Walk down Bayberry Avenue in Merrick this month and you'll pass a restaurant that didn't exist in June. Walk five blocks over to Merrick Avenue in October and you'll stand in the middle of a street fair now in its 35th year. Both of those facts are true at the same time, on the same handful of blocks, and neither one explains the other on its own. Put them side by side and you get a clearer picture of how commerce actually works in this hamlet than either headline gives you alone.
A New Concept on Bayberry Avenue
Start with 1960 Bayberry Avenue. For years the address was home to Anchor Down Bar and Grill, the kind of long-running neighborhood spot that becomes a landmark by default. After Anchor Down closed, Rabbit Hole Bar and Grill took the space with a similar concept. Rabbit Hole closed in 2024, and the storefront remained vacant before its next tenant arrived.
This summer it got a new tenant: Betty's Burgers & Ice Cream Bar, which opened in July 2026 in the same footprint. Co-owner John Breeze told Greater Long Island the pitch was straightforward: the community could use something more casual, and the water made the location worth betting on.
"We felt like the Merrick community could use something like this, and being so close to the water was the perfect spot for it."
What's worth noticing is how Betty's is positioning itself. Both of its predecessors framed themselves as bar and grill concepts, evening-driven, drink-forward. Betty's is building around a proprietary beef blend, smashburgers, Philly cheesesteaks, wings, and foot-long hot dogs, with a full bar and both indoor and outdoor seating layered on top rather than leading the menu. It's a daytime-friendly, family-friendly pitch for an address whose previous two restaurant concepts were bar and grill formats.
Here's the turnover in one place:
| Era | Business | Concept |
|---|---|---|
| Long-running, pre-2020s | Anchor Down Bar and Grill | Traditional bar and grill |
| Closed 2024 | Rabbit Hole Bar and Grill | Bar and grill |
| Opened summer 2026 | Betty's Burgers & Ice Cream Bar | Burgers, ice cream, casual dining |
A third concept now occupies the address, with the same water view and foot traffic pattern. Whether Betty's format will find an audience remains to be seen. Its different approach makes it worth watching over the next few seasons, rather than treating it as just another restaurant opening.
The Weekend That Doesn't Change
Now walk over to Merrick Avenue itself, where the calendar follows a different rhythm: it repeats. The Merrick Fall Festival and Street Fair returns October 23 through 25, 2026, marking the event's 35th year, run by the Merrick Chamber of Commerce.
The organizers have kept the format consistent enough that a chamber representative described it to Patch in almost procedural terms last fall:
"Friday is just rides. On Saturday and Sunday is the street fair, plus the rides. The street fair is five blocks long. We close up Merrick Avenue and we have over 300 vendors."
Those five blocks run along Merrick Avenue near the train station, and last year the Long Island Rail Road parking lot itself became carnival ground for the weekend, filled with a Ferris wheel, a dragon roller coaster, and a slide that kept steady lines all weekend. Sixth graders from Chatterton School ran a bake sale in the middle of it. A trailer stage near Smith Street carried live music through the crowd noise.
What makes the festival different from Betty's Burgers isn't just its longevity. It's who shows up to sell. Per that same Patch report, the vendor mix is deliberately local: shop owners from the avenue itself opening their doors for the weekend alongside outside craft and food vendors. The fair isn't an event that happens to Merrick Avenue. It's built out of Merrick Avenue's own storefronts, temporarily doubled by three hundred more.
Where the Two Meet
Here's the connection worth sitting with. A business on this stretch that opens in July gets exactly one shot at the fall calendar's biggest built-in audience before winter thins out the waterfront crowd. Betty's Burgers will be roughly three months old when Merrick Avenue closes to car traffic and a five-block wall of neighbors and visitors starts walking past storefronts on foot, at a pace slow enough to notice what's new. That's not a marketing plan the restaurant designed. It's just the shape of the calendar it landed in.
The contrast is the real story here, not either fact in isolation. Merrick Avenue's festival has returned for 35 years, while the Bayberry Avenue address has hosted three restaurant concepts. The event returns each fall; the restaurant has a new menu and a daytime-friendly format this summer. Together, they offer two different views of Merrick's commercial life.
For anyone who already calls Merrick home, that's the useful read on the season ahead. The festival will look, structurally, almost exactly like it did last October and the October before that. Betty's Burgers is the variable. How a daytime-friendly, dessert-forward format compares with the address's earlier bar-and-grill concepts is something to watch over the coming seasons, not something a July opening announcement can settle.
If you're heading to the Fall Festival this year, the walk down Merrick Avenue from Sunrise Highway toward the LIRR lot passes directly through the kind of storefront experimentation that's been playing out a few blocks over all summer. Worth a burger on the way.
If Merrick's mix of long-running institutions and shifting storefronts has you thinking about what your own corner of the hamlet is worth right now, Robyn Goldowski can walk you through it. Get your instant home valuation and see what today's Merrick market means for your address specifically.
