The restaurant building at 62 Montauk Highway in Westhampton, home to Buoy One for the better part of a decade and to The Ketch after that, is being remade as a sports bar called Big Al's Clubhouse. The company behind it, Big Al's Clubhouse LLC, has spent the summer laying the groundwork to run a full bar at the address, and the plan pairs that bar with a working kitchen: Big Al's intends to feed people, not just pour for them.

A clubhouse built by friends, according to the friends

The bar's own public page describes the concept plainly: a sports bar where fans, friends and families watch every game together, built around food, drinks and game-day energy. A construction post from early April shows the interior coming together, with the owners framing the project as a group of friends putting up a clubhouse of their own. Would-be regulars have been asking for an opening date in the comments for months. None has been announced yet, which suggests the finish line is close but not crossed.

The corner it is taking over has fed Westhampton for years

The address matters more than the name for anyone who drives Montauk Highway. Buoy One brought its Riverhead seafood operation to 62 Montauk Highway at the start of the 2010s and made the corner a reliable stop for lobster rolls and fried flounder for years. After Buoy One's Westhampton run ended, The Ketch took the building, serving a casual menu of steaks, burgers, wings and seafood, and was active as recently as this spring, hosting a fundraiser for the Westhampton Beach St. Patrick's Day parade in March. The Ketch's own page now lists the restaurant as permanently closed. The turnover, in other words, is fresh, and the building is not sitting empty for long.

The stretch of highway it sits on is one of the more recognizable in the hamlet, across from the sword-fighting statues that have marked Casa Basso for generations of beach traffic. A sports bar is a different bet than seafood on that corner, and arguably a smarter one for the ten months of the year when the beach crowd thins and the year-round Westhampton, Eastport and Speonk crowd wants somewhere to watch the Jets lose in company.

It is also a corner that rewards operators who commit. Buoy One lasted the better part of a decade there because it treated the address as a year-round restaurant rather than a summer stand, and The Ketch kept the lights on by cooking for the locals, not just the beach traffic. Big Al's is walking into a building that already knows how to be a neighborhood restaurant, with a dining room, a kitchen and a parking lot that Montauk Highway drivers have been pulling into for fifteen years.

What happens next

Openings like this one come down to the unglamorous last mile: staffing, stocking and a sign going up on the highway. A company that has pushed the project forward twice in a single month is a company with a construction schedule, and the pace suggests the owners want to be open sooner rather than later. Football season starts in two weeks. Whether Big Al's makes kickoff is still an open question, but Westhampton is getting its clubhouse either way, and the corner that has been feeding the hamlet since the Buoy One days is going to keep doing it.