For forty years, the six oceanfront acres between Riverside and Long Beach boulevards were the emptiest famous lot on Long Island. Long Beach residents know the parcel as the Superblock, and for most of their lives it has been a fenced stretch of sand and weeds in the middle of a city that has no land to spare, kept vacant by one collapsed plan after another while the boardwalk ran right past it. That era is ending with tacos. The development that finally filled the lot now has a taco stand on the boardwalk, a full sit-down restaurant beside it, and this month it gets the biggest piece of the trio: Hacienda Tulum, a Mexican steakhouse the size of a small theater, is in its final days before a September grand opening.

Three concepts, one stretch of boardwalk

The operators behind it are not new to Nassau County. Tulum Taco & Tequila opened its original restaurant at 945 Merrick Road in Baldwin, where its liquor license has been active since May 2025. The Long Beach expansion runs under a sister company, and the State Liquor Authority issued its license for the boardwalk premises on July 8, covering units of The Breeze at Long Beach and running through the middle of 2028. The leasing deal, announced in early 2025, put the restaurant into roughly 5,800 square feet at the base of the new development, the largest retail space in the project.

What has actually appeared on the boardwalk since then is more ambitious than one restaurant. Tulum Taco Stand opened first this summer, a walk-up window built for the beach crowd: tacos, bowls and frozen margaritas for people still sandy from the towel. Tulum Tacos & Tequila, the sit-down room, followed. Hacienda Tulum is the third act and the reason to plan an evening rather than grab a snack. The company has been previewing it all August as something Long Beach has not had before: a Mexican steakhouse directly on the boardwalk, with the dining room looking at the Atlantic. Its own site lists the address at 180 Boardwalk and is already taking reservations.

Why this lot means more than dinner

Any restaurant opening on the water in September would be pleasant news. This one carries more weight because of where it stands. The Superblock sat empty since the mid-1980s, cycling through owners, proposals and lawsuits, including a long legal war over a revoked condo permit that cost the city dearly and became a cautionary tale in local government. Towers were announced and never built. For a barrier-island city of thirty-some thousand people, a dead sixth of the oceanfront core was a civic wound everyone walked past on the way to the beach.

B2K Development finally broke ground on the parcel, and the result is one of the largest projects the city has ever seen: The Breeze, a rental building whose first tenants began moving in at the end of 2023, and The Boardwalk, its neighboring condominium buildings. The ground floors were always the public stake in the project, the part of the deal that turned a private tower into a block of the city. That is the space the Tulum group took, and the taco stand serving beachgoers this summer was the first visible proof that the Superblock had joined the boardwalk instead of just looming over it.

What to expect this month

The steakhouse positions itself well above taco-stand prices, with the kitchen leaning into dishes that take longer than a beach lunch: steaks, seafood and traditional preparations that the quick-service windows cannot do. The group has been running previews for local tastemakers through August, and the response videos making the rounds lean heavily on the room itself, which was built to feel like a hacienda courtyard that happens to face the ocean.

An exact opening date has not been posted publicly; the company has said September, and the reservation system is live now. For readers who want the lower-commitment version first, the taco stand and the sit-down taqueria are already open on the same stretch, and the boardwalk in early September, after the crowds thin and before the cold, is arguably the best two weeks of the Long Beach year.

There is a version of this story that is just a restaurant listing. The reason it is more than that is the forty years of nothing that came first. A generation of Long Beach kids grew up biking past a fence where the city's showpiece block should have been. The next generation will grow up thinking it was always normal to get a margarita there and watch the waves. That is what getting a lot unstuck actually looks like: not the ribbon cutting, but the ordinary Tuesday dinner afterward.