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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
Swell Taco
Swell Taco opened in Babylon Village in 2012, started by siblings Steve and Brooke Jankow, who both grew up in California eating what they've described simply as really good Mexican food — and then spent years on Long Island missing it. Rather than settling for a compromise version of the West Coast tacos and burritos they'd grown up on, the Jankows built their own restaurant around that specific California-Mexican style, importing a genuinely different regional sensibility to Long Island's taco scene. That California through-line shows up in more than just the menu — Swell Taco's whole identity leans into a beachy, surfer-inflected atmosphere that stands out in a Babylon Village dining scene otherwise dominated by more traditional Italian and American spots. It's a vibrant, casual room built for the kind of easy, unfussy meal the Jankows grew up with, rather than a formal sit-down Mexican restaurant experience. The menu centers on marinated steak tacos, fried mahi-mahi fish tacos, and beer-battered shrimp tacos alongside quesadillas, burritos, and sides — a lineup that leans closer to Baja and Southern California taco traditions than to the more corn-tortilla-forward, interior-Mexican style found at some of the Island's other taco spots. Free chips and green salsa on arrival is a small but telling touch, the kind of casual hospitality gesture that's standard at California taquerias and less common at more formal East Coast Mexican restaurants. Swell Taco's self-description as Long Island's best taco and burrito bar is obviously a marketing line, but it reflects real staying power — the restaurant has operated continuously in the same Deer Park Avenue storefront for well over a decade, building a following specifically among Long Islanders looking for the fish-taco, fried-and-battered California style rather than a more traditional street-taco format. That specific regional identity — Cali surf culture transplanted wholesale to a Babylon storefront — is something few other Long Island taco spots have attempted with the same consistency. Siblings running a restaurant together long-term is itself a meaningful structural detail — Steve and Brooke Jankow have kept ownership and daily decision-making within the same two-person partnership since 2012 rather than bringing in outside investors to accelerate growth, which has kept Swell Taco's menu anchored to the specific California dishes they grew up on rather than drifting toward a more generic, broadly appealing Mexican-restaurant format as it might have under different ownership pressures. For a Long Island taco list, Swell Taco is the essential "California taco culture, transplanted whole" entry — fried mahi-mahi and beer-battered shrimp tacos served in a beachy, surfer-vibe Babylon Village room, built by California-raised siblings who opened the restaurant specifically because they couldn't find that style of Mexican food anywhere else on Long Island.
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