I just love what the Hamptons has become in the wintertime.I grew up in Manhattan, the lucky son of a couple who lived around the corner from Barney Greengrass and had what we called back then a “country house” in Hampton Bays. Back then, Labor Day came, school started and weekends were spent in Central Park. The cottage was winterized—completely shut down, pipes blown clear of water so the furnace (if there even was a furnace) could be turned off. Coming out on weekends was not really an option.
And now, look what we’ve become.
This past weekend, in what should be among the quietest weekends of the year, every place I went to was hopping. In Sag Harbor these days, you can hardly tell the difference between a Friday or Saturday night in summer and winter. There’s no place to park, the bar stools are all full, the stores are all open, and there’s a line at the ice cream shop counter. Bridgehampton is the same way, and Southampton Village is only marginally different.
The lone exception is Westhampton Beach, which remains quaintly, but kinda sadly, quiet in winter. For some reason, they’ve never managed to capture the year-round residents of the surrounding residential neighborhoods. Frankly, I’m not sure why.
The west-of-the-canal restaurant industry remains a difficult one to figure out. Great places like The Station fail. Mediocre or even terrible ones persevere year after year.
In a corkscrew of irony around irony, I was surprised to hear that Villa Tuscano had closed. I’d eaten there two or three times over the years, and each time the food and service had been, frankly, not good. And yet the place always seemed pretty crowded. The bar stools were full, the restaurant’s dining room—with its lighting turned up way too bright—was typically more or less full. And lots of friends told me they went there a lot. Go figure, right?
Then it closes, sits empty all summer, and then—poof!—up pops a sign for Centro in late fall. I rolled my eyes the first time I passed it and muttered something typically cynical (for me) about another uninspired ristorante, or trattoria, in this case.
Then I heard that James Carpenter was the chef. Then I went there.
Now I’m telling you to go there, too.
Some of his former bosses will probably roll their eyes, but Mr. Carpenter has a great track record of setting restaurants east of the canal on the right path. After his initial tenure at Della Femina, where he was the bridge between the Pat Trama/Kevin Penner and Mike Rozzi administrations, he resurrected the American Hotel to new heights when it had been woefully flagging in the wake of Peter Dunlop’s departure, and he pulled East Hampton Point up by its bootstraps, though failings on the other side of the kitchen door meant that was a hard-won victory in a lost war. He put the old Maidstone Arms, now the Living Room, back on the fine dining map by sharpening the presentation of the Swedish dishes new owners had introduced, and then he turned Page in Sag Harbor around and made it a hopping destination (with no small amount of help from Eric Peele and company).
Centro is already a vast improvement from what was, and a welcome rung in the gradual climb of the food scene west of the canal.
I hope we will be able to say as much about another replacement for an Italian joint that suddenly closed its doors despite seeming to be relatively popular. Tuscan House wasn’t my favorite place for Italian, but it wasn’t bad by any means, the service was sharp and friendly, and the bar and dining room were wonderful spots to hang out.
So I was mildly surprised when all of a sudden the sign was gone and replaced with one advertising a new gastropub soon to open. It made a bit more sense to read on 27east.com that it’s to be owned by the same owner of Tuscan House and will keep some of the menu favorites, while mixing in pub fare—that means burgers and steaks and fish—and I’ve been saying that a gastropub is exactly what we need out here, though it seems a bit presumptuous to put the term in the name of the actual restaurant. Nonetheless, the idea alone is one that raises hopes, and in such a prime location it should be an easy success if the execution lives up to the “gastro” and not just the “pub.”
The logic in the move is easy to see. You had Tuscan House, which seemed to do relatively well but wasn’t packing them in. Lunches were quiet, despite having an essentially open-air dining room, albeit kind of around the bend from the mainstream of foot traffic. Italian food is not exactly what a lot of Americans are looking for at lunchtime, unless you’re talking pizza slices and parmigiana heroes.
I will venture to guess that the owners saw the success the relocated Publick House was having and figured they needed to tailor their game to the pitch a bit. Hopefully, it was the right call.
The best news I’ve heard all winter is that the owners of my favorite restaurant from last summer, Ete, which inhabited the old Robert’s building for a scant three months, are looking at one of the two empty restaurant spaces directly across the street in the Water Mill Shoppes. We loved chef Arie Pavlou’s French-prep American fare at Ete and thought the service that his delightful wife, Liz, mustered from the staff was spot on. So it would be a joy to see it brought back to either the old Foody’s—the closing of which I’m still depressed over—or Muse spaces.
How’s this for a segue: It just so happens that the chronically vacant Water Mill Shoppes was once home to an Indian food space and, just recently, I heard that Indian food might be making its long-awaited first foray into the tableclothed dining rooms in the Hamptons’ heart, into the space of another recently closed restaurant that was painfully sad to see close.
The word over the wood is that the ambitious owners of Saaz, the Indian restaurant on the highway in Southampton, formerly Peter’s Back Street and Meson Ole, are the soon-to-be new leaseholders at the former Wild Rose/Southfork Kitchen/Fresh spot on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike. The building owner, erstwhile screenwriter-turned-restaurateur Bruce Buschel, says that a new lease hasn’t been signed yet, and that there are still a number of potential new tenants.
An Indian restaurant in Bridgehampton would be an ambitious testing of the seemingly crumbling walls to ethnic foods in the snootiest reaches of the Hamptons. Have the progressive eaters populated Sag Harbor and Bridgehampton enough to prop up a place that will draw its base of clientele from the same pool of stodgy old crumbs who couldn’t be convinced to eat only fish on a night out to dinner?
Stay tuned this spring for the answer to that question and a whole lot more, like: Will Ron Perelman finally bring La Bibloquet to Sag Harbor, a year after he was supposed to?
Either way, I’ll have the salmon.
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