At the end of the world, there’s a burger stand with orange booths and homemade ice cream. It’s been waiting for you since the Summer of Love.
The Memory
You’ve driven as far east as you can go. The highway ends here. The land ends here. Beyond the lighthouse, there’s nothing but ocean until Portugal.
Your skin is tight with salt. There’s sand in places sand shouldn’t be. You spent the afternoon getting knocked around by waves at Ditch Plains, and now the sun is dropping toward the bay, and you’re hungry in the way you’re only hungry after the ocean has spent hours trying to kill you.
The building looks like it hasn’t changed since your parents were teenagers. Orange plastic booths. A walk-up window. A menu board with prices that seem like typos until you remember this is Montauk, and Montauk has always operated on its own logic.
You order a Big John Burger and a chocolate shake. Your burger arrives hand-pressed, the edges craggy and charred. That shake is so thick the straw stands up straight. You eat standing in the parking lot, watching the light go gold, watching the surfers load their boards into salt-rusted trucks, watching the day become the kind of memory you’ll carry for decades.
This is the end of the island. This is where the Hamptons runs out of road.
And somehow, against all odds, there’s still a place here that makes ice cream by hand and doesn’t charge you $18 for the privilege.
The Truth
John’s Drive-In opened in 1967. That year, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s. The first Super Bowl was played. Thurgood Marshall joined the Supreme Court. The Summer of Love happened in San Francisco, and in Montauk, a guy named John Torr opened a burger stand that looked like a Carvel.
He wasn’t trying to make history. He was trying to make a living. Montauk in 1967 was a fishing village at the end of nowhere—a thousand year-round residents, a summer population that swelled with surfers and families and people who wanted to be as far from Manhattan as geography allowed.
John Torr saw an opportunity. He built a little building, installed a griddle and a soft-serve machine, and started serving burgers to whoever showed up.
The building was designed to resemble a Carvel storefront, and there have been renovations since—none of them recent, none of them dramatic. The orange plastic booths are still orange. The walk-up window still works. The parking lot still fills with sandy, sunburned people who’ve spent the day doing something more interesting than working.
Bourdain would have driven past a hundred places to get here. He’d have ignored the farm-to-table spots and the seafood restaurants with the harbor views and the places that exist primarily to separate tourists from their money. He’d have pulled into this parking lot, ordered at the window, and sat on the hood of his car eating a burger and watching the sun set.
Because this is what he was always looking for: the real thing. Not the curated thing, not the branded thing, not the thing designed to be photographed. Just a burger stand that’s been serving burgers since 1967, run by people who give a damn, in a place where the ocean is always close enough to smell.
The History
The Torr Era
John Torr was a character. Montauk in the ’60s and ’70s was full of characters—fishermen, surfers, artists, drifters, people who’d found their way to the end of the island and decided to stay. Torr fit right in.
He and his wife Elsie built John’s Drive-In from nothing. They also built several other Montauk businesses: the IGA Supermarket (then called Sunbeam Supermarket), the Crow’s Nest Restaurant on Lake Montauk, the Pier One diner at the fishing docks, the Flying Fish Restaurant on East Lake Drive. The Torrs were entrepreneurs in the old sense—not venture-backed disruptors, but people who saw what a town needed and provided it.
John’s Drive-In was their most enduring creation. The burgers were cheap—25 cents in the early days, including one pickle chip (two if you were lucky), onions, and ketchup. Ice cream came from machines with handles you pulled, soft-serve swirling into cones. Most of the staff was local kids working summer jobs.
Don’t Give Away the Store
One of those kids, decades later, wrote a reminiscence of working for John Torr:
“For the small-sized cones, we had to lift the handle on the machine and go around two swirls high. For the large cones, it was four swirls… and not an ounce more on either. Even though I was conscious of the ‘portion control’ idea, when my friends came in or when there was a cute surfer at the counter, I found it hard to give them EXACTLY two swirls, and my feeling was, ‘What’s one or two more swirls?’ I must admit, sometimes a small cone became a large cone, and each time, John Torr was right there behind me screaming, ‘Don’t give away the store!!'”
