Staten Island Restaurant Tour, Part XXII: Mike’s Unicorn Diner (Bulls Head)
Willowbrook Lake, above, was the most scenic thing in my second visit to Bulls Head. The first visit might have gone better if the weather had not been so grey — and if I had gotten to see the Bayonne Bridge, connecting the North Shore of Staten Island to New Jersey, from a better vantage point than the Victory Boulevard bus. I’ll take a closer look when I get to the North Shore neighborhoods of Port Richmond and Mariners Harbor.
Why I chose the more utilitarian side of Bulls Head, known as the Staten Island Industrial Park, for my first visit will forever be shrouded in mystery. There was a reportedly good Italian restaurant called Lorenzo’s there. But the area was designed more for trucks and the vast Amazon fulfillment centers they serve than for transit-riding pedestrians like me. I did get a good view of the restaurant from the wrong side of the uncrossable West Shore Expressway — as well as a closeup view of the Nitecap Adult Megastore on Gulf Avenue, which bills itself as “Costco for adults.”
At more or less the corner of Gulf Avenue and 5th Street, here was the place through which so many of my online purchases are routed. According to this memoir by a living Staten Islander: “Bulls Head in the 1960s consisted of open fields, farmland, small woodlands, streams, ponds, swamps and plain, simple empty lots.” Italian and Greek farmers, Criari and Iovine by name, supplied islanders with fresh produce, flowers, and yew trees.
I shared bus rides with the folks who work here, and they were some of the most exhausted-looking people I have ever seen, eyes closed, slumped against the windows. The walking was tricky, with few sidewalks, and the light was dim, so I didn’t capture many expansive vistas — though there were grassy wetlands and big sky all around me.
Realizing belatedly that today’s walk was, frankly, a foolhardy idea, I thought I’d try a less challenging street than 5th on my way out, only to be confronted by three or four inches of muddy standing water here on scenic Bloomfield Avenue. It was not nearly as pretty as Willowbrook Lake subsequently proved to be. The thought of wading into this, and then spending several hours on the way home with cold wet feet, made me turn back.
My second visit was to the populated eastern side of the neighborhood, the one with a recognizable street grid and, y’know, restaurants and stuff. Much more sensible for the urban explorer. There’s Mike’s as well as the Z-One Diner in the lower right corner, with Lorenzo’s and Nitecap at left. I regret that I shall never know the pleasure of Lorenzo’s Drunken Clams with sausage, fennel, cherry peppers, white wine, and butter.
Bulls Head dates from a more economical time when people couldn’t afford apostrophes. It is named for a 19th-century tavern popular among loyalists to the British crown during the American Revolution (that separatism is very Staten Island). No relation to the Bulls Head Tavern operating on the Bowery in Manhattan, where George Washington hoisted a pint with the boyz. The SI Bulls Head burned several times, as a lot of things did in that candlelit era, giving the area its nickname of Phoenixville (rising from the ashes). Today a lot of NYC firefighters live in Staten Island.
The website linked above notes: “Almost all of Staten Island’s Dutch, Flemish and Huguenot architecture has been destroyed by development and insensitivity to the Island’s extraordinary 17th Century Dutch and English history.” Notable businesses now operating on the site of the Staten Island Bulls Head, at the corner of Victory Boulevard and Richmond Avenue, include Exxon, BP, Burger King, and Mickey D’s, none of which enticed, though I must say, I wouldn’t mind a 100% professional hand wash, if you know what I mean.
Passing up the Whoppers and Big Macs, I hoofed it to Mike’s Unicorn Diner just a block from that historic spot. It is a few steps away from Willowbrook Park, Willowbrook Lake, and the College of Staten Island, themselves part of a sprawling greenbelt embracing parks too numerous to name. The name Willowbrook became notorious when dashing young investigative reporter Geraldo Rivera made his name by documenting the shocking conditions in the nearby Willowbrook State School for mentally disabled kids in a 1972 exposé for ABC7.
Even before that, Robert F. Kennedy, following a 1965 visit, described kids “living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo.” And even before that, from 1956–71, a leading vaccinologist described the use of the Willowbrook kids in hepatitis-A research as “the most unethical medical experiments ever performed on children in the United States.”
Mike’s Unicorn Diner brightens up the dreary commercial drag of Victory Boulevard with nice landscaping, including a cherry tree that happened to be in bloom when I stopped by, saluting a waving American flag. I’m sure the Tories at the Bulls Head Tavern would have been shocked: “It has fifty stars now?”
