The New Moon Café was a Montauk Highway fixture for nearly five decades, and its closing in December 2025 left a gap on the street that people still talk about. The story of that gap is easy to tell as a story about a building. It is better told as a story about a person, because East Quogue didn't wait for the café to close to honor the man who ran it. The town already had a park pavilion named after him.
Ronald Campsey Pavilion sits at Bay Avenue Park Marina, a short walk from where the New Moon Café operated on Montauk Highway for 46 years. The ribbon was cut in June 2024, more than a year before Ronnie and Shana Campsey served their last Tex-Mex plate. So when residents ask what's replacing the café that anchored downtown since the 1970s, the honest answer is that nothing replaces Ronnie Campsey. The building changed hands. The person is still part of the hamlet's map.
Forty-Six Years Behind the Counter
Campsey came to Long Island from Texas, following a girlfriend here on his twentieth birthday, and eventually bought the East Quogue restaurant and built out the kitchen himself. What he opened became a Tex-Mex fixture that outlasted most of the businesses that opened around it. The café closed for good in December 2025.
That closure explains why the building sat empty through most of 2026 while a very different kind of business tried to fill the gap for roughly three weeks.
What's Actually Replacing It, and When
The New Moon Café property sold for $1.8 million to the Chambers family, who already run Mary's Pizza and Pasta at three other East End locations. Bill, Vinny and Chris Chambers took over the original Islip Terrace restaurant in 2005, bought a Speonk building in 2016, and opened there in 2019. This will be their fourth location, and by their own account it won't open soon. The plan is to demolish part of the existing structure and double the building's footprint, which Bill Chambers has said pushes the realistic opening to 2027 at the earliest.
That's the detail worth sitting with if you've been driving past a dark storefront wondering when the pizza place shows up. It isn't a renovation measured in months. It's a rebuild measured in years, from a family that has done this three times before and knows exactly how long it takes.
Into that gap, for roughly three weeks from mid-August through Labor Day weekend, stepped Bethenny Frankel.
About Three Weeks, One Pink Storefront
Frankel opened Supermodel Cafe at 481 Montauk Highway, a pop-up built around Goldberg's Famous Bagels, with three-dollar plain and everything bagels topped by twelve-dollar spreads that leaned into the brand's humor, caviar next to an everything-but-the-bagel blend. The run was planned as roughly three weeks from its August 13 opening, timed to close around Labor Day weekend, and it did. For a hamlet that normally watches summer traffic pass it by on the way to Southampton and East Hampton, roughly three weeks of destination lines was its own small event. It was never meant to be a second act for the corner. It was a cameo.
Here's where that leaves Montauk Highway as of late September.
| Business | Status | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Stone Creek Inn | Open | Celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2026 |
| Sakura House | Open | Japanese menu on Montauk Highway |
| Tony's Asian Fusion | Open | Popular for dinner |
| EQ Pizza & Deli | Open | Longtime Main Street stop |
| Goldberg's Famous Bagels (East Quogue branch) | Open | Separate from the Supermodel Cafe pop-up |
| Sonny's Prime Village Meat Shoppe | Open | Organic, grass-fed chops and imported Italian goods |
| Haskell's Bait and Tackle | Open | Where the fish stories start |
| New Moon Café | Closed since December 2025 | Sold to Mary's Pizza and Pasta for $1.8 million |
| Mary's Pizza and Pasta (East Quogue) | Under construction | Chambers family targeting 2027 or later |
| Supermodel Cafe | Closed | Ran roughly three weeks, August 13 through Labor Day weekend |
The street isn't thinning out. It's mid-transition, with one long-tenured landmark gone, a proven local operator building something bigger in its place, and a headline-grabbing pop-up that already did its job and left.
The Farm Stands Already Moved to Fall
While the restaurant news gets the headlines, the seasonal businesses on the edges of Montauk Highway have quietly turned over the way they do every September. Densieski Farm, the family operation on Lewis Road that marked its hundredth year in 2018, has shifted its stand from spring asparagus and strawberries to pumpkins and root vegetables, alongside sourdough and focaccia from the Dough Den. Hampton Fruit & Vegetable, closer to the Main Street strip, is still running with local produce and cut flowers. Neither business waits for a ribbon-cutting or a construction permit. They just change what's on the table.
On the Civic Calendar Before Winter
The organizations that run East Quogue's public life, the EQ Civic Association, the Chamber of Commerce, the Fire Department, and the Beautification Committee, are already planning the events that carry the hamlet into the holidays. EQ Holiday on Main has grown into a market drawing more than 100 vendors alongside music, Santa, and family activities, a bigger production each year than the Easter Egg Hunt at the Village Green or the summer's Seafood Party that precede it. There's also a standing fundraiser to install a Main Street clock, and the newly formed EQ Park District has started work on landscaping downtown and acquiring land for green space, the kind of infrastructure that doesn't show up in a restaurant review but shapes what the street looks like walking past it.
Where the Street Empties Out
For the quieter half of the day, East Quogue's public land does most of the work. Pine Neck Sanctuary, a 77-acre preserve on Southampton's Bay to Bay Trail, has more than two miles of footpath through pine barrens and marsh that end on a wide-open view of Shinnecock Bay. Bay Avenue Park Marina has a boat ramp, floating dock slips, and kayak racks, along with the EQ Native Plant Garden and the Ronald Campsey Pavilion, the same pavilion named for the man whose café just closed two decades into its second act. Dolphin Beach stays less crowded than the more traveled ocean stretches, and lifeguards are on duty during season for anyone who wants the water without the line.
None of this required a construction permit or a celebrity to show up. It was already there, and it's the reason East Quogue's slower pace outlasts whatever storefront happens to be dark on Montauk Highway at any given moment.
The New Moon Café's sign is down. The Ronald Campsey Pavilion's sign isn't going anywhere.
If you're trying to understand how East Quogue's Main Street is actually changing, block by block and season by season, Jennifer McLauchlen has been watching this stretch of Montauk Highway for years and is glad to walk you through what's coming next.
