Once named the “best new restaurant in the country” by USA Today, Tootles & French was far more than just good vibes and tasty food.
NICOLAS STERGIOU
Producer, Social Media Manager, Labor Organizer, and Unofficial “Astoria Street Spectator.”
When a neighborhood restaurant closes, Astoria’s online comment sections tend to become either amateur crime scenes or belated food-review columns.
Within minutes of the announcement, strangers confidently announce the motive on Facebook and Reddit: The rent was too high. High operating costs forced them out. The food was overrated. I miss the old Irish pub that was there. The space will become another smoke shop, bank or national chain. Blah blah blah… We have seen it happen here many times already.
The restaurant may not immediately offer us a detailed explanation. But a small-business owner is not a public defendant, and a neighborhood is not entitled to a full autopsy every time someone decides to close a chapter of their life.
Tootles & French, for example, opened in 2023 under co-owners Chad Goldsmith and Vanessa Massas. In early 2025, it received a remarkable distinction: USA Today readers named it the best new restaurant in the country. The recognition celebrated its food and thoughtfully selected wines, but awards alone do not explain what made the restaurant valuable to Astoria.
When Goldsmith and Massas announced the restaurant’s closure recently, Astorians mourned the greater loss of the kind of space Chad and his team had created behind the dining room.
Tootles & French regularly opened its doors to comedy, art, wine tastings, Broadway open-mic nights and other local events. It participated and led Ditmars Restaurant Week, bringing nearby businesses together rather than treating every neighboring restaurant as competition. It employed Astorians and gave performers, organizers and assorted neighborhood characters somewhere to gather–even well known local food critic Alpaca Jones. Mayor Zohran Mamdani was known to stop by on occasion too.
I met Chad after we exchanged messages about promoting Ditmars Restaurant Week through Gotham Goose, the satirical Instagram page I manage. Chad clearly appreciates a good joke—which is probably helpful when your restaurant is named after silly childhood nicknames shared by him and his brother.
Last Saturday, during the restaurant’s final week, I attended its final Broadway open-mic night. I expected musical-theater karaoke. I did not expect the evening to become so emotional.
The room was filled with extraordinarily talented singers, regulars and friends who understood that they were not simply attending another event. They were saying goodbye to a place where people had been encouraged to shamelessly express themselves..
After singing a couple of my more upbeat regular songs, I decided to sing the ballad “Up There” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Despite being sung by Satan in Hell, it is a surprisingly touching song about feeling out of place and longing for a more cultured world better suited to who you are and what you hope to become.
I dedicated it to my late father, a true Astorian who moved our family to Bakersfield, California, a place where summer temperatures regularly climbed past 100 degrees and where I often felt far removed from the world I imagined for myself–Astoria. He mostly disliked musicals and did not always let me stay up late enough to watch South Park, yet he still took me to see that R-rated musical in 1999, when I was 12—not long after I had gotten in trouble at school for refusing to turn a South Park t-shirt inside out. We disagreed from time to time, but he understood that loving someone sometimes means making room for what they love, even when you do not fully understand it, a belief that has also become central to the satire and community work I create online. He was also not thrilled when I got a drum set and filled the garage with noise, but he let me play anyway. That garage, much like the back room of Tootles & French, became a place where I could be loud, strange and entirely myself.
That memory had nothing to do with restaurant criticism. I was not thinking about menu prices, plating or whether the fries had the correct level of crispness. I was thinking about my father, surrounded by supportive strangers in a room a small-business owner had made available to us.
That is what disappears when a place like Tootles & French closes.
This does not mean we should ignore the economic pressures facing neighborhood businesses. Commercial rents, operating costs and long hours make hospitality unforgiving.
Recently, state Senator Julia Salazar and Assembly member Emily Gallagher introduced the New York City Small Business Rent Stabilization Act (2025-S8319), which would establish a commercial rent guidelines board and provide qualifying tenants with stronger lease-renewal protections.
The proposal will face debate, but its underlying question deserves serious consideration: If we value independent businesses as part of our neighborhoods, what are we willing to do to help them survive?
Rent protections wouldn’t solve every problem.
Sometimes burnout, family obligations, changing ambitions or the simple need to reclaim one’s life matter matters more.
In announcing the closing, Chad told me that the sacrifices required in his personal life to sustain the restaurant—and everything that made it special—had become too great. We should take that explanation seriously without demanding further explanation. It was also a reminder for me. As a recovering workaholic, I know that if my father were still here, I would want to spend every hour with him that work once convinced me I could afford to lose.
The least a neighborhood can offer in return is some humanity.
Before posting that a closing restaurant “wasn’t even that good,” consider that employees are losing a workplace and owners may be grieving something they spent years building. Criticism is fair while a business is operating. Cruelty during its goodbye is NOT civic engagement. It’s just cruel.
So this is not a restaurant review. It is a thank-you. But not for nothing—their food WAS that damn good.
Thank you to Chad, Vanessa and everyone at Tootles & French for the meals, the wine, the jobs, the laughter, and the backstage memories.
Astoria should remember that—and make it easier for the next person who tries to build one.
