Starting October 1, Al Gusto, the family-run pan-Latin kitchen at 1845 Fifth Avenue in Brentwood, will pour beer, wine and cocktails alongside its food. It is the first time in more than a decade that this corner of Fifth Avenue has been able to serve a drink at all.

A Fifth Avenue fixture grows up

Al Gusto is not a newcomer cashing in on a hot block. State records show the family corporation behind it was formed in February 2016, with Cesar William Martinez at the helm, the business registered to the same Fifth Avenue address it occupies today. The restaurant itself has been feeding the neighborhood for years, opening at 8 in the morning and running late into the night on weekends, with a menu that moves comfortably between Salvadoran pupusas, birria tacos and tostones.

It is a Spanish-first spot in the fullest sense. Its own social feed runs in Spanish and leads with a simple promise: you smile when you taste the cooking. What it has never had, through all of that, is a bar.

The corner has been dry since 2015

The last operator to pour a drink at 1845 Fifth Avenue was a different business entirely, a restaurant called Restaurant Delicioso of LI, which served its last at the end of February 2015. Nothing replaced it. For over ten years, one of the busiest commercial stretches in Suffolk County's largest hamlet has had a restaurant at this address that could serve everything except a beer.

That is a longer dry spell than it sounds. New bars and dining rooms on Long Island cluster heavily in showcase downtowns, the Patchogues and Huntingtons and Rockville Centres, where barrooms change hands as fast as leases do. Brentwood, with far more residents than any of those places, sees a fraction of that investment. When a full bar comes to Fifth Avenue, it is genuinely uncommon, and it says something about a business confident enough in its trade to take on the cost of building one.

The plan looks wider than the dining room

There is one detail worth watching. The space where drinks will be served covers 1845-1847 Fifth Avenue, a step wider than the single address the restaurant has always used. That is the kind of footprint an operator sets up when it plans to use the space next door, whether for a dining room expansion, a bar area or private events. Al Gusto has not announced anything, and the footprint alone does not say what the second storefront is for. But a plan that covers two addresses is rarely an accident.

What changes on October 1

The practical answer is simple: from the first of October, the kitchen that has been serving its birria dry can legally put a cold beer or a cocktail beside it, with the full range of beer, wine and spirits served at the table.

For the neighborhood, it is a small but real upgrade. Brentwood residents who want a sit-down dinner with a drink have long had to leave the hamlet to get one, heading to Bay Shore or Islandia or the Sagtikos corridor chains. Every table that can serve a drink on Fifth Avenue keeps a little more of that spending, and a little more of those evenings, in the community the restaurant already serves.

Al Gusto's hours run daily from morning through late night, and the pours begin October 1. If the second storefront turns into something, the footprint suggests the Martinez family is already thinking past the dining room it has.