Rowdy Hall To Move From East Hampton Village to Amagansett After Summer

The owners of the renowned English pub Rowdy Hall say that they will move the business from its tiny nook at the back of an alley off Main Street in East Hampton Village to a new location on Montauk Highway in Amagansett at the end of the coming summer.

The business will stay open in East Hampton through the summer and move in September, co-owner Mark Smith said on Monday, to the vacant restaurant space that was Indian Wells Tavern from 2008 to 2020 and, most recently, Main Street Tavern, which closed last year. Long ago, the space was divided into two separate businesses, home to McKendry’s Pub and the Estia cafe.

“It’s got a much bigger bar, a bigger dining room and has a nice beer garden out back, so it’s a great opportunity for us to continue to grow,” Smith said. “Rowdy is a quirky space. The bar is very tight south of the taps there, and when the door opened the winter rushed in.

“It’s going to be a bit melancholy for me,” he added. “The same things that made it quirky give it its character and intimacy.”

Rowdy Hall opened in July 1996, at the back of the alley just up the street from the East Hampton movie theater that had been home for many years to O’Malley’s burger joint and has become one of the downtown’s focal businesses.

But the owners — who also own nearby Nick & Toni’s, Coche Comedor and La Fondita in Amagansett and Townline BBQ in Wainscott — were facing a need for expensive renovations but would still be left with the small, oddly shaped building, that the new location does not present.

“It’s basically a brand new building — it was just rehabbed soup to nuts,” Smith said.

Smith noted that a lot has changed in East Hampton Village since 1996 as well. Between the pandemic and the rise of streaming services, the movie theater is not the major driver of business to Rowdy it once was and neither are other businesses in the downtown.

“When we opened Rowdy, they were all locally owned stores and they were open until 10 p.m. — the bookstore was open until 11 p.m. — and people were walking around the town at night,” he recalled. “Now, it’s all national brands, the people who work in the stores don’t live here, the stores close at 6 p.m. and they go home. And in the off-season, the local school teachers and civil servants are not going to Balenciaga to do their shopping after work. It’s a very different landscape than what we bought into.”