3 Long Island seafood houses that have lasted the decades

With all due respect to tuna tartare and miso black cod, sometimes you just want an old-fashioned seafood dinner. You’re craving a dozen freshly shucked clams reclining on a bed of ice followed by a golden-brown fillet of local flounder or a steamed lobster that is too hot to touch — but you’ll start cracking into it anyway. You'll take a beer over a glass of wine, you want the décor to be aggressively nautical and you don’t want to change out of your flip-flops either.

Luckily, Long Island can lay claim to a number of old-school fish houses where little has changed over the decades.

Peter's Clam Bar, Island Park

Or 85 years. That’s when Peter’s Clam Bar in Island Park was established. Current owner Butch Yamali was fuzzy about the exact date until he dug up the restaurant’s first bill from the Town of Hempstead and confirmed that, in 1939, Peter Sempepos opened the restaurant’s front doors to Long Beach Road and the back wall to Barnum Inlet. Peter’s younger brother, Leo, who had been a chef at the Essex House in Manhattan, ran the kitchen and soon bought the restaurant.

Leo’s children, Phil, Sue and Ann, plus Ann’s husband, Peter Costalas, eventually took over from their father. (Phil, a master shucker, can be seen in an old photo wearing a black glove on his right hand to protect it from clamshell injuries.) The family sold it around 2001 and the next incarnation, Yamali said, lasted about 10 years.

Yamali grew up down the street from Peter’s and went on to forge his own career in hospitality: His Dover Group includes The Milleridge Inn in Jericho, The Coral House in Baldwin, Maliblue in Lido Beach in addition to concessions at schools, hospitals and parks.

Yamali bought Peter’s "in boarded-up condition" soon after it was ravaged by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and reopened it in 2014. Peter and Ann lived around the corner from his mother and, one day, he knocked on their door to ask for their restoration counsel. With their help, he said, "we changed everything back to the original Peter’s," he said. "We went back to their recipes and I even hunted down the brand of oyster crackers they used, Bury’s."

The view is better out back — the water and the gentle hills marred only by the Town of Hempstead’s decommissioned waste transfer station — but the ultimate Peter’s experience is to sit at one of the tables hard by Long Beach Road’s five lanes of traffic and consume plate after plate of clams on the half shell, courtesy of Luis Pagliucci and his team. Pagliucci has been shucking at Peter’s for 10 years and he can open a dozen clams in 40 seconds (I timed him).

So central are clams on the half shell to his business, Yamali has held a clam-eating contest every year since 2015. Last year’s winner, Peter Adams, slurping for the Island Park Fire Department, downed 174 in seven minutes. (This year’s contest is Aug. 11.)

If Pagliucci is a shucking sensation, his colleague, Arturo Amaya, is a frying fiend. In the kitchen, Amaya oversees the six fryolators with preternatural ability. "He can anticipate just how much time it takes to fry shrimp, scallops, clams, a piece of flounder. He knows exactly when to pull it up," Yamali marveled.

Once upon a time, frying was the preferred method at Peter’s. Now broiling is catching up. Change happens. When Yamali took over in 2014, he added a lobster grilled cheese (lobster salad, mayonnaise, bacon and Gruyère), a Mediterranean crab cake sandwich (with tzatziki and cucumber salad) and seafood paella. An additional dining room and outdoor decks had been built in the 1980s but he subsequently bought the building next door to access its 100-space parking lot, also adding a tiki bar and, this year, 8 slips for patrons coming by boat.

More info: 600 Long Beach Rd., Island Park, 516-432-0505, petersclamhouse.com

Gosman's Dock, Montauk

A lot can change in 10 years. A lot more can happen in 81. That’s the sweep of restaurant history Robert Gosman Jr. has in mind when he talks about the business his family founded in 1943. Located on the hook of land that separates Block Island Sound from Lake Montauk, Gosman’s Dock grew from small fish packer to a waterfront chowder stand to the sprawling 7-acre complex that encompasses a 500-seat restaurant, a clam bar, a sushi bar, a rooftop bar, a fish market, an ice cream parlor and boutiques.

Parts of the main restaurant and, especially, its wood-paneled bar, look pretty much the way they did when Gosman was born in 1962. "The main growth started in 1968 and went through the '70s," he said. "We added the clam bar and the shops, which were designed to mimic a New England-style village."

The kitchen has barely changed since then. At one end of the hot line, two dishwasher-sized kettles boil side by side. One handles steamers (AKA belly, soft-shell, long-neck or Ipswich clams). The clams, already portioned into Eisenhower-era slatted metal baskets, wait in the refrigerator until a cook places them in the kettle. At noon, when the restaurant opens, the boiling water is fresh but, by 9 p.m., it will have taken on the savor of thousands of clams. This is the broth that, the next day, will be served alongside each order so that diners can swish the steamers to remove any errant sand while not diluting any clam taste.

The other kettle is where lobsters meet their fate. Each is served with drawn butter and the same coleslaw first made by Robert’s great aunt, Teresa Gosman.

