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A butcher, a baker and a mozzarella maker are now at the reins of the Red Horse Market in East Hampton, which soon will be a full-service, year-round food store offering fresh-baked goods, prime meats, seafood, produce, groceries, a barista coffee bar, take-and-go foods from egg sandwiches to lunches to dinner entrées, soups, pizza by the slice or the pie, calzone, strombole, fresh mozzarella ...
“And sauce, of course, the best sauces around. Wait till you taste it,” said Pasquale Langella, the mozzarella maker, recently as John Mazur’s design/construction team continued to transform the space, which the three partners hope to open for business on April 1.
“When this is finished, people are going to see something they’ve never seen before,” Mr. Langella said.
“It’s not just an Italian place,” said Tim McClung, the butcher, whose offerings will included USDA prime dry aged beef— “21 to 31 days, a true dry age”—and whose meat offerings will be accompanied by a glass case of fish that itself is six feet long. Mr. McClung, who also had a butcher shop at Hampton Market Place in East Hampton and who lives in Springs, will continue to run Tim’s Prime Meats in Sag Harbor as well.
“When people drive by at 3 or 4 they’ll be smelling Bill’s baking,” Mr. Langella said of Bill Bertha, the baker, a 25-year veteran of the Beach Bakery at Gurney’s Inn whose “classical scratch mix” recipes are of his own design. Mr. Bertha lives “3.8 miles down the road,” and he plans to have his pastries out of the oven by the time the market doors open at 6 a.m. “I want all my tradespeople to come in,” he explained.
The market will stay open until 9 p.m., making life easier for customers who’d rather not drive into East Hampton Village and have to park there to shop for food.
“It’s a very cool idea,” said Tom Desmond, a broker at Hamptons Realty Group who helped the three partners get together to lease the space from Ben Krupinski, the owner of the Red Horse plaza. “Pretty much three local independent guys, they all have their specialties, coming together. It’s a great space, a great opportunity.”
Mr. Desmond also works at Wines by Morrell in the Red Horse center, and he sees the potential for “cross-marketing,” being able to accommodate, say, a shopper who would like to pick up a cabernet to accompany one of Mr. McClung’s steaks. The space was known as the Red Horse Market when Jerry Della Femina and David Silver were partners in it from about 1993 to 2002 (including the infamous outdoor pumpkin display that led to a dustup with East Hampton Village officials), and it was named for a horse statue on the property back in the days when a Levi’s store stood there.
Citarella took it over and ran it as Tutto Italiano starting in 2005, and Mr. Langella and Gennaro Giugliano, his brother-in-law, did a brisk portion of that business making fresh mozzarella and pizzas until the store was shut down abruptly in 2010.
“It’s unbelievable that I’m coming back and becoming a part owner,” said Mr. Langella, who drives east with Mr. Giugliano from Bohemia to work each day. “This is not a coincidence.”
The Red Horse Market looks out on a horse pasture on one side and has a spacious, well-lit kitchen on the second floor, a basement with office and storage space and a main-floor retail area that Mr. Mazur is redesigning with features like rough-sawn pine and metalwork that formed part of an atrium at the New York Botanical Gardens.
“You might as well use the ambience,” Mr. Bertha said. “This is not Stop N Shop.”
His upstairs setup already includes a gigantic refrigerator with a freezer at the back, a steambox for making bread rise, dough machines, a donut fryer, oven racks, a prep sink and a blue, 12-burner Garland stove.
“What a great view for a bakery,” he said of huge windows on either side. “You can open the windows to get cross-ventilation in summertime.”
Mr. Langella will make his cheese in one corner on the main floor, just to the left of an extremely long glass case to be filled with meats, fish, deli foods, salads, and other foods cooked on premises and not far from another refrigerated case where specialty cheeses and other products will go.
“Proscuitto and mozzarella are like brothers and sisters,” said Mr. Langella, who once again will have Mr. Giulgiano at hand. Pizzas will be made and displayed in another section of the main floor space.
Joe Genna will be the market’s chef, and the market should employ about 40 people in summer over two shifts, Mr. Bertha said. A hiring fair was held about two weeks ago.
Like his partners, Mr. Bertha credited Mr. Krupinski with making life a lot easier to open a business in the space. Mr. Krupinski sent a crew over to fill in an open area upstairs, creating extra floor space, and loaned his machinery and manpower to put in appliances like refrigeration units and stoves, including through a second-story window.
“I never had a landlord be so helpful as in the last weeks,” Mr. Bertha said. “He really wants us to succeed.”
The shopping center suffered after Tutto Italiano, which was its anchor store, closed its doors, Mr. Giugliano said. Now people “can’t wait” to see the new market open, he said.
It was Mr. McClung who first looked at the vacant space, Mr. Langella said, and who then approached Mr. Bertha about using it together. The three partners knew of each other but were not really acquainted, Mr. Bertha said, and they found that they hit it off.
“Separately, we couldn’t do this by ourselves,” he said. “An act of God put us together.”
“The butcher has a following, the baker has a following, Pasquale with his brother-in-law,” Mr. Desmond said. “And everyone is like so anxious to get something going; the business dropped off demonstrably here.”
“Everybody say ‘Mozarella!’ “ Mr. Bertha said as the men lined up under a drizzle for a photograph outside the new store.
“The rogues’ gallery,” yelled out Rodney Willitt, an owner of Wines by Morrell, from across the way. “You put it in the post office!”
“Give us a bottle of wine!” the men shouted back, laughing.
