Kelly Dijorio
Drive down Atlantic Avenue in East Moriches and you will pass exactly one building that has spent the better part of a year changing hands: 215 Atlantic, longtime home to ITA Kitchen, an Italian spot that ran on a seasonal schedule and handed its address to a new owner this year. According to ownership at SALT on the Water, the Merrick waterfront restaurant that built its reputation over more than a decade, the plan was to take over that footprint and have it running by late June, ideally before the Fourth of July. Whether that exact date held or slipped by a few weeks, the more interesting fact is not the calendar. It is what that address actually offered the new owners: roughly ten boat slips and direct water access for a restaurant built to serve the Moriches Bay boating crowd from the dock, not just the parking lot.
That detail is the whole story of how dining works in this hamlet. East Moriches does not grow a restaurant scene by filling storefronts along a commercial strip. It grows one by recirculating a small number of waterfront addresses that come with slips already attached. If you want to understand what is actually new here this summer, you have to think about the bay the way the operators do: as the only real estate that matters.
Every other hamlet along this stretch of the south shore has some version of a Main Street where turnover happens in ordinary retail cycles. A lease ends, a new tenant signs, a sign changes. East Moriches has almost none of that rhythm, because almost none of its commercial buildings sit on water. The ones that do are rare enough that when one becomes available, it draws attention from operators who already have a proven concept somewhere else and are looking specifically for bay frontage, not square footage.
SALT choosing the old ITA Kitchen building is a clean example. The appeal was never really the dining room. It was the roughly ten dedicated slips that let boaters tie up and get served without ever setting foot on land, plus a location positioned to catch both the local boating community and the wineries-and-weddings crowd that flows through the East End all season. A restaurant without water access could copy the menu. It could not copy the slips.
The clearest proof of this pattern predates SALT by nearly a hundred years. Silly Lily Fishing Station has operated on Moriches Bay since the 1930s, and it is one of the last fishing stations still running anywhere on Long Island's south shore, a category that once numbered at least a dozen across both shores of Suffolk County, with notable south shore locations at Fort Pond Bay in Montauk and the Shinnecock Canal. The name comes from two fishermen's wives, Sylvia and Lily, who ran the place as one of the most successful stations of its era. Today it still functions as a working marina with 46 slips for boats up to 26 feet, plus moorings, alongside sailboats, paddleboards, kayaks and canopied Day Lily skiffs for anyone who just wants to putter around the bay for an afternoon.
What changed is not the dock. It is what happens on land next to it. The property's food and drink arm, Lily's Seaside, opened out of a refurbished 1950s bread truck parked beside the marina's cold-line building, and it is run in partnership with Christian Mir and Elaine DiGiacomo, the husband-and-wife team behind Stone Creek Inn in East Quogue, about 15 miles east. Lily's Seaside is not technically a full restaurant kitchen. Stone Creek prepares the food at its East Quogue location and transports it to East Moriches, where it is reheated and assembled on-site: a charred street corn Caesar with lobster, fries buried in warm crabmeat and aioli, a Thai-style lobster stew, tacos finished with gochujang or spicy soy barbecue, pickled vegetable banh mi, sliced prime rib and gruyere on ciabatta, and the requisite lobster rolls.
That commissary arrangement only makes sense once you accept the premise: the dock was the asset worth building around, and the kitchen bent to fit it, not the other way around.
The same logic shows up in the marinas that keep East Moriches boaters moving in and out of the bay. A short list of what is actually operating on the water this season:
None of these are restaurants, but they are the reason a restaurant with slips is worth more here than one without. And they explain a wrinkle that catches out-of-towners off guard every season: Moriches Inlet, the passage boaters actually need to reach open water, is flagged by the U.S. Coast Guard as unreliable for anything but shoal-draft boats, three feet or less, and even those should only run it with prior local knowledge. The bay itself is calm. Getting to it from the ocean side is not something you improvise. That single fact is part of why local operators, not passing tourists, tend to be the ones who know which slips and which routes actually work.
None of this is abstract history. It shapes what a resident can walk into this week. The Moriches Library is running its LawnFest today, a low-key community gathering on the library grounds that has become a fixture of the late-summer calendar. Bradstock, the hamlet's own end-of-summer live music gathering, is set for September 5. Between now and then, the bay itself stays the busiest venue in town: paddleboards and kayaks out of Silly Lily, boats queuing at Moriches Bay Marine's fuel dock, and, if the summer went as planned, a dining room full of boaters tied up at the old ITA Kitchen address under its new name.
The thread connecting all of it is the same one that has run through this hamlet for a century. East Moriches was never going to build a Main Street, because its most valuable ground was never the storefront. It was the water in front of it. A fishing station that opened when Sylvia and Lily first ran its docks in the 1930s and a waterfront brand deciding this year that ten boat slips were worth more than a bigger dining room are separated by nearly a hundred years and are making the exact same calculation.
If you live here, you already feel this without naming it: the businesses that last are the ones that figured out the bay is the customer, not the backdrop. Everyone else is renting a storefront on a street that was never really the point.
For those who know this stretch of Moriches Bay well and want a deeper read on what's changing along the water, from new construction and land opportunities to the neighborhoods just east and west, Kelly DiJorio has spent years tracking exactly this kind of local shift across the central Hamptons corridor. Let's Connect if you want to talk through what's happening on your stretch of the water.
Kelly pays close attention to every detail and takes pride in providing her clients with an unwavering dedication to their best interests through the highest level of confidential, personal, and professional service.
Let's Connect