Tap Room Taps Rockville Centre For Next Tavern

ROCKVILLE CENTRE, NY — The owners of Tap Room will open a fourth tavern in Rockville Centre and celebrate an anniversary of their original Patchogue establishment in the coming weeks.

The bar/restaurant is expected to start serving its popular pub fare and craft beers at 47-51 North Village Ave. the first week of November, said co-owner James Bananno.

In the build-up to the grand opening in Rockville Centre, Bananno and his colleagues will host a block party, featuring food and beer trucks, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their flagship Tap Room at 114 W. Main St. in Patchogue on Oct 10. The festivities will be held from noon to 4 p.m. on Railroad Avenue.

Bonanno had been searching for a space to open a new tavern in Rockville Centre, a town that he said has attributes similar to Patchogue's. He and his co-owners found one in the 5,000-square-foot first floor of the corner building, formerly the site of Arooga’s restaurant, adjacent to the Long Island Rail Road station.

“Rockville Centre is an incorporated village and it’s a walkable town with a lot of other great restaurants and bars,” Bonanno said. “It has something that we’d like to be a part of. It’s just a community that we always had our eye on, and this opportunity presented itself.”

A Blue Point native, Bonanno established Tap Room in neighboring Patchogue in 2011, after which he and his partners opened a second location in Massapequa Park (1010 Park Blvd.) in 2015 and a third in Bay Shore (44-46 E Main St.) in 2019.

Since day one, Tap Room has partnered with Patchogue-based Blue Point Brewing. The tavern serves dozens of craft beers, including seasonal varieties such as pumpkin, on a daily rotation, but always offers multiple Blue Point varieties. These include Toasted, Hoptical and Special Haze.

Among Tap Room’s signature foods are a variety of mussel dishes, including Buffalo mussels cooked in white wine with a buffalo wing sauce and blue cheese, and German mussels prepared with Hefeweizen beer, sauerkraut and kielbasa. Other big sellers are the mac and cheese bowls.

“We have pub fare-bar food but we put a really strong emphasis on being some of the best bar food you’ve ever had,” Bonanno said. “So everything is house-made. We make all of our appetizers, ranging from mac and cheese bites to mozzarella sticks.”

Tap Room also owns Bango Bowls, billed as a “health quick-serve brand” consisting of salads and acai, grain and poke bowls, with six storefronts across Long Island. The Tap Room in Rockville Centre will be the first to feature a Bango Bowls ghost kitchen for pick-up orders and delivery.

Tap Room sports a barn-like wood decor with custom-made tables and multiple flatscreens on the walls for patrons can catch the big games. The tavern also hosts weekly themed nights such as the popular Trivia Night on Wednesdays.

Pending approval from the Village of Rockville Centre, Tap Room expects to open a second-floor catering hall with golf simulators in 2022.

Patchogue Tap Room’s 10th-anniversary party will raise funds for Independent Group Home Living Program, a charity that assists people with intellectual disabilities.