What Stellina means
Little star. It is a tribute on two levels: a Floral Park restaurant that opened in 1960, and Adriana Milana's late mother Maria.
Stellina is the Italian word for little star. People assume it is a flourish. It is a family word, and it is doing two jobs at once.
Stella, Floral Park, 1960
In 1960 Adriana Milana's grandparents opened Stella Ristorante in Floral Park. It has been a Long Island landmark for more than six decades, the kind of place where families become regulars and regulars become family. Adriana grew up in it.
Stellina is the diminutive: the little star to that one. Naming a new restaurant after an older one is a promise more than a compliment, because anyone who knew the first will come and check.
And for Maria
The name also honors Adriana's late mother Maria. As Adriana puts it, they named it for her mother, and for her grandparents' restaurant, where she learned what hospitality actually means.
Earning a small name
The name commits us to being small. Forty seats, one service, a kitchen you can hear from the table. Stellina is owned and run by Chef Fabrizio Facchini and his wife Samira together with Adriana and Tom Milana, which is a plain way of saying that the people who greet you at the door are the people whose name is on it.
The star turns up all over this restaurant once you start looking: on the door, on the menu, on the wordmark above the awning on South Street. It is the same one every time, and it means what it says.
Come in and sit down, and ask whoever is at the door about Stella. They will tell you the long version.