Hear this article read aloud.
Walk into L’Étoile and the room tells you where you are before the menu does: marble tables, a long banquette, a cart that comes to the table. The website we built for it had to do the same thing on a phone screen. So it speaks the restaurant’s language, French in the headings and plain English in the sentences, and it looks like a Parisian bistro at lunchtime.
L’Étoile is a French restaurant at 108 South Street in Oyster Bay, in the historic Snouder’s Building, a storefront that has been part of the village’s main street for more than a hundred years. It sits two doors down South Street from its sister, Stellina Ristorante, and like Stellina it is part of Stellina Hospitality Group. The name means “the star,” the same idea as Stellina’s little star, said in French. The new site went live on letoileny.com at the end of August 2026.
The light one
Stellina, Casa Stellina and The Audrey all lean dark. L’Étoile’s site is the light one of that first group: warm parchment and cocoa ink, antique brass, and a pour of bordeaux. Dark bands appear here as the exception rather than the rule, which is the quickest way to tell the sites apart, and the most honest reflection of the room.
The headlines are set in a fine, high-contrast display face, and there is a small story in how they are styled. That typeface has no italic of its own, and a fake slanted one looks cheap, so wherever a headline leans into emphasis, as it does in “A French restaurant, the Parisian way,” it switches to a true italic serif instead. It is the kind of detail nobody should notice, and everyone would notice if it were wrong.
Sections in French
The site titles its sections the way the restaurant does: Les Menus, Le Bar, Au Program, Le Journal, Informations Pratiques. The story page is Notre Maison, told in chapters. The guest reviews sit under Nos Convives. It is never more French than a guest can follow, and every heading is followed by a sentence in plain English.
The menus follow suit: La Carte for the food, Happy Hour, Les Cocktails, Au Verre for wines by the glass, La Carte des Vins for the full list, and Les Desserts, all on one page with a row of links across the top. The wine list goes appellation by appellation, from Chablis to Saint-Julien. The menus are kept by the restaurant’s team in Stellina HQ, the group’s own admin, rather than in the website’s code, so a change to the carte is made once and the site follows.
A building with a story
The Notre Maison page starts with the building, because the building is where L’Étoile starts. Then the cooking, drawn from the foundations of French cuisine: escargots, onion soup, seafood towers, steak frites, duck and tartares. Then the cellar, rooted in Champagne, Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Loire and the Rhône. Each one gets its own chapter.
Pages for the things people ask about
A French dining room invites questions, and the site answers them before anyone has to call.
- Le Plateau. The tiered tray of oysters, langoustines, shrimp and lobster on crushed ice, explained component by component.
- Sous L’Étoile. The members dining club in the cellar beneath the restaurant, with what membership includes.
- Au Program. Wine dinners, seasonal evenings and the fixtures of the week, including the Caviar & Champagne Experience.
- Private dining. Rehearsal dinners, milestone birthdays, anniversaries and the occasional proposal, planned with the kitchen rather than from a package.
- Le Journal, notes from the kitchen, the cellar and the village, from bringing your own bottle to the case for a burger on a French carte.
Booking is never more than a tap away. The home page puts a reservation bar under the first screen, handing off to OpenTable with the details carried across, and online ordering for pickup, gift cards and Stellina Hospitality Rewards sit alongside. Guest reviews come straight from Google, in guests’ own words, and a short feedback form goes directly to the team. The site is quick on a phone, and it is built so search engines and AI assistants can read what L’Étoile is, where it is and how to book a table.
Part of a family
L’Étoile’s footer carries the whole family: Stellina Ristorante two doors down, Casa Stellina in Farmingdale, and The Audrey, The Bay Butcher and HOSHI a few minutes’ walk away in Oyster Bay.
Merci
Thank you to the whole L’Étoile team for trusting us with a room this particular, and for every tartare finished at the table. The next time the occasion is the point, reserve a table on South Street.
