The building at 2 Pulaski Road in Kings Park has been quiet since January, when Relish, the diner that drew weekend brunch lines to the edge of Main Street for years, served its last plate. This week the silence ended: Ditch, the Montauk-inspired surf shack with locations in Bay Shore and Port Jefferson, announced on its own channels that it has bought the property and will open its third restaurant there.

A surf shack working its way north

Ditch takes its name and its whole personality from Ditch Plains, the surf beach in Montauk where owner Tracy Smith spent his childhood summers watching the local lineup. He opened the first Ditch on Bayview Avenue in Bay Shore in May 2023 with co-owner Alex Anderson, and the formula has not changed since: tacos, poke bowls, beach food done properly, fresh-squeezed cocktails, and dining rooms built out of weathered wood and murals so the whole thing reads like a beach escape that happens to be open in February.

Kings Park will be the third room to get that treatment. The company confirmed the move Monday with a short message telling Kings Park it would see the town soon, and its reservations page now lists Kings Park alongside Bay Shore and Port Jefferson as coming soon.

The Port Jefferson playbook

If you want a preview of how this goes, look at what happened up the shore. In 2025, Ditch bought the former Spycoast space at 140 Main Street in Port Jefferson. Spycoast closed at the end of that June, the renovation crews moved in, and Ditch celebrated its grand opening on August 15, about two months later, with the executive chef and opening team trained at the Bay Shore flagship first.

That location settled quickly into village life: lunch and dinner daily, late nights on Fridays and Saturdays with live music and DJ sets running to 2 a.m., takeout for the ride home, and a menu that runs from Korean chicken sandwiches to poke bowls to the tacos the name promises. The bet was that a waterfront village with year-round foot traffic would support beach food in all four seasons, and the bet has held. Smith has described the Port Jefferson room as a year-round beach food destination for locals and day-trippers, which is a fair summary of the brand as a whole: Montauk nostalgia, served indoors, twelve months a year.

What Kings Park is getting, and what it lost

Relish was not a casualty nobody noticed. The diner-style spot built a devoted following over its run, the kind of place with hundreds of reviews and a brunch crowd that treated it as a standing appointment, and when it went dark in January the question of what would happen to the building became a running conversation in town. When the Ditch news landed in the Kings Park Community group on Facebook, the post collected more than a hundred comments, and the pun economy ran hot for a full day.

The fit is easier than it might look. Kings Park is not a beach town by reputation, but it has its own stretch of water at the Kings Park Bluff, Sunken Meadow State Park next door, and a downtown that has been steadily filling in around the train station. A restaurant built on the idea of an endless summer is less of a stretch here than a glance at the map suggests.

When it opens

No opening date has been announced yet, and if Port Jefferson is the template, the renovation comes first: expect the weathered woods, the murals and the relaxed energy before the doors open. Bay Shore to Port Jefferson took the better part of a summer from purchase to grand opening.

For Kings Park, the bottom line is the good kind: the most-watched empty building in the hamlet has a future, it involves tacos, and the people behind it have now done this twice. Keep an eye on the corner of Pulaski Road. The surf is coming to it.