barBar Rescue · Season 3, Episode 24 · Aired October 27, 2013
Bungalow Bar
Rockaway, New York
It is still up and running.
On the show
Season 3, Episode 24 · October 27, 2013 · bar
Revisited in Back to the Bar: The Luck of the Irish (S4E52, aired 2016-05-08) as Bungalow Bar
What happened after
Waterfront bar/restaurant at 377 Beach 92nd St, Rockaway Beach NY, at the foot of the Crossbay Bridge. Thriving -- named USA TODAY's Best Beach Bar of 2026.
What happened on the show
Hurricane Sandy had nearly destroyed the Bungalow Bar, and Taffer arrived at the Rockaway Beach waterfront facing a triple challenge: rebuild a once-successful bar the storm had wrecked, get the five brothers who owned it to set aside their disagreements, and retrain a staff long out of practice. The reconstruction was extensive enough that the staff training and stress test had to be held at a borrowed Manhattan bar while the Beach 92nd Street building was rebuilt. The rescue carried real warmth: the owners of Turtle Bay, by then rebranded as Spirits on Bourbon, visited to hand the staff new cups, T-shirts and a 5,000 dollar donation. As Taffer left, the brothers gave him a framed photo of an American flag raised in Sandy's floodwaters, mounted in wood salvaged from the destroyed Rockaway boardwalk. Notably, this was the first bar Taffer rescued that was not a failing business but a storm-damaged one.
After the cameras left
The Bungalow Bar is not just open, it is thriving, the strongest survivor in its stretch of the catalog. The waterfront spot at 377 Beach 92nd Street, at the foot of the Crossbay Bridge, was named USA TODAY's Best Beach Bar of 2026, with general manager Katy Grey quoted on the honor in the local Rockaway Times. Yelp shows more than 700 reviews and over a thousand photos updated into July 2026, and its Facebook following tops 17,000. A bar Sandy nearly erased came all the way back.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.