specific street, the Conor Hertell team is on the road every week. Buy or sell? Call Hertell today.
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