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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.
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Right Coast Taqueria
Right Coast Taqueria traces back to a friendship forged nearly three decades ago at the Houlihan's restaurant chain, where founders David Preisler and Richard Zoob met while working in full-service corporate restaurants. The two eventually decided to build something of their own — smaller, faster, and simpler than the corporate dining rooms where they'd spent their careers — opening the first Right Coast Taqueria in Deer Park in 2018 with a deliberately lean staff and a scratch kitchen built around a handful of core dishes done well. The restaurant markets itself directly as the "home of the birria taco," leaning into the dish's national popularity over the past several years with a version built entirely from scratch rather than shortcutting the notoriously labor-intensive braised-beef preparation. That birria taco has become the specific dish regulars point to when recommending Right Coast Taqueria to first-timers, alongside other specialty items like Mongolian beef tacos and pupusas that push the menu beyond a strictly traditional Mexican format into a broader, street-food-inspired range. Plans for a second location were already underway when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, forcing Preisler and Zoob to pause expansion at a moment when many restaurants were closing outright rather than merely delaying growth. That the taqueria not only survived the shutdown period but eventually resumed expanding — into Ronkonkoma and, later, East Setauket, where a grand opening was celebrated with local town officials in attendance — reflects real staying power for a concept built by two restaurant-industry veterans rather than first-time owners. The taqueria also runs a mobile kitchen operation out of its Holbrook footprint, extending the same scratch-cooked menu to catering and event work beyond its fixed locations — a growth pattern that mirrors how several of Long Island's newer, most successful counter-service concepts have chosen to expand carefully rather than overextending into too many storefronts too quickly. Preisler and Zoob's decades in corporate full-service dining before opening Right Coast Taqueria gave them a specific, informed reason to build something smaller and simpler instead — a lean staff, a tight core menu, and a scratch kitchen are all choices that push against the operational complexity of the big-format restaurants where the two men spent their earlier careers. That background is part of why the birria taco in particular gets the from-scratch treatment rather than a shortcut version: the founders had already seen, firsthand, what cutting corners on a labor-intensive dish looks like in a larger restaurant, and built their own concept specifically to avoid it. The East Setauket opening, celebrated with local town officials present, is itself a small but real marker of how the taqueria has been received as it's grown — town officials don't typically show up for openings that haven't already built some local goodwill. For a Long Island taco list, Right Coast Taqueria is the essential "home of the birria taco" entry — a scratch-kitchen taqueria built by two Houlihan's-trained restaurant veterans, whose Deer Park original has grown into a multi-location Long Island taco name anchored by a genuinely from-scratch birria taco.
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