Walk from Adelaide Avenue to Atlantic Avenue in East Moriches and you're covering less than half a mile, both streets ending at the same bay. One of those addresses has been under the same owner since 2015 and has spent a decade quietly adding services rather than reinventing itself. The other has changed its name and its cuisine twice in about three years, and this summer it's doing it again. If you eat locally and pay attention to what's actually open on a given Tuesday, that difference tells you something about how this stretch of Moriches Bay actually works.
Three Concepts, One Dining Room
The building at 215 Atlantic Avenue has good bones and a bad habit. It sits right on Moriches Bay, and before it was anything else it was Coral Tapas & Wine Bar. In May 2023, a husband-and-wife team out of Huntington, Salvatore and Christina Sorrentino, took over the space and opened it as ITA Kitchen, their third location after Bay Shore and Garden City South. They leaned into 360-degree water views and a menu built around dishes like pesto risotto balls and ricotta gnocchi.
ITA Kitchen ran there for roughly three years. Then, in late March 2026, ownership confirmed to Greater Long Island that SALT on the Water, the longtime Merrick waterfront restaurant, was taking over the same address for a second Long Island location. The target was a late-June opening, with hopes of welcoming guests before the Fourth of July. The plan leans hard into the boating crowd that already fills Moriches Bay all summer: about ten dedicated boat slips, service brought directly to guests on their boats, and a stated intent to book private events like weddings and showers, plus partnerships with nearby wineries aimed at the East End tourism traffic that passes through on the way to the Hamptons and North Fork.
None of this makes SALT a bad bet. The Merrick original has held its own waterfront reputation for more than a decade, and a boat-slip build-out is a real investment, not a paint job. But if you've lived here through the Coral Tapas years and the ITA Kitchen years, you already know that a great water view on Atlantic Avenue doesn't guarantee a long tenancy. The building keeps drawing serious operators. It just doesn't seem to keep any one of them.
The One That Didn't Reinvent Itself
Now walk over to 99 Adelaide Avenue. Silly Lily Fishing Station has been renting boats and selling bait out of the same spot on Moriches Bay since 1932. Jay Scott bought the property in 2015 after growing up fishing those same waters, and instead of rebranding the place into something else, he restored the original wooden cottage and kept adding to what was already there. He brought in vintage 16-foot dories with their old Tohatsu outboards, added Sunfish and Flying Scot sailboats, kayaks, and stand-up paddleboards, and partnered with East Quogue's Stone Creek Inn to launch Silly Eats, a food truck built out of a 1950s Chevrolet Grumman Olson van.
That food operation has since grown into Lily's Seaside, a lobster shack serving coastal food and cocktails on-site through the season, alongside the boat rentals, sailing lessons, and eco-tour paddling trips that were always the core of the business. Nothing about Silly Lily has been replaced. It's been layered.
That's the difference worth noticing if you actually live here rather than just passing through on a summer weekend. Atlantic Avenue keeps attracting concepts that arrive with real ambition and real money behind them, and still turn over every few years. Adelaide Avenue has run on one owner's steady additions for over a decade. Both are waterfront addresses on the same bay. The businesses that last here aren't necessarily the fanciest ones. They're the ones where somebody owns the dirt and isn't renting it back to a rotating cast of restaurant groups.
The Farm Stand That Found a Landlord Who Isn't Selling
There's a third data point that makes the same case from a completely different angle. Barn Again Farm started as a home farm stand run by Matt Gartelman, who moved to the Moriches from Wantagh with his family in 2022 and was thirteen by the time the stand made its next move. He'd been running the stand out of his family's property on Bernstein Boulevard, on a farm just under two acres.
In spring 2025, Gartelman moved the stand to the historic Ann Smith Duck Farm Tin Barn, at the corner of Bay Avenue and Montauk Highway in East Moriches, opening there for the first time on April 18 and 19 of that year. The move happened because he'd gotten to know the volunteers at the Ketcham Inn Foundation's Book Barn back in October 2024, and the Foundation offered him the Tin Barn as a new home for the stand. In exchange, Barn Again Farm donates a percentage of its proceeds back to the Foundation to help fund restoration of its historic properties. Two seasons in, the arrangement is still standing.
The Ketcham Inn Foundation, a registered nonprofit, has spent decades stewarding the Terrell-Havens-Terry-Ketcham Inn and its associated buildings, including the Tin Barn Gartelman now uses. That inn dates to 1693 and once hosted Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on their way to visit William Floyd at his estate in Mastic. A nonprofit foundation isn't going to sell that barn to the highest bidder or swap it for a different tenant when a three-year lease runs out. It exists specifically to keep these buildings in community use. That's a very different kind of stability than a commercial lease on Atlantic Avenue, and it's exactly why a thirteen-year-old's farm stand found a more durable home there than a restaurant with real capital behind it found two blocks away.
What's Actually Different Along the Water Right Now
If you're trying to keep track of who's where along the East Moriches waterfront, here's the current lineup:
- SALT - East Moriches (215 Atlantic Avenue): the newest of the three, targeted for a late-June 2026 opening ahead of July 4th, with roughly ten boat slips and a layout modeled on the Merrick original.
- Lily's Seaside at Silly Lily Fishing Station (99 Adelaide Avenue): coastal food and cocktails served on-site through the season, alongside the marina's boat, kayak, paddleboard, and sailing rentals that have been building for over a decade under the same owner.
- Barn Again Farm (Bay Avenue and Montauk Highway): now in its second season at the historic Tin Barn, with proceeds still supporting the Ketcham Inn Foundation's restoration work.
Why This Matters If You Already Live Here
None of this is really about which restaurant has the better menu. It's about understanding why the same half mile of shoreline produces both a restaurant that's changed hands twice in three years and a marina that's added services under one owner for over a decade. If you've wondered why Atlantic Avenue always seems to have something new to try, and why Adelaide Avenue always seems to have the same guy running the boat rentals, the answer isn't luck or quality. It's who holds the deed and what they're trying to do with it. A restaurant group leasing waterfront square footage is making a bet that has to pay off fast. An owner-operator who bought the property outright, or a nonprofit that exists to preserve a specific building, is playing a longer game by definition.
That's worth knowing the next time a new sign goes up on Atlantic Avenue. It's probably not the last one.
If you're thinking about what a home near this stretch of Moriches Bay is actually worth in today's market, or you just want a second opinion on the neighborhood from someone who's watched it change for years, reach out to Donna Neyland for a conversation grounded in what's really happening on the ground here, not just what the listing photos show.
