The building at 716 Sunrise Highway in Rockville Centre spent decades as the village's TGI Fridays, the red-striped standby where south shore birthdays ended in sparklers and loaded potato skins. Then the chain collapsed around it and the dining room went dark. Now the corner has its next act, and it could hardly be more different: KPOT, the all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue and hot pot chain that has been opening restaurants at a pace almost no one in the industry can match, lists Rockville Centre as its next Long Island address, and state records tie the new restaurant to the old Fridays building on Sunrise Highway.

Grills in the table, broth beside it

If you have not been to the Bay Shore location, the format takes about one sentence to understand and one visit to get hooked on. Every table at a KPOT has a grill built into it and a burner beside it, and for a flat price the kitchen keeps sending whatever you order: marinated short rib, brisket, pork belly and spicy chicken for the grill, and seafood, vegetables, noodles and thin-sliced meats for a bubbling pot of broth you season yourself. You cook, you combine, you go back for more. It is dinner as an activity, which is a large part of why the chain's dining rooms fill with birthday groups on the same nights Fridays once owned.

The company says it has more than 100 restaurants open across the country with more than 50 on the way, a growth curve few full-service brands have matched, barely a decade after the first KPOT opened. Long Island got its first taste in 2024, when KPOT opened at the Westfield South Shore mall in Bay Shore, between the Cheesecake Factory and Macy's. The chain's own map also lists Westbury, at the Samanea New York center on Old Country Road, and now shows Rockville Centre as coming soon.

The corner Fridays left behind

The address makes the story. TGI Fridays was a Long Island fixture for decades, and Rockville Centre's was one of the survivors of the chain's first big cut, in January 2024, when Bay Shore, Islandia and Massapequa Park went dark and seven Island locations remained. The reprieve did not last. The chain's American operating company went through bankruptcy that fall, dozens more restaurants closed in the months that followed, and the company's own location finder now lists exactly two Fridays on Long Island, in Central Islip and at Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream. Rockville Centre did not make the cut.

Fridays itself is trying to climb back. The company announced in late September that a Central Islip franchisee will build five new Fridays across New York State, its first American growth deal in more than a decade. But that comeback does not run through Rockville Centre. The Sunrise Highway building is going to a different kind of table entirely, one where the reader does the cooking.

Rockville Centre keeps reloading

The village's dining strip has been in constant motion this year. Dodici reopened under new owners after three decades on North Park Avenue. Sage & Sea is taking over the old Aperitif space. A new restaurant group is building out the corner where Catch 13 went dark. Add an all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue hall on Sunrise Highway and Rockville Centre starts to look like the rare downtown where the question is not what closed, it is what is opening next.

There is no announced opening date yet, and buildouts of this size take months, so do not cancel your weekend plans for it. For now, Rockville Centre sits on the chain's own locations page marked coming soon, alongside Albany, the only other New York location in the pipeline. When it does open, expect the formula that packs the Bay Shore dining room: a flat price, a table full of raw short rib, and the smell of the first batch hitting the grill the moment the door opens.

For a generation of Long Islanders, 716 Sunrise Highway is where the waiters sang and the dessert arrived on fire. The next generation may know it as the place where dinner cooks in the middle of the table. The building keeps the same job either way: it is where Rockville Centre goes to celebrate nothing in particular.