In a 27east report, Bill Chambers, one of three brothers who run Mary's Pizza and Pasta, said, "I used to live in East Quogue, used to eat at the New Moon and loved the area."
The sentence sounds like nostalgia. It's actually the key to something bigger happening on Montauk Highway this year, where two milestones landed almost on top of each other and look, on the surface, like opposite stories. One restaurant just turned thirty without touching a wall. Another, nearly five decades old, is currently a demolition site. Read them side by side and East Quogue's Main Street tells you something most visitors never notice: the businesses that preserve longstanding traditions and the businesses that change completely are being run, in both cases, by people who already live within a few minutes of the building.
The Anniversary That Kept Its Classics
Stone Creek Inn opened in May 1996, when Chef Christian Mir and his wife Elaine DiGiacomo bought a historic building once known as the Ambassador Inn after spotting it while visiting Elaine's parents' summer home in Westhampton Beach. Within its first year, the 160-seat restaurant earned two-star reviews from both the Long Island edition of The New York Times and Newsday, and thirty years later the couple is still running it themselves.
As 27east reported, the anniversary celebration landed on May 23, which happens to be DiGiacomo's birthday, and the couple marked it the same way they opened: uncorking a 12-liter bottle of champagne that takes three staff members to open and two to pour. From Memorial Day through Labor Day, they ran a $30 prix-fixe Monday menu built from old dishes; DiGiacomo told 27east it was "so folks can come and reminisce." Some of those dishes never left the menu at all. The tiny cheese ravioli with mussels and chive broth and the warm egg custard topped with caviar have been there since the beginning, grouped under a category the owners started calling "the classics" about seven or eight years ago because, as DiGiacomo told 27east, certain dishes can never leave without a riot.
In a 27east report, DiGiacomo said, "Thirty years later and I'm just so excited and proud."
The staff has stayed almost as long as the building. Bartender Phil Eberhardt just retired after 25 years behind the bar. Wine director Gabrielle Walsh helped the restaurant earn a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence. None of this required a renovation. Thirty years in the same room, with the same couple, is the whole point.
The Closing That Changed Everything
A few hundred feet away, the opposite thing happened to a building that had been just as constant. New Moon Café had been what broker Enzo Morabito of Douglas Elliman called, in a Behind the Hedges report, the heartbeat of East Quogue for nearly five decades, run by Ron and Shana Campsey. Ron had started it as a Tex-Mex spot after buying the property years earlier, building the kitchen onto the back himself.
As Behind the Hedges reported, that building sold in December 2025, just before the holidays, for $1.8 million against an original ask of $2.5 million. The buyers were the Chambers family, owners of Mary's Pizza and Pasta, who closed on the deal and immediately began demolition. Their plan is not a light refresh. In a 27east report, Bill Chambers said the family intends to demolish part of the structure, rebuild, and double the size of the building, work that will take considerably longer than a typical buildout. As of this year, the earliest realistic opening for the new location is 2027.
Here's how the two milestones actually compare:
| Stone Creek Inn | New Moon Café → Mary's Pizza and Pasta | |
|---|---|---|
| Opened | May 1996 | Roughly the late 1970s |
| Ownership | Christian Mir and Elaine DiGiacomo, unchanged | Ron and Shana Campsey, sold to the Chambers family |
| What happened in 2025-2026 | 30th season, same building, with longtime menu staples | Sold for $1.8 million against a $2.5 million ask |
| Current state | Open, still in its original building | Mid-demolition, doubling in size |
| Next milestone | Ongoing | Reopening not expected before 2027 |
Why the Buyer Already Lived Ten Minutes Away
It would be easy to read the New Moon sale as an outside investor swooping in on a beloved local spot. That's not what happened. Bill Chambers and his brothers Vinny and Chris, who run the family's three existing locations in Islip Terrace, Farmingdale, and Speonk, live in Speonk, Remsenburg, and East Moriches respectively. All three towns are a few minutes from East Quogue by car. Bill Chambers didn't discover the New Moon building through a listing search. He grew up eating there.
That local proximity also explains where the family's ambitions stop. Chambers has said the brand has no plans to push farther east toward the Shinnecock Canal, where he says costs and complications increase the closer a business gets to it. Mary's Pizza and Pasta already made one eastward jump when it opened its Speonk location in 2019 inside the century-old former Olde Speonk Inn building. East Quogue is, by the family's own account, as far east as they intend to go.
That's the pattern worth remembering the next time a familiar building on Montauk Highway changes hands. In East Quogue, the people buying up legacy properties aren't arriving from somewhere else. They're neighbors who already know the building, the customers, and the stretch of highway well enough to bet their own money on doubling down on it.
What's Actually Staying the Same Along the Strip
The rest of Montauk Highway's food scene isn't standing still waiting to see what happens to the New Moon building. The corridor still runs on a mix that's been stable for years:
- Sakura House and Tony's Asian Fusion cover the strip's Far East flavors
- EQ Pizza & Deli and a branch of Goldberg's Famous Bagels handle the daily grab-and-go
- EQ Wines & Liquors sits within walking distance of both
- Hampton Fruit & Vegetable keeps a farm stand running for produce and cut flowers
- Sonny's Prime Village Meat Shoppe stocks grass-fed chops alongside imported Italian pantry goods
- Haskell's Bait and Tackle is still where most fishing trips start
None of these businesses are mid-transition. They're the reason the highway still functions as a real Main Street while its two anchor restaurants sort out their own stories at opposite ends of the change spectrum.
The Rest of the Weekend Hasn't Moved Either
Away from the highway, East Quogue's outdoor routine hasn't changed shape this year, and there's a small detail that ties it back to the same family behind New Moon Café. Bay Avenue Park Marina, where boaters and kayakers put in alongside floating dock slips, sits next to the Ronald Campsey Pavilion, named for the same Ron Campsey who ran New Moon for decades. The pavilion had its ribbon-cutting in June 2024, meaning the Campsey name is still stamped on the waterfront even as the family's restaurant building comes down a short drive away.
Farther south, Pine Neck Sanctuary remains a 77-acre preserve managed by the Nature Conservancy along Southampton's Bay to Bay Trail, with more than two miles of footpaths through pine barrens and marsh that end at an open view of Shinnecock Bay. It's the kind of walk that hasn't needed an anniversary or a sale to stay exactly what it's always been.
That's the real shape of East Quogue right now. A thirty-year-old restaurant that has kept its building and longtime menu staples sits a few doors down from a fifty-year-old one being rebuilt from the studs, and both are run by people who already called this stretch of highway home before they ever wrote a check for it.
If you're curious how a hamlet this small keeps producing stories like these, or you'd just like to talk shop about what's changing along Montauk Highway, Natalie Lewis is always happy to talk East Quogue, whether or not real estate ever comes up.
