YoYo Chicken opens first eastern Suffolk location in Calverton Friday

A free chicken sandwich helped pull customers into Calverton Commons on Friday, but the bigger story was what YoYo Chicken’s arrival says about Middle Country Road: the corridor is still drawing food businesses that believe eastern Suffolk can support them.

YoYo Chicken opened its first eastern Suffolk location at 4490 Middle Country Road in Calverton, inside the Calverton Commons shopping center. The fast-casual chain, which specializes in fried chicken, wings, smashburgers, sandwiches, bowls, burritos and milkshakes, had already begun serving customers with a soft launch about 10 days earlier. For the grand opening, the restaurant gave away a free chicken sandwich with no purchase required.

The opening puts another dining option into a strip of Calverton that already includes other food and retail stops. Golden Jalapeños Cafe operates at 4486 Middle Country Road, and Beleaf is at 4462 Middle Country Road. Beleaf opened in the plaza as Riverhead Town’s first recreational marijuana shop, another sign that the shopping center has become a draw for businesses looking for visibility along one of the East End’s main commercial roads.

YoYo Chicken’s move to Calverton is also notable because it is the brand’s first eastern Suffolk location. The company already has a broader New York-area footprint, with locations listed in Huntington Station, Deer Park, Baldwin, Bohemia, Fresh Meadows, Woodside and several Brooklyn neighborhoods, along with Bayonne, New Jersey. Calverton, then, is not a one-off experiment. It is a test of whether a chain with an established regional base sees enough traffic on the East End to justify expanding farther east.

The store’s hours reflect that bet. YoYo Chicken in Calverton is open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, a schedule aimed at both lunch crowds and late-night customers. The restaurant also offers dine-in, takeout and delivery through Uber Eats and DoorDash, giving it multiple ways to capture traffic beyond walk-ins at the counter.

The broader development picture in Calverton helps explain why a chain like YoYo Chicken would land there now. The Town of Riverhead says Calverton Enterprise Park is the largest commercial industrial subdivision in the Northeast, and Riverhead has continued to see new projects along the corridor. In February, a roughly 16-acre mixed-use proposal on Middle Country Road won preliminary site plan approval for 30,000 square feet of commercial space and 36 one-bedroom apartments.

With just 5,934 residents counted in Calverton in the 2020 Census, the local market is not large on its own. But the new chicken shop, the existing plaza tenants and the steady stream of development activity suggest Calverton Commons is becoming one of the East End’s more active commercial nodes.