Restaurateur Starr Boggs Was A Quasar In Westhampton Community

Starr Boggs, the gregarious restaurateur and chef whose elegant eponymous restaurants were the crown jewel of the dining scene in the Westhampton area through four decades, died at 70 last week — barely a month after selling the last iteration of his eateries.

Boggs was remembered this week by friends and family as the consummate restaurant chef and owner, whose skills in the kitchen were matched by his robust personality. They celebrated his refined palate for both flavors and the character of a new acquaintance, or job applicant.

His passing, a perusal of the hundreds of messages floating through the social media-verse make clear, leaves in its wake a sprawling community of satisfied customers and beloved former employees.

“He didn’t have a family of his own, but he had the biggest family anyone could have,” said Tony Marr, a close longtime friend, whose mother was Boggs’s first restaurant partner on the South Fork. “He would give someone a job and they’d become his family and he would become their family. He was beloved by the whole Westhampton community.”

Boggs never went to culinary school, but learned the craft on the job, honing his skills in the kitchens of restaurants in Virginia and Florida before landing at The Restaurant, in the Inn at Quogue, in 1981. He was 29 years old.

A year later, he partnered with the Inn at Quogue’s owner, Susie McAllister, to open The Patio restaurant on the corner of Main Street and Sunset Avenue in Westhampton Beach.

The first review of the new restaurant by longtime Newsday food critic Peter Gianotti gave the restaurant a simple assessment: “Shining.”

Gianotti remained a fan of Boggs throughout his career, giving his restaurants the top 4-stars rating in each iteration.

“He had a gift, like a great athlete,” his brother, Joe Boggs, said this week. “Lenny Riggio once said to me that Starr had the greatest taste buds there ever was.

“One of the things that always impressed me about his restaurants was how much he loved to teach,” his brother continued. “I’d see little kids who started as busboys and then I’d come back and they’d be managers. And after they went on to distinguished careers, they’d come back over and over just to see him.”

“He taught me about farm-to-table before that was a catchphrase,” said Peter Armellino, who worked in Boggs’s kitchen and is now chef of the Michelin-starred restaurant Plumed Horse in Saratoga, California, in a Facebook message last week. “He took me to my first James Beard dinner, introduced me to French cheese, promoted local food and local wines. He taught me to be a chef. I’m heartbroken.”

Ralph Starr Boggs was born November 9, 1951, to Ralph and Betty Boggs and grew up on a family farm in Onancock, Virginia, on the Eastern Shore, where dinners were made with home-grown vegetables, dairy and meats and oysters and fish gathered from the nearby Chesapeake Bay. His grandmother, Reaston Boggs, taught him to cook and to appreciate the quality of fresh, local ingredients, his brother said.

A superb athlete — he was 6-foot-4 and more than 250 pounds — and an honors student, Boggs attended the prestigious College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he played football on a team coached by Lou Holtz, who would go on to national fame at Notre Dame.

It was in Williamsburg that a girlfriend got him interested in restaurants, and he took a job in the kitchen of the historic Williamsburg Inn. After college, he stayed with the restaurant industry and worked for several years at upscale restaurants in West Palm Beach before spending a season on Nantucket.

Marr recalled that his mother, Susie McAllister, was visiting Palm Beach that spring and mentioned to the owner of a restaurant there that she was looking for a talented chef to take over the kitchen at her inn, the Inn at Quogue. Marr said the Florida restaurateur insisted that Boggs was her man. A phone call and an audition, and Boggs had the job.

The next year McAllister and Boggs partnered to open The Patio in downtown Westhampton Beach. Three years later the pair sold the popular restaurant — which remains — and Boggs went out on his own, opening the first location bearing his name a couple of doors down the side street from The Patio, riding the renown the young chef’s culinary talents had already earned the Westhampton area.

In 1992, Boggs moved out of the small digs on Sunset Avenue — the building is now Tony’s Asian Fusion — and to the oceanfront Dune Deck Hotel, where the new Starr Boggs became known as one of the premier fine dining restaurants on the South Fork. In 2004, he returned to downtown, opening a new Starr Boggs in a large Victorian home on Parlato Drive.

“Starr had a philosophy about food: You buy the best ingredients and you take care of them when you cook them,” said Frank Lucas, the longtime chef de cuisine at the Parlato Drive restaurant. “With his staff, he expected them to work hard and to care. You have to care, not just show up. He did and so did they, and he loved them and respected them for it, and they loved him and respected him.”

Starr Boggs is survived by his brother Joe, of Onancock, and his wife Kathy, and their children Ryan, Tucker and Brooke Martin; a sister, Dale Bundick, also of Virginia, and her son Russ Bundick.

Friends said that in addition to his mastery of food and the restaurant industry, Boggs was also a superb golfer who traveled to play courses around the country with a clutch of local friends. He also loved fishing and boating and music.

Health issues had made running the restaurant difficult in recent years, and it was first listed for sale in 2018. Boggs said at the time he wasn’t desperate to sell and would happily continue on if he didn’t find a buyer.

The restaurant finally sold in late February, to Rooted Hospitality Group owners David and Rachel Hersh, who also run Cowfish and Rumba restaurants in Hampton Bays and Flora in Westhampton Beach.

His longtime friend Tony Catanzaro said that people gravitated to Boggs’s orbit, lining up to help him with whatever he had put a mind to and that he quickly would return the generosity of spirit, and that his death would leave a gaping hole in the lives of many Westhamptonites.

“He was so real, no pretense, no bull. He was just genuine, and he was a flawless judge of character and his group of friends. We took care of Starr, and he took care of us,” Catanzaro said. “People loved helping him. It was uncanny. Everybody loved him. I’ve lost my best friend.”