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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
Reese's 1900
Reese's 1900 sits on North Ocean Avenue in Patchogue, just off Main Street, in a building whose own documented history stretches back to at least 1914 — old photographs of the site show trolley tracks running past the front door, from the era when trolley cars carried passengers down South Ocean Avenue to the Great South Bay. The pub has occupied that same footprint for decades, evolving into the "true pub of the Old Style" regulars describe today, run for years by co-owners Joe Palmeri and Matt. Palmeri has bartended since he was 17 years old and is now in his sixties, which means his tenure behind the Reese's bar alone accounts for a meaningful chunk of the pub's operating history — a kind of institutional memory that's rare in a restaurant business where ownership and staff typically turn over every few years. That continuity shows up in the room itself: an unpretentious, old-style pub atmosphere built for regulars rather than engineered for Instagram, serving honest food at prices that haven't chased the rest of Patchogue's more upscale dining scene. The signature order is the 1900 Burger — a thick, richly beefy patty finished with blue cheese and bacon, served on a soft bun alongside a stack of thick-cut pub fries. Newsday's feedme section specifically singled it out as Long Island readers' top burger recommendation, a distinction based on reader votes rather than a single critic's opinion, which carries real weight in a region as dense with burger competition as Long Island. NextStop Magazine separately praised the pub for offering "great food at great prices, in a friendly and inviting atmosphere," and Greater L.I. magazine profiled Palmeri's own four-decade bartending career as a story in its own right, independent of the burger that made the pub famous. The pub's civic standing in Patchogue runs beyond food writing, too — Palmeri and Matt served as Grand Marshals of the 2024 Patchogue St. Patrick's Day Parade, the kind of hyperlocal honor typically reserved for businesses and people who've been genuine fixtures of a town's civic life for years, not for a restaurant chasing a viral moment. That combination — a building with documented roots reaching back over a century, an owner who's spent more than 40 years behind one bar, and a burger that Long Islanders themselves voted the best on the Island — is a harder set of credentials to fake than a flashy build or a trendy topping list. For a Long Island cheeseburger list, Reese's 1900 is the essential "old-style pub, reader-voted burger" entry — a blue cheese and bacon cheeseburger served out of a Patchogue building with roots reaching back over a century, by an owner whose own history behind the bar runs almost as deep.
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