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All American Hamburger Drive-In
All American Hamburger Drive-In has been flipping burgers on Merrick Road in Massapequa since 1963, and the family that runs it has resisted the urge to change much of anything in the six decades since. There's no indoor seating — just a walk-up window, a handful of picnic tables out front, and a neon sign that's been drawing cars off Merrick Road since the Kennedy administration. It's the kind of drive-in most of the Island's other burger spots are, whether they admit it or not, quietly trying to imitate. The menu is deliberately short: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and quarter pounders, each available with or without cheese, plus the option to double up into what the menu calls a Double Header or a Double Double. Add a hot dog, onion rings, or a grilled cheese and you've covered the entire board. The patties are thin, griddled hot and fast rather than built up gourmet-style, and the fries are peeled fresh on site rather than dropped frozen from a bag — a detail regulars notice even if they can't always articulate why the fries taste different from everywhere else on the Island. That stripped-down format is the whole point. All American isn't chasing a smash-burger trend or a truffle-aioli upgrade; it's running the same order-at-the-window, eat-at-a-picnic-table format it opened with in 1963, back when drive-ins like this one were common across Long Island rather than a novelty. Writers covering the place consistently reach for the same comparison — a genuine "Happy Days"-era throwback — because it's one of the only spots left on the Island where that description isn't an exaggeration. The restaurant has stayed a Massapequa fixture precisely because it never tried to become anything else. ABC7 New York profiled the drive-in specifically for having "been flipping burgers since 1963," treating the shop's longevity itself as the news. Roadfood.com and independent burger writers, including critic Nick Solares, have separately singled it out as one of the more honest examples of old-school Long Island drive-in cooking still operating, a distinction that matters in a region where most similar spots from that era have long since closed or been remodeled into something glossier. Generations of the same Massapequa families have grown up stopping there, which is part of why the restaurant's Yelp and Tripadvisor pages are stacked with reviewers recalling specific childhood memories of the place rather than just rating the food. For a Long Island cheeseburger list, All American Hamburger Drive-In is the essential "this is what a Long Island drive-in actually looked like" entry — a thin, fast-griddled patty served at a walk-up window with fresh-cut fries, in a Massapequa parking lot that's looked and operated essentially the same way since 1963.
VS
P.S. Burgers
P.S. Burgers has operated out of a small storefront on 2nd Street in Mineola since 2012, built around a premise that was still fairly novel for a Long Island burger joint at the time: a menu centered on 100% grass-fed beef rather than the grain-fed standard most fast-casual burger spots default to. Grass-fed beef runs leaner and carries a slightly different, more mineral flavor than grain-fed, and P.S. Burgers built its entire identity around that distinction rather than treating it as a footnote on the menu. The restaurant's stated mission is to draw from "the 4 corners of the world," and that shows up literally in the protein list — alongside the grass-fed beef, P.S. Burgers offers lamb, bison, turkey, and salmon patties, plus veggie and Beyond Burger options, letting a single restaurant serve a genuinely wide range of dietary preferences without splitting into separate menus. That range is unusual for a Long Island burger spot of this size; most independent burger joints on the Island pick a lane — classic diner, smash, or gourmet — and stay in it, while P.S. Burgers has built a following specifically by refusing to. The build style leans gourmet rather than smash: thicker, more deliberately constructed patties finished with toppings meant to complement each specific protein rather than a single house sauce applied across the board. That approach has made P.S. Burgers a regular stop for Long Islanders looking for something beyond a standard beef cheeseburger without leaving Mineola for a more expensive sit-down restaurant, and it's earned steady coverage from local outlets like Going Local Long Island and Burger Weekly specifically for that global, protein-forward menu structure. Operating from the same modest Mineola storefront for over a decade, without the kind of expansion into multiple locations that similarly popular Long Island burger spots have pursued, has let P.S. Burgers stay closely controlled by the same team that built its grass-fed sourcing relationships in the first place — a level of focus that shows up in the consistency regulars describe across reviews spanning more than ten years of operation. Sticking to grass-fed sourcing for over a decade also means absorbing a cost the restaurant could have quietly walked back at any point when grain-fed beef prices dipped — grass-fed beef consistently runs more expensive than the conventional alternative, and a small independent storefront choosing to hold that line for ten-plus years, across five distinct proteins rather than just the flagship beef patty, is a more durable commitment than a limited-time menu feature. For a Long Island cheeseburger list, P.S. Burgers is the essential "grass-fed, globally-minded" entry — a Mineola storefront that's spent over a decade proving a burger joint can serve lamb, bison, turkey, and salmon patties alongside a proper grass-fed beef cheeseburger without losing focus on any single one of them.
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