The view from my booth table was traditional Mediterranean diner chic. The guy who I rightly or wrongly assumed to be Mike asked if I had been here before, and I said “not that I remember, but you never know.” Mike’s Unicorn Diner of Bulls Head is one of four, also including Mike’s Place in Eltingville, Mike’s Dakota somewhere between Graniteville and Mariners Harbor, and Mike’s Olympic Grill somewhere between Port Richmond and Westerleigh. The latter two are practically neighbors on the North Shore, separated only by the MLK Expressway, and three of the four locations (barring Eltingville) are within 20-minute walks of each other. Must be convenient for Mike, though he probably drives.
View of the Brooklyn Bridge as I came out of the men’s room door. Some Staten Islanders stress their separateness from “the city,” as they call their fellow borough of Manhattan, but Mike’s seems determined to celebrate its connection. I like both the stubbornly independent spirit of the island and the fact that we have been part of the same metropolis since the City of Greater New York was integrated in 1898, so I can hop on the ferry for a day trip without really leaving town.
I spotted what was billed as a souvlaki omelet on the menu and had to have it. The waiter made sure I got the marmalade I requested with my whiskey-down (rye toast in diner-speak).
I asked if the souvlaki were pork or chicken. The waiter went to check and I heard the guy I assumed to be Mike say, “There is no such thing as a chicken souvlaki!” I’ve been eating them for 30 years at the Manhattan (formerly Key West) Diner at Broadway and West 94th on the Upper West Side. Just sayin’.
But here at Mike’s, souvlaki is lamb, period. The home fries were definitive, which is to say well done, just how I like ’em.
I was tactful enough (though just barely) not to ask for a chicken burger, though apparently, they’re offered farther up Victory Boulevard, closer to the corrupting chicken-eating influence of Manhattan. Perhaps I was feeling a little spiky, my head swirling with Bulls Head’s tumultuous history, from the Tories who fought against the American Revolution and the values to which it dared to aspire, to the heartless scientists who experimented on helpless children, to the people like me who buy stuff online but never have any contact with the workers who pack and ship it.
Oh, a few minor historical footnotes: The United States of America declared our independence on July 4, 1776 and by 1783 the Tories had lost the Revolutionary War. Geraldo won the Peabody, the most prestigious award in broadcast journalism, had his own TV show for 11 years, and is so famous that people needn’t specify his last name anymore, effectively making him the Beyoncé of his profession. The first Amazon Labor Union was created in one warehouse on April 1, 2022, by a vote of 2,654 to 2,131, with applause from President Biden — though workers at a second warehouse voted a month later not to unionize by a vote of 618–380. Bulls Head was certainly fertile ground for a meditation on the tension between man’s inhumanity to man and the hope for better days. It was also full of cozy looking Shangri-Las, like those on this quiet, pleasant, curving street.
I wanted to cheer them on. I liked the modernized Mock Tudor cosmetics of the Parkview Estates condo development. The nod to an English architectural style is not inappropriate in a neighborhood named for a Tory tavern.
Here is another of the island’s famous kills, or little streams, in Willowbrook Park. Just beyond it is the College of Staten Island — I nearly had a panic attack as the city bus swung left for passengers entering or leaving the campus, before realizing it would swing right back around and continue to my rendezvous with a lamb souvlaki omelet.
I’m sure I’ll see more of these little waterways tucked among neighborhoods around the extraordinary greenbelt in what I increasingly think of, second time I’ve used this line, as New York’s Secret Borough. Here ends season two, episode one. In this second phase of the Tour I’ll be focusing on the island’s most obscure and scattered neighborhoods, variously classified as West Shore or Mid-Island, before moving on to the many nabes lining the populous North Shore in season three. That’s the plan. Let’s see if I can stick to it.
Previously on the Staten Island Restaurant Tour:
Part I: Angelina’s (Tottenville)
Part II: Fina’s Farmhouse (Arthur Kill)
Part III: Laila (Richmond Valley)
Part IV: Il Forno (Pleasant Plains)
Part V: Breaking Bread (Prince’s Bay)
Part VI: Woodrow Diner (Huguenot)
Part IX: Marina Cafe (Great Kills)
Part XI: Canlon’s (Oakwood Heights)
Part XII: Prince Tea House (New Dorp)
Part XIII: Inca’s Peruvian Grille (Grant City)
Part XIV: Colonnade Diner (Jefferson Avenue)
Part XVI: Chinar on the Island (Old Town)
Part XVII: Cinco de Mayo (Grasmere)
Part XVIII: Phil-Am Kusina (Clifton)
Part XIX: Lakruwana (Stapleton)
Part XX: Pier 76 (Tompkinsville)
Part XXI: Chang Noi Thai (St. George)
If you’re enjoying the Staten Island Restaurant Tour, please follow my blog by clicking follow next to my name at the top. Then subscribe to get emails on new episodes. You can also subscribe to the SIRT channel on YouTube. For offline reading, the first 21 episodes of the SIRT are available as an ebook. See you soon!