Robert, the restaurant’s general manager, recalled that when he first got involved, about 40 years ago, "the menu was very basic. It was lobster, clams on the half shell, steamers, local fish." Staying true to Gosman’s essence without staying stuck in the past is, he said, "a slippery slope."

Even though Gosman’s is synonymous with lobsters, "we used to sell more whole ones, but nowadays people don’t want to get their hands dirty — don’t want that mustache of butter on their upper lips. That’s why I introduced twin lobster tails in the mid-90s and also brought back the original lobster rolls from the '50s."

Keeping current means subtracting as well as adding and recycling: "We used to do fried Ipswich clams, but people don’t order them anymore. We still serve steamers, but a lot of people don’t understand how to eat them."

Gosman noted that Montauk is changing rapidly. "The traffic has definitely gotten worse, and the demographic is changing — it’s just too expensive out here for most families." As the owner of a business that has, for eight decades, catered to families, that pains him.

For the time being, he said, Gosman’s isn’t going anywhere — although it will close for the season at the end of September, as it does every year. But he conceded that it has been on and off the market for the last few years and that the decision to stay or sell rests with his father and uncles.

More info: 500 W Lake Dr., Montauk, 631-668-5330, gosmans.com

Chowder Bar, Bay Shore

Eighty miles west of Montauk, Pat Robinson and Lynda Nenninger recently renewed their lease on Chowder Bar until 2050. This shipshape little structure next to the Fire Island ferry terminal in Bay Shore was built as a yacht brokerage office in 1946, became a restaurant in 1975 and was purchased by the two women in 1988.

Friends since both attended Mepham high school in Bellmore, Nenninger went to college for hotel-restaurant management and forged a career in hospitality. Robinson studied biochemistry and accounting and embarked upon a career in Pharma.

Then, one day in 1988, recalled Robinson, "Linda called me at work and asked me. ‘You want to buy a restaurant?’ I said, ‘Let’s take a look,’ and, two weeks later, we were here. I was 26, she was 25, we didn’t know anything."

They sunk everything into their new venture, moving home with their respective families and, in Robinson’s case, selling her car. Their first year was also the first year Chowder Bar stayed open all year-round. Until 1999, when they winterized the building, they only had baseboard heating in the main room — the current dining room "was basically a greenhouse — we would wrap it in plastic during the winter."

The eatery’s main room looks much the way it did in 1975: Dominated by a wood-grained Formica counter, the walls are a collage of decommissioned helms, pennants and lanterns, while lines and clam baskets hang from the wood-beamed ceiling. With few exceptions, the menu matches the décor.

Two newish introductions — Thai-chili shrimp tacos and blackened catfish tacos — have ascended to the bestseller list but, Robinson said, "our most popular items haven’t changed much: the "fishwich" [fried flounder and American cheese on a toast], fried seafood boats, broiled seafood combo, linguine with clams, raw clams, clam chowder."

On a good week in summer, Chowder Bar goes through about 2000 clams. All Atlantic hard-shelled clams are the same species, Mercenaria mercenaria. From smallest to largest, the designations little neck, middle neck, top neck, cherrystone and quahog (AKA chowder clam) refer only to size. Robinson, who won Fire Island’s Kismet clam-shucking contest in 2007 and 2009 (the only years she entered), provided an object lesson in which clams are best for which jobs.

"We usually use the little necks for serving on the half shell," she said, "but we’ll shuck any size the customer wants. We use the top necks for baked clams casino and oreganata, the cherrystones for frying and the chowder clams for chowder."

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Chowder Bar is famous for its clam chowders. New England (white) and Manhattan (red) have been on the menu from the beginning but around 2008, customers began requesting a mixture of the two. This so-called Long Island clam chowder appears to have been invented by Popei’s of Bethpage back in the 1980s and was added to the menu here in 2013.

Robins was quick to point out that, "how good your Long Island chowder is depends on how good your Manhattan and New England chowders are."

Red or white, each chowder begins with a broth made from 100 chowder clams steamed in 10 gallons of water. The broth is strained, the clams are chopped and set aside. In two other huge pots, aromatics — onions, celery, potatoes and bacon — are sautéed. Now the soups diverge: Crushed and whole tomatoes are added to the Manhattan pot, along with chopped green peppers and carrots. Roux (a thickening mixture of butter, flour and milk) along with cream and half and half are added to the New England. Each base gets a thorough dousing with broth and, at the last minute, a generous portion of those chopped clams.

To fill an order of Long Island chowder, a server ladles a portion of Manhattan into a bowl, then carefully tops it with another ladle of New England for a vaguely yin-yang presentation. It's up to the diner to gently marbleize it or stir it into one creamy, pink bowlful.

Not only does Long Island chowder outsell the other two, it’s become Robinson's favorite as well. "It’s the perfect compromise," she said, "for the person who finds Manhattan too acidic or New England too creamy." 

Her approach to chowder could also serve as an explanation for Chowder Bar's longevity — as well as a motto for any of the Island's old-school fish houses: "Be flexible, but keep the basics." 

More info: 123 Maple Ave., Bay Shore, 631-665-9859, thechowderbar.com