ABOUT US

What About Us is More Like It

The Sloppy Tuna wasn’t just a bar. It was an experiment.

Montauk’s old mantra was simple: a drinking town with a fishing problem. That was before the Tuna rewired the whole circuit. What the town got was a blast of genius and insanity that turned 148 South Emerson — a building that had been five different bars over fifty years — into the most notorious beach spot in the Hamptons. Today it’s still a bar, but forevermore it will be known as “Formerly The Sloppy Tuna.”

The Tuna wasn’t exclusive. It was inclusive. That was Come As You Are. Surfers, Wall Street brokers, Hollywood actors, supermodels, lifeguards, and locals all walked through the same sand-caked doors and got treated exactly the same. We didn’t care if you worked at Goldman Sachs or if your outfit was from TJ Maxx. No cover charge. No bottle service. You could be somebody to someone, but you were nobody to us. That slogan hung on the wall because the staff wasn’t background noise — they were the show. And unlike most of the Hamptons, we respected them above all else.

And what a show it was. Tuesdays and Thursdays were Ladies’ Nights. Saturdays were all-day DJ marathons. We ran goldfish races and snake-charming acts, and when Coney Island said no to its freak show, the Tuna said hell yes. We had more mini entertainers than attorneys — and that’s saying something. We rang bells behind the bar, packed locals shoulder-to-shoulder, and hired anyone with the guts to keep up. The place grew so big that the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas flew out to take over a weekend — because a Montauk beach bar was throwing bigger parties than they were.

THE LEGACY

Too Wild to Last. Too Much Fun to Forget.

The politicians tried to make an example out of us, slapping the owner with 165 criminal violations in one night. We beat every single one. The Tuna didn’t just survive the storm — it turned it into advertising. We didn’t chase likes — we collected WTFs. And the pile got so high it couldn’t be ignored.

The much-talked-about book is the tell-all of that period: a staff that became a family, Wall Street greed colliding with small-town politics, and courtroom theater so absurd it felt like a satire — the kind of legal circus where the clowns had gavels. The cast of this story isn’t “based on a true story.” They were the true story. A real-life Animal House of its time, but with better DJs, worse decisions, and a bigger stage.

Chamber of Commerce numbers don’t lie: Montauk jumped from 10–15,000 visitors in 2010 to well over 100,000 by 2015. That wasn’t by accident. Whether you loved or hated the Tuna, you had an opinion — and that opinion made more press than almost anything else in the Hamptons.

The bar is gone, but the story isn’t. What it was — a renegade summer factory where everyone belonged and nobody behaved — is now what it will be: a brand, a best-selling book tearing up the page, and a documentary rolling into screens.

Every streamer and studio wants the next cultural phenomenon. The Tuna isn’t just a book or a doc in the making — it’s a bidding war waiting to happen. Whoever tells this story owns the last wild chapter of Montauk, the Hamptons, and maybe American nightlife itself.