Andrew DeRobertis was driving out to meet a friend in early 2025 when he spotted the sign. It was posted outside a squat building on West Montauk Highway that most people in Hampton Bays could place without thinking twice: the old Friendly's, empty since 2017, then briefly something else, then something else again. "The sky opened up and it gave me a ray of light," he said of that moment. What he was looking at wasn't obvious to most drivers passing by. To Andrew, it was an opening.
That building has a strange history for a town this size. In under a decade, it has operated under four different names, and understanding why three of them failed while the fourth is thriving tells you something real about how Hampton Bays actually works, not the version of the hamlet that shows up in a weekend visitor's Instagram feed.
Four Names, One Address
Friendly's closed in 2017. Two years later, restaurateur Salvatore Biundo opened Hamptons Standard in the space, only to be served papers for trademark infringement by Standard International, the hospitality group behind The Standard Hotel in Manhattan. He renamed it Salvatore's and swapped the continental menu for Italian. Then came Barona Bay in 2023, a New American and European concept that, as one local business report put it, didn't last long. By the fall of 2024, the building was empty again and back on the market.
Here's the timeline laid out plainly:
| Restaurant | Approximate Years | What Happened |
|---|---|---|
| Friendly's | Closed 2017 | Long-running chain location shuts down |
| Hamptons Standard | 2019 | Opened, then hit with a trademark infringement claim from Standard International |
| Salvatore's | 2019–2023 | Renamed, pivoted to an Italian menu |
| Barona Bay | 2023–2024 | New American/European fusion, short-lived |
| DeRo's Food & Family | 2025–present | Opened by brothers Andrew and Evan DeRobertis |
Four concepts in roughly eight years is not a coincidence. It's a pattern, and patterns at a single address usually point to something structural about the location itself, not bad luck repeating four times in a row.
Why This Corner Kept Losing
Hampton Bays has been shaped by water since before it had a name people would recognize today. The hamlet sits between the Great Peconic Bay to the north and the Shinnecock and Tiana bays to the south, linked by the Shinnecock Canal. That geography created two very different kinds of restaurant real estate, and understanding the difference explains why 149 West Montauk Highway struggled for so long.
One kind of restaurant here sells a view along with the food. Sundays on the Bay sits on Dune Road with sunsets over the water built into the experience. Edgewater looks out over Shinnecock Bay from a deck built for exactly that purpose. Amalfi Coastal Kitchen & Cocktails opened as a waterfront concept explicitly built around the bay setting. R.AIRE, tucked inside the longstanding Hampton Maid property, sells an evening built around chef-driven tapas and a curated wine list in a destination-dining frame. These places can draw a diner from Manhattan or a weekend renter on Dune Road who is choosing an experience, not just a meal. The water does a lot of the selling.
The other kind of restaurant here has none of that. It sits on the highway, in a stretch that also holds fast food and strip retail, with a parking lot instead of a dock. A restaurant in that spot can't charge a view premium and can't count on a seasonal wave of vacation renters wandering in off a beach walk. It has to earn repeat business from people who live here year-round, which means it has to be good enough, affordable enough, and familiar enough that a family in Hampton Bays chooses it on a random Tuesday in February, not just a Saturday in July.
That's the test 149 West Montauk Highway kept failing. A trademark dispute, an identity swap, a short-lived fusion concept: each version was aiming, in its own way, at something closer to a destination than a neighborhood habit. None of them built the kind of local trust that a highway address without a water view actually needs to survive an off-season.
What DeRo's Understood That the Others Didn't
Andrew and Evan DeRobertis didn't come to this cold. Their father, Paul DeRobertis, owned and ran Paul's Italian Restaurant on Hill Street in Southampton for 50 years before selling the business in 2023. Both brothers grew up working there. Andrew has said the first place he came home to from the hospital as a newborn was the restaurant. That's not branding language, it's the actual origin of how they think about the business.
When they opened DeRo's Food & Family in the spring of 2025, they didn't try to reposition the building as a destination. They built a menu of chicken parmesan, shrimp francese, tacos, and burgers, priced for a family to come back weekly rather than once a season, and they said it outright: "What my father taught us about the restaurant business is you have to take care of the locals." Their clientele now comes from East Hampton, East Quogue, Riverhead, and Southampton as much as from Hampton Bays itself, which suggests the model is working beyond just filling a neighborhood gap.
The details reinforce the strategy rather than decorate it. The brothers bottle their own condiment line, Hampton Dressing Company, including a Caesar dressing based on their grandmother's 80-year-old recipe, a product that started because customers at their father's restaurant kept asking to buy it. The restaurant added a liquor license after opening and has run rotating specials like a Monday martini-and-meatball combo priced for a weeknight, not a special occasion. There are wall panels inside dedicated to highlighting good deeds in the community, a small gesture that only makes sense if your business model depends on people feeling like this is their place.
By the time this fall arrives, DeRo's will have been open for roughly a year and a half, already outlasting Barona Bay's run in the same space. That's not a guarantee of permanence, but it's the first version of this building in nearly a decade that looks built for the long game rather than a quick concept swap.
The Same Pattern Shows Up Off Montauk Highway
This local-first logic isn't confined to one restaurant. On September 26, the Hampton Bays Harvest Festival returns to the lawn between the Hampton Bays Community Center on Ponquogue Avenue and Southampton Town Hall, bringing local produce, art, live music, and children's entertainment. It's not a tourist draw built around a beach or a brand name. It's a town gathering on a municipal lawn, timed for the exact week the summer rental crowd thins out and the people who actually live here reclaim their own calendar.
Line that up next to what happened at 149 West Montauk Highway and the pattern gets harder to miss. The restaurants that struggle here tend to be the ones borrowing a destination playbook that works two miles away on the water. The ones that stick, and the civic events that draw a real crowd, are the ones built for people who plan to be here in February too.
What to Watch on This Stretch of Highway Now
None of this means the water-facing restaurants are doing anything wrong. Sundays on the Bay, Edgewater, Amalfi, and R.AIRE all serve a real purpose and a real customer, and Hampton Bays is better for having both kinds of dining rather than just one. But if you live along this corridor and you've watched storefronts churn for years without quite knowing why, the answer isn't bad management or bad luck repeating itself. It's that a highway address without water frontage has to compete on trust built over years, not atmosphere built for a season.
If DeRo's holds its current pace through another winter, it will be the first tenant at that address since Friendly's to prove the location can support something permanent. That's worth watching, not because it changes anything about property values on the highway, but because it says something true about what Hampton Bays actually rewards: consistency with the people who are already here, long after the summer traffic clears out.
If you're weighing what a specific corner of Hampton Bays, or any hamlet along the East End, actually tells you about its long-term character rather than its seasonal surface, that's the kind of read Michael Petersohn brings to every conversation. Request a Personal Market Consultation to talk through what you're seeing on the ground here, and what it might mean for your own plans.
