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Besito
Besito was founded by restaurateur John Tunney, who spent years traveling through Mexico specifically to understand its cuisine and its people before opening his first location in 2006. That direct, immersive research shows up in the restaurant's positioning: Besito presents itself not just as a place to eat tacos, but as what Tunney has described as a genuine family and cultural experience, built around spaces designed to evoke the romance and energy of Mexico rather than a generic strip-mall Mexican-restaurant look. The restaurant's most distinctive dish is its iron-skillet tacos — corn tortillas topped with queso Chihuahua that's melted directly onto the tortilla in a hot skillet, then finished with a choice of chicken, steak, or vegetables. That skillet-melted cheese technique is a genuinely different construction than a standard taco build, closer to a quesotaco than to a typical folded street taco, and it's become one of the dishes regulars specifically order Besito for rather than treating as one option among many. Beyond the tacos, Besito runs a full, ambitious Mexican menu — tableside guacamole, house-made tortillas, enchiladas, fajitas, fresh seafood, and premium steaks — alongside a handcrafted margarita program that's become a destination in its own right for date nights and celebrations. That range positions Besito closer to an upscale, full-service Mexican restaurant than a quick taco counter, which shows up directly in the room's design and service style as much as in the menu. The concept has grown from that original 2006 opening into three Long Island locations — Huntington, Roslyn, and West Islip — without losing the specific cultural-experience framing Tunney built the brand around from the start. Sustaining that consistent identity, and the iron-skillet taco format specifically, across three separate dining rooms for nearly two decades reflects a level of operational discipline that's genuinely harder to maintain than it is to launch a single well-received restaurant. Tunney's background matters for understanding why Besito reads as more deliberately researched than a typical upscale Mexican concept: rather than adapting an existing restaurant group's format to a new cuisine, he built the entire concept around firsthand time spent in Mexico specifically to get the details right, from the iron-skillet technique itself to the tableside guacamole preparation and the room design meant to evoke the country rather than a generic Southwestern aesthetic. That level of specificity is part of why the restaurant has been able to sustain three separate locations without any one of them feeling like a diluted copy of the original — the underlying research and technique were established once, thoroughly, before the concept ever expanded beyond its first dining room. For a Long Island taco list, Besito is the essential "upscale, skillet-melted cheese" entry — corn tortillas topped with queso Chihuahua melted tableside in a hot iron skillet, served across three Long Island locations built by a founder who spent years in Mexico researching the cuisine before ever opening a restaurant of his own.
VS
Little Mexico
Little Mexico has served Westbury from its Post Avenue storefront since 2007, built by a chef-owner who spent years working in Mexican kitchens — including a stint at a restaurant called Don Juan — before opening a place of his own. The restaurant leans specifically on fresh, hand-made corn tortillas rather than a flour-based, more Americanized approach, positioning itself as one of Nassau County's more consistently authentic Mexican kitchens rather than a Tex-Mex-leaning crowd-pleaser. Newsday critic Joan Reminick singled out Little Mexico in an April 2014 feature specifically ranking the best tacos on Long Island, describing it plainly as "an authentic Mexican eatery" — a distinction Reminick didn't hand out loosely across every Mexican restaurant she covered. The piece specifically called out the restaurant's tacos de lengua, soft corn tortillas piled with tender cubes of beef tongue, as a standout order — a dish that requires real technique and a customer base willing to order beyond the safer chicken-and-steak options most casual taco spots lean on. That commitment to traditional, less mainstream cuts and preparations runs through the rest of the menu, too: tacos arrive dressed simply, with chopped tomato, onion, cilantro, radish, and lime rather than the shredded cheese and sour cream toppings more common at Americanized taco counters. It's a format built to let the filling and the fresh tortilla carry the dish, rather than burying either under heavy toppings — the kind of restraint that tends to signal a kitchen cooking for people who already know what they're ordering rather than trying to make an unfamiliar cuisine feel safer for first-timers. Having operated continuously from the same Westbury address for nearly two decades, through a period when Long Island's Mexican food scene has grown considerably more crowded with both authentic and Tex-Mex-leaning competitors, is itself a meaningful signal — Little Mexico built its reputation before much of that competition existed and has kept its core identity intact rather than chasing trends that came later. Regulars who've been ordering the same tacos de lengua since the Newsday feature ran over a decade ago are effectively voting with a decade-plus of repeat business. For a Long Island taco list, Little Mexico is the essential "authentic, unshowy corn-tortilla taqueria" entry — hand-made tortillas, a genuine tacos de lengua, and nearly two decades in the same Westbury storefront, built by a chef who spent years in other people's Mexican kitchens before opening his own.
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