Dimon Estate Offers Dinner With a Side of History

Dinner with a side of history.

The history of the property on Manor Lane in Jamesport once owned by clipper ship magnate John Dimon, now home to a restaurant known as The Dimon Estate, is a long and storied one with dramatic twists and turns. Farmers settled the land, sons fought for it, heirs left it to make their fortunes and returned to it to share their wealth and worldliness. Crops grew, animals grazed, cannonballs rolled, tragedy struck, a grand home was built, fire consumed it.

General manager and head chef Chris Kar is leaning heavily into that history to create a unique dining experience for guests that goes beyond a few photos on the wall and blurb on the menu. Though it has that, too. He and partner Emily Hammond have worked to incorporate as much of the Dimon family backstory as possible in the décor, the food and the extensive gardens outside.

“It’s a story-driven restaurant,” Kar said in a recent interview. “As we continue to try to (achieve) this goal of it becoming a space for public history, I’m telling stories with every single menu about the different Dimons and what their legacy was.”

For example, Kar’s summer menu describes the Dimon family’s early years in agriculture and incorporates that in something the chef says the North Fork has always been good at: farm-to-table dining. Local seafood, including scallops, mussels, oysters and clams, is featured alongside dishes built around the summer harvest of tomatoes, squash, beets and potatoes, among others.

The fall menu is inspired by John F. Dimon, who struck out on his own to be a merchant in Peru, married there, and returned to Jamesport with a wife, Rosalie, and a small fortune. The couple built the original manor house on the estate. With a nod to that era, Kar said, “I’m going Peruvian on half the menu and the other half is still American flavors.”

Kar and Hammond — and Kar’s father Mat Kar before them — have worked with local historian and gardener Richard Wines to research the Dimon family and the property for years. Mat Kar and a partner purchased the estate and undertook a full-scale restoration of the manor home in 2005. Shortly before it was to reopen as a restaurant, a fire broke out and consumed the building. What stands today is a near identical recreation.

“It is, in fact, entirely new construction except for the doorknobs. The doorknobs were out for restoration when the original home (burned) down,” Wines recalled in a recent interview. “It’s also such a marvelous recreation of what was there … the outside is almost exact and the inside is pretty close. So even though it’s a reproduction, it still speaks to some very interesting episodes in the town’s history.”

The Dimon Estate was built in the Second Empire style of architecture, also known as Napoléon III design. Made famous by Baron Haussmann, who oversaw the rebuilding of much of Paris in that style from the mid-1850s to 1870, Second Empire’s most iconic element is the mansard roof and the Dimon Estate certainly has one.

“Not many buildings here were built in that style because it was a fancy style and most people here were simple farmers,” said Wines, who is chairman of Riverhead Town’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. “The Dimon family was wealthy by local standards.”

Wines said he recently dined at the restaurant and sat outside, which provided him a view he imagined was something out of the past.

“Here you are with this grand building behind you and you look out in all directions and all you see is open fields around you. There are some horses across the street, and it’s a very quiet road,” he explained. “It almost feels like all of Long Island once was, historically.”

Part of the view outside the Dimon Estate is of the gardens, which have been a passion project for Kar and Hammond. Kar has been involved with the business, formerly known as the Jamesport Manor Inn, off and on for several years. He took over as general manager and relaunched it as the Dimon Estate in March 2022. He enlisted the help of his partner, Hammond, to reimagine and revamp the grounds.

Hammond, who has a garden design business of her own in Connecticut, explained the property has several garden spaces now, each with an intent and purpose.

“The idea was to create a four seasons look to contrast the architecture because, well, it’s kind of a moody building, between the colors and the Second Empire style, the slate roof,” Hammond said. “I wanted to complement that and also lend a little whimsy … it’s always alive, always buzzing.”

All of the gardens have a Victorian touch, but the five main gardens have distinct themes, Hammond explained. — “We have a great story here — an American clipper ship family with access to all these exotic places and the gardens are inspired by that history.”

The front garden greets visitors and features a clematis growing up and over the archway at the entrance, a point of real pride for Hammond. “It’s the kind of plant where when you have an idea of what you want it to do and then you bring it to the property and it does what you wanted it to. You have to love it when that happens, and it is gorgeous,” she said.

There is also a chef’s botanicals garden, where herbs and edible flowers are grown, mostly for use at the bar. Then there is the “Rosalie Garden” bordering the outdoor dining area. It is a kind of test garden where Hammond experiments with plants alongside a crop of staples — lilies, roses, Japanese anemone, peonies and hellebores included — that reflect the Asian influence of the Dimon history in shipbuilding for the tea trade with the Far East and China.

The Dimon Estate also has an orchard that Kar and Hammond inherited. The trees, not meant to produce fruit for sale, had a problem, Hammond said.

“They were a little hooked on drugs, and I come from an organics background,” she explained. More than a year later, the orchard is responding well to the switch to organic treatment and Hammond has installed two “pollinator patches” to help the fruit trees and chef’s garden — and a micro-farm planted by Kar — flourish.

“They’re strictly native plants and pollinator species and it has been a real treat to watch it evolve and to see plants that are supposed to be here thrive in a space they are meant to be in,” Hammond said. “You can sit there and watch bees and butterflies for hours.”

The micro-farm is Kar’s project, and it includes 140 tomato plants he started from seeds in his apartment, he said. He got the gardening bug during the pandemic, he said, “when we were all locked up.” There are also 50 pepper plants and dozens of other squash and melon plants, among others, all grown from seeds.

“We’re doing our best to recreate what the Dimon family did on this property for 200 years,” Kar said.

After three generations of farmers worked the Dimon family land, the third, John Dimon, left at the age of 15 for New York City and would go on to start a shipyard that would eventually become Smith & Dimon. With the help of ship designer John Griffiths, Smith & Dimon built several of the fastest clipper ships ever to set sail, most famously the Sea Witch.

Built in 1846, “speed was written into almost every line of the Sea Witch,” according to Maritime Heritage Project’s website, and “she had the reputation at that time of being the handsomest ship sailing out of New York.” Three years later, the Sea Witch set the world speed record for a monohulled sailing vessel sailing from Hong Kong to New York in 1849 by making the trip in 74 days.

The record stands to this day.

While his father was enjoying great success as a shipbuilder, John F. Dimon was being educated among the upper class in New York City. As a young man, he later struck out on his own and traveled to Peru, where he built a robust enough business to retire to the North Fork circa 1860. Once there, he acquired the original Manor Lane farmhouse and set to replacing it with the Second Empire mansion for his bride. Riverhead Town historical records indicate the new home was outfitted with a prayer booth, or chapel, for Rosalie, who was raised Catholic in Peru.

The house was “not at all typical of the area,” according to town Historian Georgette Case. It came to be known by locals as “the Manor house.”

Dimons continued living on the property into the early 20th century.

While plans to expand the Dimon Estate business have been met with staunch opposition by some neighbors and the town’s zoning officials, Kar continues to mine the property’s rich history to expand the Dimon legacy there

Wines, at least, thinks that is a valuable effort

“It’s pretty rare. There are some private houses and a museum or two, but there’s not many spaces that people can go to and enjoy a meal or anything like that in a historic structure,” he said. “They’ve done an admirable job trying to infuse the look and the feel and the food with a bit of history, which is a nice way to differentiate the Dimon Estate from most of the other restaurants here, which are in fairly nondescript modern buildings.”