The doors are open at 180 Boardwalk. Hacienda Tulum, the Mexican steakhouse built into the ground floor of Long Beach's Superblock development, is seating diners, taking reservations and cooking through dinner with the Atlantic filling its windows, and this week the group behind it made the opening official. Long Beach has had boardwalk food for a century. It has never had this: a fine-dining room directly on the boards, planned to run all year, where the surf is the view from the table rather than the reason you left it.

What is on the table

The kitchen answers to culinary director Eduardo Salgado, a Culinary Institute of America graduate who ran the kitchen at 'Emat in Mexico's Valle de Guadalupe wine country, and the menu reads like a steakhouse that wandered south and came back happier. The grill section runs through rib eye, New York strip, cowboy, cowgirl, tomahawk and filet mignon, each finished with a guajillo and garlic compound butter, grilled sweet peppers and scallions. The dish the group leads with is a set of sliced rib-eye tacos built on Pat LaFrieda beef under a crust of griddled Oaxaca cheese.

Around the steaks sits a long Mexican coastline of a menu. The raw bar pulls oysters from both coasts and stacks a seafood tower with caviar service. There are green and black aguachiles, Ensenada ceviche, truffled duck flautas and mussels steamed in mezcal. The fish list stays close to home where it can, with Long Island hake alongside branzino, red snapper and a Puerto Nuevo style lobster. And the sauces are a statement of intent all by themselves: five moles, in pink, green, poblano, manchamanteles and truffle, the kind of slow, layered cooking a walk-up beach window cannot do. Dessert leans playful, with a sweet corn flan, a churro with pistachio ice cream and arroz con leche.

A second room is still to come. Cemelle, a 24 seat agave bar tucked inside the restaurant, is planned as its own destination for tequila, mezcal and cocktails like the house mezcalita made with piloncillo and passionfruit.

Three Tulums on one stretch of boards

Hacienda Tulum is the top tier of a three-part plan the Tulum group has been assembling on this block all year. The walk-up Tulum Taco Stand faces the boardwalk for the towel-and-sandals crowd, the full-service Tulum Tacos and Tequila handles margaritas and weeknight dinners, and the Hacienda is the evening-out room, with indoor and outdoor seating, a patio and a private dining room. The operators, longtime friends Nicolas Geeraerts and Tommy Mitsios, grew the Tulum name from Mineola and Baldwin before betting its biggest room on Long Beach.

The bet is the year-round part. Boardwalk businesses in Long Beach have always lived and died by the summer calendar, and a restaurant of this ambition only works if people drive to the beach in January for dinner. The Hacienda is built on the assumption that they will, that a dining room on the ocean is worth the trip precisely when the crowds are gone and the boards are empty and the Atlantic is doing its best winter theater.

The lot everyone walked past

The address matters as much as the menu. The six oceanfront acres between Riverside and Long Beach boulevards sat behind a fence for roughly forty years, the famously cursed Superblock that outlasted every plan announced for it since the mid 1980s. The development that finally filled it brought apartments, condominiums and a stretch of boardwalk-facing commercial space, and the Tulum group took the largest piece of that ground floor, roughly 5,800 square feet at the base of the new buildings.

When this publication covered the Hacienda in September, it was a promise: a steakhouse in its final days of construction on a lot Long Beach had written off. Now it is a lit dining room on the boards. For a city that spent four decades walking past sand and weeds in the middle of its own oceanfront, dinner over that exact spot is more than a new restaurant. It is the block finally joining the boardwalk.

If you go

Hacienda Tulum is at 180 Boardwalk in Long Beach, with reservations open on its website and by phone at 516-882-4837. Come for a tomahawk, stay for the moles, and if the evening is mild, ask for the patio: the Atlantic does not charge a supplement.