This is what a real place sounds like. Not mission statements and brand values. A guy screaming about ice cream swirls because margins matter, because every cone counts, because running a small business is an act of controlled desperation that most people will never understand.
John Torr died in 2014 at 88, peacefully in his sleep. The obituary noted that for 35 years, he walked to work every morning except for one month a year when he took his family back to Sicily. He’d put on his white apron, make his pizzas—John’s eventually added pizza to the menu—and run the place he’d built.
The Succession
After the Torrs, the business passed to David Rutkowski in 1985. David ran it for decades, extending hours, adding menu items, keeping the place alive. His family helped—his mom, dad, brother, sister. His wife Maureen started working there in 1984 and never really left. They met at the Drive-In. They married in 1998.
In 2020, David and Maureen sold to Jason and Chelsea Jordan, who promised to preserve the traditions. The Big John Burger remains. The homemade ice cream remains. The orange booths remain.
Three owners in 58 years. That’s not a business. That’s an institution.
The Sociology
Status Without the Signal
John’s Drive-In occupies a peculiar position in the Hamptons social hierarchy: it’s in the Hamptons, but it’s not of the Hamptons.
Montauk has always been different. Geographically, it’s the end—you can’t go further east without a boat. Culturally, it’s resisted the forces that transformed Southampton and East Hampton into playgrounds for the ultra-wealthy. Yes, there’s money in Montauk now. Yes, the celebrity sightings have increased. But there’s still something rougher here, saltier, less polished. The fishing boats still go out. The surfers still crowd Ditch Plains. The year-round population still looks at the summer people with something between tolerance and amusement.
John’s Drive-In is the perfect expression of this Montauk ethos. Nothing about it is aspirational. Nothing about it is exclusive. A burger stand with a parking lot, and if you want to eat here, you stand in line like everyone else.
The Bourdieu Angle
Pierre Bourdieu would note that this apparent democracy is still a form of distinction. Choosing to eat at John’s instead of somewhere “nicer” is a signal—it says I don’t need to prove anything, it says I’m comfortable here, it says I understand what Montauk actually is.
But here’s what makes John’s different from the calculated casualness you see elsewhere in the Hamptons: the people who work here aren’t performing. They’re not executing a “concept.” They’re making burgers because their boss made burgers and his boss made burgers and this is just what this building on Montauk Highway has done since 1967.
One Tripadvisor review captured it perfectly: “This is a standard on every Montauk trip. Delicious soft serve. Who needed Ben & Jerry’s? Long live John’s!”
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No pretension, no irony, no positioning. Just a place that’s been part of people’s Montauk trips for so long that it’s become inseparable from the experience itself.
The Uncomfortable Part
Montauk is changing. Everyone who loves it knows this. The fishing village at the end of the world is becoming another outpost of Hamptons wealth, another place where the people who built the community can no longer afford to live there.
John’s Drive-In is caught in this transition. On one hand, it’s a survivor—nearly six decades in the same location, still serving the same food, still operating on the principle that a burger should cost what a burger should cost. On the other hand, it exists in a town that’s becoming unrecognizable.
The year-round population has grown from a thousand to around four thousand, but the character has shifted. The old fishing families are dying off or moving away. The surfers are still there, but they’re competing for waves with hedge fund managers who’ve discovered the “authentic Montauk experience.” The motels where people used to stay for $50 a night are being replaced by boutique hotels charging $500.
John’s Drive-In can’t solve this. A burger stand can’t fix housing prices or preserve a fishing economy or hold back the tide of money that’s reshaping the entire East End. What it can do—what it has done, for almost sixty years—is remain itself. The prices stay reasonable. The burgers stay hand-pressed. The ice cream stays homemade.
The Struggle of Legacy
Bourdain was drawn to places like this partly because they were delicious and partly because they were endangered. He understood that every family-run spot surviving against economic logic was a small miracle, and that miracles don’t last forever. He’d have sat in this parking lot eating his burger, watching the sun set, and felt the particular melancholy of loving something you know you might lose.
