This feature is part of our 2023 Next Wave Awards.
This fall, The Long Island Bar will mark a decade in business under the stewardship of co-owners Toby Cecchini and Joel Tompkins. But there will be no party or special menu to celebrate the occasion.
You’ll understand if Cecchini is a bit superstitious about acknowledging such milestones. His first bar, Passerby, in New York’s Meatpacking District, was a year shy of its 10th anniversary when he lost the lease due to a demolition clause. He and Tompkins thought they could find a space to open a new bar together within six months, but the search would take six years. It proved to be worth the wait.
Credit: Jeff Brown
Ramon Montero opened The Long Island Restaurant in 1949 (or 1951, by some accounts) on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Henry Street in Cobble Hill, just a few blocks from the Brooklyn waterfront. Montero’s daughter Emma and her husband Buddy Sullivan were the caretakers for nearly 60 years with the help of Emma’s cousins, Maruja and Pepita (Cecchini lovingly refers to Emma and her cousins as the “Three Graces” and celebrates their legacy with three small plaques with their names at the end of the bar).
After Buddy died in the mid-’70s, Emma and the cousins kept things running until one day in 2007 a “closed” sign went up, leaving the future of the historic space uncertain.
Tompkins and Cecchini were among the many restaurateurs and bar owners who wondered
