On the morning of August 20, a filing landed at the New York State Liquor Authority that Smithtown has been waiting more than a year to see. Big Belly BBQ, LLC applied for a new restaurant liquor license at 863 West Jericho Turnpike, Suite 2, the storefront where Big Belly Que served brisket and burritos until a fire in the building shut it down last summer. The application is fresh, the address is exact, and the signal is hard to misread: a restaurant does not spend money licensing a bar in a space it has no plan to reopen.

The fire that emptied the building

Just before 6:47 on the morning of July 27, 2025, the Smithtown Fire Department was called to a commercial building fire at 863 West Jericho Turnpike. The first chief on scene found heavy smoke pushing from the roof and from multiple storefronts and upgraded the call to a working commercial structure fire. The flames had broken out above the ceiling of the bagel shop in the multi-tenant building, and crews from Hauppauge, Commack, Kings Park, Nissequogue, Nesconset and St. James turned out alongside Smithtown to knock it down, with Central Islip and Centereach units covering the district. The fire was declared under control at 7:33 a.m. The one person inside at the time walked away unhurt, and town fire marshals took over the investigation.

The building survived. The businesses inside it did not get off so easily. Big Belly Que, which occupies Suite 2, has been dark ever since.

Thirteen months of quiet, then a filing

For most of the year that followed, the only signs of life were digital. The restaurant's website went up with a banner promising that a reopening date would be posted soon. On Facebook, the owners posted that the brick and mortar would be opening back up after the fire, while also dealing with a second, stranger setback: the restaurant's main Facebook page was hacked, and the owners wrote that they were locked out of it with no help from the platform in getting it back.

Meanwhile the paperwork that once let Big Belly Que pour a drink quietly ran out. State records show the restaurant's previous license, first issued in September 2023, expired at the end of September 2025, two months after the fire, while the dining room sat closed. Whatever reopening the owners were planning, they would need to start the licensing process over from the beginning.

That is exactly what the August 20 filing is. The application, logged at 11:37 a.m. with intake already complete, is for a restaurant license at the same suite in the same building, and state records show it is the same class of license the restaurant held before the fire. It is the first concrete, dated, public step toward reopening that has appeared anywhere outside the owners' own promises.

A catering trailer that became a dining room

Big Belly Que did not start as a restaurant. It began in 2014 as Big Belly BBQ, a catering company started by three friends who cooked barbecue for parties and events across Nassau and Suffolk. After years of catering, the partners opened the Smithtown dining room, pairing slow-smoked barbecue with a Mexican fusion menu: brisket, ribs and pulled pork sharing the board with burritos and quesadillas, plus burgers for the unconverted. The room built a following in the years before the fire, and the catering side of the business kept working through the closure, handling orders even in the days right after the flames.

This building has come back before

There is a strange echo in the address. Fire department archives show that 863 West Jericho Turnpike also burned on an April night in 1977, back when the property was home to the Gables Bar. The site came back from that fire, and the shopping strip that stands there today has held decades of Smithtown businesses since. If history holds, the barbecue smoke should be the pleasant kind again before long.

What happens next

A pending application is not an opening date. The State Liquor Authority still has to review the filing, a process that typically runs weeks to months, and the owners have not yet posted the reopening date their website promises. But the sequence is now running in the right direction: the renovation promises, the new application, and a storefront on one of Smithtown's busiest roads that people have driven past for a year wondering about. For anyone who had a favorite order at Big Belly Que, the honest answer to when it comes back is still soon. As of August 20, soon has paperwork behind it.