'Breaking Bad' stars Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston visit LI restaurant to promote their mezcal

"Breaking Bad" Emmy Award winners Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, who in 2019 founded the mezcal brand Dos Hombres, were in Huntington Wednesday to promote their drink at the Mexican restaurant Besito.

"They were here from 5 to, like, 6 o'clock, and they were having a good time," says Jose Reyes, 36, of Hauppauge, regional manager for the small chain's three Long Island restaurants. "They own that mezcal so they're going around the country promoting their brand. Very cool people — they had a very good time with our guests at the bar."

While Besito's management had the event in process "probably a month-and-a-half ago," says Reyes, they alerted the public the day before.

"We posted on Instagram around 2 o'clock and then we started hearing our phone ring: 'Ohmigod, is that true?' People started making reservations, making sure they got themselves a spot at the bar or in the dining room. The two guys were just running around, having fun with the customers. People took a lot of pictures."

Social-media posts by the restaurant show Cranston, 65, who played teacher-turned-meth-kingpin Walter White on the acclaimed 2008-13 AMC drama "Breaking Bad," and Paul, 41, who played his partner-in-crime Jesse Pinkman, mixing drinks behind the bar. In a posted video, Paul clowns around beside a female bartender, to the laughing delight of customers. Reyes said the stars served the restaurant's specialty drink, the Mexcalita margarita, using Dos Hombres mezcal.

Besito has stocked the brand for about a year, the manager said.

Cranston and Paul stayed beyond the half-hour posted on the restaurant's social-media notice, which read, "Huntington 5/26 5-5:30pm @aaronpaul @bryancranston @doshombres stop by for a visit to shake up some #doshombres cocktails with our besito bartenders!"

When introducing the brand internationally in December, Cranston said at the online Web Summit conference that three years after "Breaking Bad" ended, he and Paul "said, 'Let's go down to Oaxaca, Mexico, and let's spend a week and see if we can find something that really appealed to both of us.' "

As Paul recalled, "We stumbled upon this little village three hours from Oaxaca — San Luis del Río — and we sampled multiple mezcals out there and could not find it. We were actually on our way out and someone came running up to us and said, 'Hey, there's another palenque [a mezcal distillery] that you didn't see. It's not on the tour, but it's a bit of a hike — you have to hike through a river with a machete and just chop through the brush to get to it.' So we did and, no joke, we stumbled upon this operation in the middle of this forest that looked like a meth lab. I'm not just saying that. It did, in a good way."