Babette's Closes After 27 Years Of Healthy Eating

After 27 years on Newtown Lane, the restaurant Babette’s, which was made famous by a presidential visit and was at the vanguard of the healthy eating movement, will close its doors this week.

Babette’s was the first local restaurant to feature a menu of primarily vegetarian dishes with a focus on organic ingredients and imaginative preparation that owner Barbara Layton broke the mold of vegetarian restaurants she had known in New York City.

“I was a vegetarian and the only place you could go in the city that served vegetarian food were dives,” Layton recalled this week. “They had no energy, no life force, an no ambiance. I said why can’t we have a place that serves vegetarian food and has a cool vibe.”

Small inside, but flush with sunlight from two walls of glass doors, Layton and her late husband and chef, Daniel VanDerBeek, wedged as many outdoor tables in as they could get and crafted a menu of lively dishes that happened to not have meat in them.

“I wanted to turn people on to a different way of eating,” she said. “Let them see that healthy food could be delicious.”

The menu was the creation of her late husband, a chef with a flair for the imaginative, Layton said. Since his death in 2011, the couple’s son Zach, also a chef, took over the conceptual guidance of the kitchen from his West Coast kitchen.

Two years into their experiment, things were looking grim. The Hamptons crowd had not embraced the healthy food concept, or weren’t aware it was there, and the couple came close to closing their doors at times.

Then, along came Bill Clinton.

Layton, a longtime Democratic Party supporter, posted a petition at the door to her restaurant calling for the end of the rambling, years-long investigation of President Clinton by special counsel Kenneth Starr. The Clintons got wind of the petition and during their annual vacation in East Hampton, stopped in to the restaurant to thank Ms. Layton for her support personally. The visit to the restaurant got extensive media coverage and all of a sudden Babette’s in East Hampton was on the map.

“Things really took off after that,” Layton said. “Of course, that was also when people started to catch on to healthy eating and when organic foods started to become popular. We had good food and good energy and all of a sudden we were a hit.”

The restaurant has remained a hit for all of the ensuing 20 years. In fact, Layton said, it’s never been more popular, with its sidewalk tables, breezy interior and clientele more concerned with healthy eating than ever. But as for its owner, who spends nearly every day working “the floor” of the eatery, it was time for a change.

“I could have kept going another 10, 15 years — I love what I do here,” Layton said. “It’s not that I’m leaving saying, ‘Thank god I’m done.’ I’m leaving here loving it. But there are other adventures out there and other things within myself that I want to explore.”

She said she first started contemplating closing Babette’s in 2019, and after a busy summer 2021, decided the time had finally come. She said another restaurant is possibly in the works by her son, who returned to Babette’s in East Hampton after closing his own similar restaurant in California amid the pandemic.

As for her own next act, Layton says she plans to write a book, may dabble in politics — she worked as a campaign finance advisor to Hillary Clinton and General Wesley Clark during their presidential campaigns — and says returning to the restaurant business someday is not entirely out of the question.

“I’ve had the time of my life here,” she said. “The people I’ve met, the things I learned. The hospitality business can really reveal to you everything you need to know about yourself.”