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No Good Burger Joint
That No Good Burger Joint opened in Baldwin, founded by brothers Marcello and Anthony — six years apart in age — who set out specifically to bring a quaint, neighborhood burger joint back to the town they'd grown up in on Long Island. What started as a straightforward passion project built around a single technique, the smash burger, has grown into what local coverage now regularly calls one of Long Island's most talked-about burger destinations. The smash technique is the entire premise: prime beef, ground fresh daily in-house, pressed hard onto a hot griddle to maximize the crisp, lacy, caramelized edge that's become the calling card of the national smash-burger wave over the past several years. No Good Burger Joint built its reputation on executing that specific technique consistently, at volume, out of a single Baldwin storefront — a harder thing to sustain night after night than a menu photo makes it look. After five years of steady business at the original brick-and-mortar, the brothers expanded into a No Good Burger Truck, extending the same smash-burger recipes into catering and event work across the Island rather than opening a second fixed location right away — a more cautious growth path than many newly popular burger spots take, and one that's let them keep quality control centered on the same team that built the original menu's reputation. The "award-winning recipes" line the brothers use to describe their own menu isn't just marketing shorthand — it reflects a kitchen that treats the flagship Baldwin location as the origin point of everything the brand has built since, the place "where it all started" in the founders' own words, rather than a legacy storefront being coasted on while the real energy goes into newer locations. Loaded fries and a rotating list of build variations round out a menu that stays centered on the core smash burger rather than sprawling into unrelated dishes, keeping the kitchen's focus narrow enough to execute the technique well at speed. The choice to expand via a food truck rather than a second storefront is a meaningful signal about how Marcello and Anthony think about the brand's identity: catering and event work let them carry the same smash-burger recipes to a wider Long Island audience without diluting the original Baldwin location's day-to-day service or asking a second kitchen crew to replicate the exact technique the brothers built their reputation on in the first place. For a Long Island cheeseburger list, No Good Burger Joint is the essential "hometown smash burger, done seriously" entry — two brothers building a genuine local reputation one thin, hard-smashed patty at a time out of a single Baldwin storefront, before ever expanding beyond the neighborhood that raised them.
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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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