Remember back in the cold dark days of winter when Bruce Buschel was blogging on the New York Times website about those 100 rules he was going to require of his servers at his new seafood-only restaurant in Bridgehampton? Oh, how the foodies laughed at his naiveté about the food business.
Yeah, well, they’ve stopped laughing. Now they’re just shaking their heads and murmuring under their breath about how that poor guy never saw the disaster that has befallen him coming. Mr. Buschel, whose semi-entertaining blog about his experience breaking into the East End restaurant business seems to be turning into a self-supporting pep rally—as though Andy Dufresne were stopping his tunneling through the walls of Shawshank to blog about it every few inches to convince himself to keep going—might never have a single server to browbeat with his rules.
Just as an experiment, mention the Southfork Kitchen (that’s the name; no, it’s not a diner) to anyone in the restaurant business and watch for the reaction recipe: one part instinctive wince; one part suck of the teeth; a dash of head shake and roll of the eyes; finished off with a garnish of “I feel bad for that guy, but…” A vinegar wipe ain’t gonna get the chef’s greasy fingerprint off that plate.
Here it is July 4 weekend and Mr. Buschel is not open for business yet. In fact, he’s clearly not going to be open for business for some time from the look of the property and the sound of his latest blog, which prattles on about the sort of humdrum construction issues that are eons away from opening night.
I think the Times should go out and find a local restaurant owner—perhaps one of the Nick and Toni’s crew, who suffered through years of torture to get the old Alison by The Beach resurrected as Townline BBQ—and have them chronicle the missteps and disasters that befall Mr. Buschel on a seemingly daily basis. I’m sure each entry would start out with: “There still isn’t a driveway and parking lot.”
Yeah, the driveway and parking lot are still dirt. Every day when I drive by, I’m reminded of a friend—a restaurant owner—who laughed at Mr. Buschel’s predictions last winter that he would be open April 1. “He doesn’t have a driveway,” the friend said. “You can’t pour asphalt in New York until the end of March, how is he going to open in April?”
That, of course, was true and spoke volumes about the extent of Mr. Buschel’s misunderstanding of just about everything in his newly adopted business. But it turned out to be the least of his worries.
Now it’s July 4 weekend and he doesn’t have a restaurant staff. It’s not that it’s impossible to open in the middle of the summer; it’s been done before. But I can’t think of a single instance when it was done by a newcomer to the business who was looking to open a fine-dining space. Mr. Buschel clearly has access to a mountain of money from some other source (I doubt it’s his writing career ... Ohhh, snap!) so perhaps he’s not really worried about the bottom line, but summer is short and the deepest pockets in the world won’t have much more than lint in them come the wintertime.
Let’s say he somehow gets the place open by the middle of the month. Where does one find a skilled waitstaff for a restaurant after July 4? I guess you can lure away a seasoned waiter from a good joint for the ego boost of becoming your FOH (front of house) manager, if you’re paying enough, and hope they can cherry-pick a few of their friends from around the industry to work the floor. Otherwise all you’re going to have to choose from is the late bloomers who didn’t get out here until last week or those who got fired or quit in an emotional seizure from whatever job they’ve had for the last few weeks.
(I just thought of a particular server who I guarantee will be knocking on his door when he opens. Good luck there, Bruce, this will make the Southampton Town Planning Department seem like a walk in the park. Now I can’t wait for him to open just to see if I’m right.)
Anyway, those 100 rules. Whenever Mr. Buschel does get up and running he will benefit immensely from the publicity his blog—actually just those two entries from last fall about the 100 rules, the rest has been rather banal and self-serving—has gotten him. As I’ve said before, I wouldn’t want to be one of the servers who is subject to the lice inspection that will be the opening gambit of customers there, but there will be customers for at least the first several weeks all the same. If the food’s good, they might just have a chance.
In a sense, Mr. Buschel is not alone this year in making his first foray into the East End restaurant scene—though a quick check of the bona fides of the other newcomers will quickly conjure up Cookie Monster singing “One of these things is not like the other.”
For instance: just up the street on the main drag in Sag Harbor there’s a new burger joint, LT Burger. That LT would stand for Laurent Tourondel, the French culinary master behind Manhattan’s immensely successful BLT Restaurant Group. Monsieur LT left the company last winter and was supposed to open the doors of the new joint in Sag Harbor by this weekend, serving hoity-toity burgers and bistro food in the former Grappa/Jeff and Eddy’s space.
Keep strolling past the American Hotel across the street (which has not been sold to Ralph Lauren and is not for sale) and you’ll find the windows and doors of another former Jean Luc venture, JLX Bistro, open again. It’s called La Maison or something or other and it’s another French bistro-styled place with some sort of connection to the Trata crowd. That space, for reasons I can’t figure, is jinxed and snooty bistros just don’t seem to make it out here, so I haven’t really paid the goings-on there much attention.
Did someone say hoity-toity? Well, Zach Erdem, the manager of Nello Summertimes in Southampton and its famously overpriced Manhattan progenitor, apparently took to the beachy lifestyle out here because he has ditched Boss Balan and taken over the oft-traded lease on 75 Main in Southampton. I guess maybe because he’s a newcomer nobody had warned him about the trials and tribulations of working with his famously cantankerous new landlord.
Out east, the owners of 41 Greenwich Avenue, a quietly popular West Village eatery famous mostly for its lobster mac ’n’ cheese, have taken over the old Laundry/Lodge on Race Lane in East Hampton, and in a deft stroke of marketing genius renamed it, Race Lane. I haven’t been yet, but I hear good things and I’m sure it’s going to be nice. But seriously, folks, when are we going to stop this naming restaurants after their address thing? It’s over; stop it, all of you.
Are you so afraid of coming up with a “bad” name that you’re just completely giving up on any sort of creativity, imagination or special meaning in a name? Do you just name your kids after the day of the week they were born on? I don’t care much for Southfork Kitchen, but at least Mr. Buschel had the guts to come up with an actual name (and not even one of the hundreds suggested by readers of his blog).
Take the restaurant that moved into what has been Matto for the last few years: Serafina. It’s a pretty name. Not unique by any means; yes, there was a Serafina in Sag Harbor for several years but that was no relation to the Manhattan restaurant group making its first foray into the Hamptons scene with this one.
Last but not least on the veteran/newcomers roster are the owners of a Maryland-style crab shack who have moved to Montauk. I guess seafood is seafood, but a crab shack in Montauk, land of the lobster and striped bass, seems kinda like playing a pick-up game of basketball while tailgating before a football game.
But if the crabs are good, I’m sure everyone will get past the incongruity. I know I will. I’m washing my bib.
Bon appetit, folks. We’ll see you on the other side of this mountain called summer.
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