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Are Hamptons Restaurants Really So Bad or Just Misunderstood?
Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine
It’s a matter of very little controversy, on the far-eastern tip of this skinny island where everything has the rich potential for controversy, that no one goes to the Hamptons for the restaurants. Food, maybe — to browse among the $16-a-pint berries at Round Swamp Farm or to gather one of Carissa Waechter’s tarts that are as elaborately flowered as a bridesmaid’s bouquet — but there’s a reason the genius loci of East Hampton, its titled Contessa, is Barefoot and entertaining at home. Good things grow out here. But restaurants?
“The Hamptons, if you know, you know, that when you go out, it’s not really about the dining,” society interior designer and Springs resident Sasha Bikoff confirmed to me. “You go out because you want a scene and you want a vibe and you want to tell people, ‘Oh, I’ve made this reservation. I got into this place,’” she added. “Especially on weekends, you go to these restaurants and you expect the bad service. You expect your order to be wrong.”
That’s exaggerating, if only just. The scene, divided between the stalwart perennials and the buzzy annuals, has its highlights, but despite the quietly acknowledged mediocrity of most of the establishments, getting a table almost anywhere is a reliable nightmare. “It’s like an Olympic sport in the Hamptons,” said Bobbi Brown, the cosmetics baroness whose current line, Jones Road, is named for the Hamptons street. “Every year, it’s more and more people.” And younger and younger.
We’re a long way out from the ragged summer redoubt of the ’50s, when Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline played in the annual Artists & Writers softball game. The Establishment types have been joined by the zoomers. “All the Upper East Siders just want the familiar,” one Hamptons worker told me. After a week or so of eating around, I have to agree. If there’s an epitome of the scene, it’s got to be the East Hampton Grill, owned by the restaurant group that runs Hillstone, in the space where legendary adman Jerry Della Femina once tried to extend his Manhattan success to an East Hampton restaurant. Now, the Grill is the East End’s Polo Bar, down to the framed American flag and the vintage pommel horse, and it’s about as good as it gets out here, occasionally very good. I couldn’t argue with the “fork and knife” ribs I ordered just before Memorial Day, sticky sweet and falling off the bone, even if a $68 (filet mignon) steak-frites was salty enough to be nearly inedible. The season hadn’t started, and the Grill was still reliably fullish, a table of gays and girls celebrating a birthday with candles in the hot-fudge sundae and house martinis with Hendrick’s gin, St-Germain, and Sauvignon Blanc.
The Grill is one of the rare establishments that appeals to locals and summer locals alike. (It helps that it stays open year-round.) So many others pull from elsewhere. At Le Bilboquet in Sag Harbor, an extension of a Manhattan restaurant, shrimp cocktail was $35 for five, with a harbor-side yacht view, washed down with a gobletful of spritz. (On a recent visit, on opposite sides of one pier, the 174-foot super-yacht Kisses lolled next to the 142-footer Incentive — a bit on the nose!) The vibe was scruffier, though still with yacht views, at Sag Harbor Tavern in the old American Legion, where the barely adorned burger was as good as its counterpart in Red Hook. But we’re here for the East End, not a taste of the boroughs. For this, there are the lobster shacks and clam bars, provided you can stomach some tourists. Most famous is Lunch, the inspiration for the restaurant in Showtime’s The Affair (a fact it proudly announces), or the nearby Clam Bar on Route 27. My personal favorite is Bostwick’s, where the parking lot fills with Teslas and BMWs but the wait for a table with plastic buzzer in hand democratizes all. The move is local flounder, fried as a fishstick, and off-menu fried calamari doused in Buffalo sauce.
There is constant turnover, and the game remains zero-sum — there’s only so much commercial space in the tiny towns, and residents can be quick to guard their territory from boozy incursions. The ecosystem here revolves around the temporary whims of the visiting classes. “It’s not an easy market, and it takes a lot to keep something open and keep people employed,” Joey Wölffer of Wölffer Estate Vineyard told me. Like it or not, the Hamptons must bend to its carpetbaggers.
The stackedness of the scene continues to lure the brave. The Palm Beach hoteliers Sarah and Andrew Wetenhall purchased the Hedges Inn in February and installed the old New York establishment Swifty’s as its in-house restaurant, where dinner can be served, wedding style, under tents en plein air and the waiting list for a table is already 400-people strong. Donna Lennard’s four-year-old il Buco al Mare in Amagansett, a long blond-wood ship of a place (starboard view onto an alley), serves pastas, pizzas, and eye-wateringly expensive plated tins of fish. Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s tenure at Topping Rose House endures, and his son Cédric’s Wayan and Ma.dé are back this year, popping up for their third summer in a row.
There are local eminences, too. David Hart, the chef whose business partners run Sen in Sag Harbor (by many accounts the East End’s best sushi), has recently been on an expansion path islandwide. K Pasa in Sag serves tacos, while Smokey Buns in East Hampton serves burgers. A “Wiborg” burger, named after the local beach, has roasted red peppers and “baconnaise” and is served with a heap of fries in an outdoor picnic section that’s really an alley jutting off another alley. Is this destined to become a summer scene? Sure, it’s behind Newtown Lane, but it’s also, and perhaps more, in front of the shared parking lot behind the Stop & Shop. Still, the answer seems all but certain: “Yes.”
The dowager queen of the scene is now and forever Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton (he the late Jeff “Nick” Salaway; she Toni Ross, daughter of erstwhile Time Inc. chairman Steven Ross). The same hospitality group runs pubby Rowdy Hall and the side-by-side Mexican joints La Fondita and Coche Comedor, all of which offer varying degrees of pretty decent food, but Nick & Toni’s stands alone for its status-granting power (I have known people who set much of their social stock in securing “their” table there). Steven Spielberg and Billy Joel are fans. So was Nora Ephron, who once proclaimed, “I don’t have time to get romantically involved with another restaurant. I’m married to Nick & Toni’s.” And so, after a recent visit for well-cooked half-chicken and a crispy plate of lemon-spritzed zucchini fritti (on the menu since the place opened in 1988), am I. If the wheel isn’t being reinvented, at least it still spins.
The restaurants that evolve tend to do so out of necessity. For 30 years, Dave’s Grill (later Dave’s Gone Fishing) sat happily on the water in Montauk, reservable only in person or by ever-busy telephone. First, it moved to the other side of the lake, then gave up the restaurant entirely, living on as Dave’s at Home, providing for the new-local community in the truest way possible: by catering. The real status eating, after all is said and done, is eating at home — a nicer home than your own, if you’re lucky. “You’ll see Bermuda Party Rentals trucks 20 times a day,” Joel Mesler, the artist and sometime gallery owner who moved to East Hampton in 2016, told me. A show of his work opens at Guild Hall in East Hampton in August, and the celebration dinner beforehand is being held not at Nick & Toni’s or Bilboquet but at a collector’s house overlooking the ocean. “You just bring it in,” Bobbi Brown admitted. “It’s just, honestly, the nicest way to be in the Hamptons.” In it but not of it, it would seem, which raises the question, Why here, anyway? Surely there are plenty of coasts and plenty of fabulous digs that don’t require hours of traffic on 27 East. Brown went down that path for a time. “We left for the Jersey shore,” she told me from her car (on the way out East). “They didn’t even have arugula, so we had to come back.”
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