New Wave Seafood has anchored its stretch of Wantagh Avenue since 1995, half fish market and half restaurant, the kind of place where the person filleting your flounder will also tell you how to cook it. In all that time, the one thing the dining room could not do was pour you a drink. As of this week, that changes: the restaurant can now serve beer, wine and cocktails with dinner, a first in the address's history.

The change arrived under the company's legal name, and the name is the best part of the story. New Wave Seafood is owned by 4th Generation Seafood Company, and the fourth generation is not a branding flourish. The Marinello family has been selling seafood on Long Island since 1905, a run of more than a century. Frank Marinello, the fourth of those generations, runs the Wantagh operation today.

A first for the address

The new bar covers cocktails, wine and beer served with food in the dining room, the same full range a white-tablecloth seafood house would carry, and it is built to run for years rather than a season.

It is also, as far as anyone can tell, a first for the building. Thirty-one years of dinners went out of that kitchen with nothing stronger than a soda beside the plate, on a stretch of Wantagh Avenue that sits a short drive from some of the South Shore's busiest bar rooms.

A fish market that learned to cook

New Wave belongs to a specific Long Island genre: the fish market with tables. The market case up front does the retail trade, the kitchen in back cooks what the case sells, and the menu moves with what came off the boats. It is a format that rewards trust, because the same family that picks the fish at the market stands behind the plate that lands on your table.

The Marinellos have been building that trust longer than nearly anyone in the business. The family traces its seafood trade to 1905, four generations of it, and the Wantagh shop has carried the tradition under the New Wave name for three decades. The shop sits on Wantagh Avenue between Sunrise Highway and Jerusalem Avenue, a corridor that has quietly become one of Nassau's better eating streets, and its dining room has long filled on the strength of the fish alone.

Why a bar now

The business has not published its plans, and it has not said whether the pour will start with a modest beer and wine list or the full bar it is now able to run. For a seafood house, the practical difference is easy to picture either way: a glass of cold white wine beside the fish that was in the market case that morning, or a beer with the fried basket, ordered off a menu instead of gone without.

The timing follows a pattern that has been visible across Nassau County all summer. Family food businesses that spent decades as daytime, counter-service operations have been adding bars and stretching into full dinner service, because that is where a neighborhood restaurant's margin lives now. Just last week, a Massapequa pizzeria that has fed its town since the 1970s started down the same road toward wine and beer at the table. Wantagh's turn arriving via its fish market makes a certain sense: the food was never the missing piece.

What it means for dinner

For readers in Wantagh, Seaford and Bellmore, the practical news is simple. The fish market you already trust for the raw ingredient can now put a proper drink next to the cooked one, which moves it from the lunch-and-early-dinner column into genuine Friday night territory. The change is effective now, though how quickly a bar program appears is up to the Marinellos, and businesses often take a few weeks to stock and staff a pour.

The longer arc is the better story. A family that started selling fish when Theodore Roosevelt was president just added the one amenity its Wantagh dining room never had. Very few Long Island food businesses survive four generations. The ones that do tend to know exactly when to change, and by how much.