Roto All Day cafe reopens in Bay Shore

It was open for less than a year, but tiny Roto Grocery made a big impression on Bay Shore, serving breakfast, lunch, coffee and more in an environment that was both cool and warm, hip and homey. After a nearly two-year absence, Brock Ferraro and Jack Monahan are back in action with their new Roto All Day Cafe, which opened on Wednesday.

"It’s like we picked up where we left off," Ferraro said. "During our soft opening, people were coming in, ordering their old orders, wearing Roto T-shirts that we don’t even sell anymore."

At 1,600 square feet, new Roto is about 10 times bigger than old Roto. ("Our kitchen is bigger than the original location," he quipped.) Seats have increased from four to 32, including 10 at the bar and not including seasonal seats on the patio.

Old Roto’s "kitchen" was an induction burner and a small tabletop oven; now there’s a proper oven, flat top, fryer and broiler. The opening menu is tight but imaginative, and it features one of Long Island’s best breakfast sandwiches. Modestly named "breakfast sandwich," it consists of a puffy disk of soufflé egg that fits neatly onto a grilled milk-bread bun along with house-made pork sausage, house-made zhug (a spicy Middle Eastern green sauce) and Cooper Sharp Cheddar. There’s also scrambled egg "roll up" with potatoes or chorizo sausage, avocado toast with Aleppo pepper and a jammy egg, lox toast with pickled onion and scallion cream cheese.

More lunch-appropriate sandwiches include the "Tunacado," with Ortiz tuna salad, pesto, fennel and Cooper Sharp Cheddar; a tri-tip steak sandwich with miso-peppercorn rub, lemon-Dijon aioli and crispy artichokes; freshly roasted turkey club with whipped goat cheese, marinated cucumbers and Little Gem lettuce. Right now most of the produce is from H.O.G. Farm in Brookhaven hamlet. Most breakfast items range from $9 to $13; lunch, from $16 to $22. There are also chocolate chip (plus coconut and candied walnut) cookies, banana bread and olive oil cake.

On the coffee front, Roto is still serving Two Deaf Dogs coffee with lattes (coffee and matcha) crafted from house-made syrups. New for Roto 2.0 is wine and beer. "The goal is to have not one bottle over $60," Ferraro said. "But we are trying to elevate the experience. If someone comes in asking for pinot grigio, I’m going to try to get them to order the grüner veltliner, or maybe an "orange wine" [made from white grapes that are allowed to ferment with their skins].

Ferraro and Monahan never meant to take such a long break, but fate intervened. Soon after they first opened on Bay Shore’s Main Street in December 2022, workmen from Shoregate, the apartment complex that Tritec Real Estate was building around the corner, started coming in. Monahan recalled, "word made its way up the chain to the people in the C-suite. Then management started coming in and we became friendly."

The Tritec team was looking for a cafe to occupy the ground floor of its building at 101 Fourth Ave. Was Roto interested?

"They could have asked an established Long Island brand," Ferraro said. "They could have gotten Starbucks. But they asked us. And while our rent isn’t cheap, it’s below market value."

The new lease took longer to negotiate. In the meantime, their original landlord found a new tenant, Kismet Coffee, for the old Roto space. The partners vacated in October 2023, thinking they’d be open in the spring of 2024. During the ensuing months, they traveled — to Normandy, to Amsterdam and, frequently, to Brooklyn — for inspiration.

In the coming months, Roto plans to add a full bar and, around the same time, a dinner menu, extending closing time from 6 to 9 p.m. And from there, the sky’s the limit: half-priced wine Wednesdays, vinyl-D.J. Saturdays, oyster-shucking Sundays.

"We were so limited on Main Street," Monahan said. "We had the tools, but not the space to reach our potential. This is what we wanted to do all along."

Roto All Day, 101 Fourth Ave., Bay Shore, 934-500-5580, rotoallday.com. Open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday to Monday, closed Tuesday.