Hacienda Tulum opens in Long Beach

Hacienda Tulum, one of Long Beach’s newest restaurants, is giving Long Islanders a reason to visit the boardwalk during the offseason.

The high-end Mexican steakhouse concept, brought by the team behind Tulum Tacos and Tequila in Mineola and Baldwin, will open Oct. 15, owner Nicolas Geeraerts said. Reservations for the opening will be available starting Oct. 1.

Hacienda Tulum will have seating for 175 indoors and 50 outdoors. The restaurant will also have a private room with a private patio. "We wanted to bring some sophistication to the oceanfront," Geeraerts said.

Geerarts hired Eduardo Salgado ,chef of 'Emat, a restaurant in Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico, as full-time culinary director. Salgado graduated in 2018 from the Culinary Institute of America and has been chef at 'Emat since 2020. He hired chef Bruce Reyes and sous chef Mariana Mallen to manage the kitchen day to day. Salgado said he’s learned a lot about the food industry from this experience and hopes the menu at Tulum shows "people that Mexican food is really broad and wide in the spectrum."

The menu includes dishes from Pat LaFrieda’s Prime 850 Club, which is an exclusive tier of beef representing the top 5% of USDA prime grade beef and top 1% of all beef in America. LaFrieda and Geerarts have worked closely together since 2016, "We champion him," LaFrieda said.

"We really wanted to get a classification of beef that was in that top bracket of prime," LaFrieda said, adding that it took him six years to get the Prime 850 Club as an approved USDA program. Hacienda Tulum's menu includes filet mignon, rib-eye, cowgirl and cowboy cuts.

The raw-bar menu includes East and West coast oysters. East Coast oysters are served with melon granita, citrus and pineapple-habanero powder. Other menu items include the Pat LaFrieda sliced rib-eye taco made with a Oaxaca cheese crust, pickled onions and salsa macha, and chochoyotes, which are masa "gnocchi," with pistachio, pumpkin seed and cilantro pesto.

There are 12 specialty cocktails available at the bar, including the piloncillo passionfruit mezcalita, a prickly pear margarita topped with Champagne and made with Cazcabel tequila.

No detail has been spared on the decor here. Guests are enveloped in an elevated and breezy environment. The eatery includes a taco stand with a walk-up window that opened this summer facing the boardwalk, and a still-to-come speakeasy agave bar, Cemelle, an Aztec word meaning peace, tranquility and unity. Set within the restaurant, the bar is expected to open later this year, Geeraerts said, and will have 24 seats and serve a combination of European style tapas and tasting menu eats.

Hacienda Tulum also solves a well-known problem for Long Beach: parking. Guests will have access to the eatery's separate entrance underneath the building, with 68 allocated parking spaces. A private elevator will take diners directly into the restaurant. Valet parking will be offered three to four days a week, depending on business.

The planning of Tulum coincided with a change in the City of Long Beach code that allows businesses on the boardwalk to serve alcohol. John McNally, spokesperson for Long Beach, said the unanimous decision by the city council in April to change the code after many years to allow businesses on the boardwalk to serve alcohol “was something of a clarification,” he said.

“The Allegria Hotel for instance, which abuts the boardwalk, to the north of the boardwalk, has been operating and serving alcohol for 15 years. There was just one piece of the code that prohibited businesses abutting the boardwalk from serving alcohol but it had never really been enforced,” McNally said. “So this council more or less just cleaned it up saying that they could in fact serve alcohol, so it's not serving alcohol on the boardwalk, consumption of alcohol on the boardwalk, it was just a tweak to the code that allowed businesses abutting the boardwalk to serve alcohol on their premises.”

   

Hacienda Tulum, 198 Boardwalk, Long Beach, haciendatulum.com. As of Oct. 15: open Wednesday and Thursday 5 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday 5 to 11 p.m., Sunday 4 to 9 p.m. Bar open: Wednesday and Thursday 5 to 10 p.m. Friday 3 to 11 p.m., Saturday noon to 11 p.m. Sunday noon to 9 p.m.