The Jordans, the current owners, seem to understand what they’ve inherited. They’ve promised to preserve the traditions, keeping the menu mostly intact while resisting the temptation to “elevate” or “reimagine.”
But the pressure never stops. Every year, the land under John’s Drive-In becomes more valuable, someone probably makes an offer, and the family has to decide again: keep going or cash out?
So far, they’ve kept going. The burger stand at the end of the world is still open. But nothing lasts forever, and places like this are disappearing faster than we can count them.
The Code
John’s operates on drive-in rules, which is to say: figure it out.
Order at the window. There’s no host, no table service, no app. You walk up, you read the menu, you tell them what you want. If you need more than a minute to decide, step aside and let the people behind you go.
Eat wherever. The orange booths are first-come, first-served. The parking lot is fair game. Plenty of people eat standing up, leaning against their cars, or sitting on the curb. This is not a place that cares about your dining “experience.” This is a place that cares about feeding you.
Don’t complain about the prices. They’re on the menu. You can see them before you order. If you think $6 for a hand-pressed burger is too much, you’ve lost perspective. If you think it’s too little, you’re starting to understand what’s been lost everywhere else.
Get ice cream. It’s homemade. It’s the point. You can get a burger anywhere. You can’t get this ice cream anywhere else.
Respect the surfers. This is their place as much as anyone’s. They’ve been coming here since John Torr was screaming about portion control. They’ll be here after you leave. Don’t take their spots, don’t take their waves, don’t act like you own the place just because you can afford to summer in Montauk.
Stay for sunset. The light at the end of the island does something specific in the hour before dark. John’s parking lot is one of the best places to watch it happen. Get a shake, find a spot, shut up, and look.
What to Order
What It Costs
Nothing, by Montauk standards. A full meal—burger, fries, shake—runs you somewhere in the $15-20 range. In a town where dinner for two can easily cost $300, this is practically a public service.
The prices at John’s are an artifact. They reflect a time when Montauk was for everyone, not just the people who could afford it. Every year, inflation pushes them up a little, but the principle remains: this should be a place where a family can eat without doing math.
One reviewer noted: “Perfect lunch spot in Montauk for a break from expensive Montauk sit-down lunches—this place has been in Montauk forever.”
Forever. That’s what it feels like. And in the Hamptons, forever is worth more than it costs.
The Point
The Nostalgia Trap
Don Draper sold nostalgia like a drug. He understood that Americans would pay almost anything to feel something they’d lost—or something they’d never had but believed they should have had. The perfect childhood. The happy family. The simpler time before everything got complicated.
John’s Drive-In isn’t selling nostalgia. Too busy selling burgers for that.
But here’s the thing: because the place isn’t selling nostalgia, it actually delivers it. The orange booths aren’t “retro”—they’re just old. Prices aren’t a “throwback”—they’re just reasonable. And the experience isn’t “curated”—it’s just what happens when you order a burger at a drive-in that’s been doing this for 58 years.
What Can’t Be Copied
This is the difference between authenticity and the performance of authenticity. John’s doesn’t know it’s supposed to be charming. The place has no idea it’s a “hidden gem” or a “local favorite” or whatever the Yelp categories say. It just exists, the same way it’s existed since the Summer of Love, doing the same thing it’s always done.
Bourdain understood that this kind of place can’t be replicated. Sure, you can build a restaurant that looks like John’s, that copies the menu and the booths and the pricing. But manufacturing 58 years of history? Impossible. Faking the muscle memory of three owners who learned the craft from the owner before? Can’t be done. And the loyalty of the surfers who’ve been eating here since Nixon? That’s not for sale.
The irreplicability is the point. In a world where everything is franchised, scaled, and optimized, John’s Drive-In is a stubborn remainder. It’s what a place looks like when it’s allowed to just be itself for half a century.
Drive to the end of the island. Park in the lot. Order at the window. Eat your burger watching the sun go down over the bay.
The world ends here. So does the pretense.
Some places don’t need to be anything other than what they are. John’s has been proving that since 1967.
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