I have opined—some might say, whined, and I wouldn't put up too much of a fight—in these pages over the years about the homogeneity of restaurants here in the Hamptons.
Through my now two-decades-plus of intimate witness of the restaurant scene here on the South Fork, the punchline to every chef's joke about dinner in the Hamptons has always been: steak, chicken, salmon—the holy triad of the Hamptons menu, without which an owner could nary hope to attract a table of four to his dining room often enough to keep the lights on through one shoulder season. These jokes, like much that comes from chefs, are both lighthearted and deadly serious. If I take salmon off the menu the Bonbrests and Goldmans will cancel their standing reservation on Fridays because Mitzy would die if she ate anything other than salmon. Ha, ha, ha. But, seriously, they would stop coming."
Yes, we've always been a little ahead of the national comestible curve out here because we eat raw shellfish with gusto. We welcomed Japanese food with open arms in the 1990s and we've embraced Mexican food and its various Latin variations with growing warmth as the quality and presentation have improved. But restaurant dining in the Hamptons is still very much a one-horse town. I mean, in all of the Hamptons, we still have only one honest barbecue joint. Even among our seafood joints, only a couple of them are purely seafood joints. We still don't have a real gastropub, no matter how many places offer wildly inaccurate claims of being one. And Asian food has struggled mightily to become anything other than Chinese take-out.
I dare now say, however, that there seems to be glimmers of hope, faint though they may be, that things are turning a corner. Culinary culture seems to be finding a toehold in the Hamptons.
Exhibit 1: There's a ramen place, and it seems to be doing well. It's shocking to me that ramen found success before Thai food did, but maybe that's because Thai has been around in NYC for so damn long that people have sort of moved on from it as "adventurous" dining and, well, ramen is the new Thai. It's also less adventurous in many ways, after one gets over the fact that everything is basically soup, particularly in terms of spices that our fragile Patrician constitutions can't absorb.
Momi Ramen in East Hampton is pressing on a year now and appears to be drawing steady crowds of both locals and visitors. Kudos, to them, and to us, and we can hope that they will be the foundation of an other-than-Chinese-take-out Asian food.
Exhibit 2: There's an old-folks place doing Thai food now, and it seems to be doing well.
Speaking of Thai, there's a restaurant in East Hampton that has a menu my grandmother would have loved, even though her taste-buds and familiarity with culinary skills probably would not have fully appreciated the mastery with which it was prepared. Highway Restaurant's everyday menu is as staid as staid can be (Steak? Check. Chicken? Check. Salmon? Check.) and the clientele are predictably mostly blue, in either blood or hair. The first hint that something more adventurous was clawing at the cage doors was the superb steamed pork buns that seemed deliciously incongruous with the rest of the menu when it first dropped a year ago. Then, this winter, up pops Thai Night, a once-weekly prix fixe of nine Thai dishes. Don't go looking for pad Thai, but there's curry and lemongrass and satay and they are all prepared expertly, and delicious. The crowds seem to be showing their appreciation.
At $35 a head it's a long way from a fast and dirty Thai place like Chindas, which is what we need east of the canal, but maybe we can work our way back to that. West of the canal has long basked in the Pan-Asian offerings of Tony's and Matsulin that offer Thai, Chinese and Japanese all in one menu, and do all of them fairly well. I'm at a loss as to how even one such place has never found its way east. Where is Matsulin Montauk?
Exhibit 3: There's an actual Indian restaurant in Southampton. I don't know if Saaz is doing well, or if it will survive. I'll give it this plug, from the one time I've eaten there: I found it to be a very decent representation of Indian food. It is the third foray into Indian that I can recall. Neither of the previous two lasted more than a season.
I'm not going count the proliferation of Mexican food places as evidence of our growing open-mindedness about food, because that is bolstered partly by demographic shifts, even though the extent to which non-Latinos have flocked to Spanish foods could be seen as the first toe testing the waters of real exploration in dining out. We now have some fantastic, truly-authentic, Mexican food joints, of the sort that you might expect to wander into by wonderful accident in Los Angeles, right here on the East End. The best of them, I think, is La Hacienda in Southampton, though Montauk Highway in Hampton Bays has a string of excellent versions too in Blue Cactus and La Pradera (both slightly more refined restaurants than La Hacienda).
It's a shame that Saaz had to take the place of the old Greek Bites (I miss Meson Ole too, but I'm not sure why, and I think I might be the only one). A good, traditional Greek restaurant, of the type that does smashing business in other East End towns are exactly the kind of variety we need out here.
Some concepts, like the high-end Chinese of Wei Fun and Madame Tongs may have been just a dash of Szechwan peppercorns ahead of their time and missed their chance to be hits once city stars like Mission Chinese and Han Dynasty made such food worth thinking about beyond take-out again.
As a restaurant employee who counts on customers being eager and happy to eat at the restaurant I work at, the direction I see East End eating needing to go is to where highly trained and experienced fine dining chefs feel they can offer a menu crafted from imagination, experimentation and the savvy of their own palate, without the bullying of one person at the table being too fussy to eat a single thing on the menu. The cliché "comfort food" is always going to be tops in a resort area like this and when someone is looking at throwing down the kind of seed money that is required to do just about anything east of Manorville, it's hard to pass up the easiest row to hoe. But as our community changes, both generationally and culturally, I hope we will be seeing new leg room for chefs to stretch out in and use some of the knowledge they get when they go explore cities where the cutting edge is being honed daily.
All that said, I'll have the salmon.
"
27east on Mar 7, 2016