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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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P.S. Burgers
P.S. Burgers has operated out of a small storefront on 2nd Street in Mineola since 2012, built around a premise that was still fairly novel for a Long Island burger joint at the time: a menu centered on 100% grass-fed beef rather than the grain-fed standard most fast-casual burger spots default to. Grass-fed beef runs leaner and carries a slightly different, more mineral flavor than grain-fed, and P.S. Burgers built its entire identity around that distinction rather than treating it as a footnote on the menu. The restaurant's stated mission is to draw from "the 4 corners of the world," and that shows up literally in the protein list — alongside the grass-fed beef, P.S. Burgers offers lamb, bison, turkey, and salmon patties, plus veggie and Beyond Burger options, letting a single restaurant serve a genuinely wide range of dietary preferences without splitting into separate menus. That range is unusual for a Long Island burger spot of this size; most independent burger joints on the Island pick a lane — classic diner, smash, or gourmet — and stay in it, while P.S. Burgers has built a following specifically by refusing to. The build style leans gourmet rather than smash: thicker, more deliberately constructed patties finished with toppings meant to complement each specific protein rather than a single house sauce applied across the board. That approach has made P.S. Burgers a regular stop for Long Islanders looking for something beyond a standard beef cheeseburger without leaving Mineola for a more expensive sit-down restaurant, and it's earned steady coverage from local outlets like Going Local Long Island and Burger Weekly specifically for that global, protein-forward menu structure. Operating from the same modest Mineola storefront for over a decade, without the kind of expansion into multiple locations that similarly popular Long Island burger spots have pursued, has let P.S. Burgers stay closely controlled by the same team that built its grass-fed sourcing relationships in the first place — a level of focus that shows up in the consistency regulars describe across reviews spanning more than ten years of operation. Sticking to grass-fed sourcing for over a decade also means absorbing a cost the restaurant could have quietly walked back at any point when grain-fed beef prices dipped — grass-fed beef consistently runs more expensive than the conventional alternative, and a small independent storefront choosing to hold that line for ten-plus years, across five distinct proteins rather than just the flagship beef patty, is a more durable commitment than a limited-time menu feature. For a Long Island cheeseburger list, P.S. Burgers is the essential "grass-fed, globally-minded" entry — a Mineola storefront that's spent over a decade proving a burger joint can serve lamb, bison, turkey, and salmon patties alongside a proper grass-fed beef cheeseburger without losing focus on any single one of them.
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