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Aubrey Roemer will paint 400 portraits of Montauk locals by summer's end. MICHELLE TRAURING
As the weather is warming up in the Hamptons, famous East End kitchens are getting hot, too. Arts & Living restaurant-hopped in East Hampton Village last week to hear from the chefs about which dishes are crowd pleasers, personal favorites and signatures.
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ost Popular:
Roasted Pork and Beans; appetizer; $14.
Chef’s Favorite:
Lobster-Glazed Sea Scallops; appetizer; $16.
Signature:
16-ounce New York Strip; entrée; $34.
Executive Chef Dennis J. Farrell said he loves pork belly. And what’s more, he loves it served over barbecue baked beans.
His customers seem to agree.
“We sell a ton of these. It’s a classic pairing: pork and beans,” he said. “I crisp up the pork belly skin and serve it over the beans. They get boiled with chicken stock, molasses, ketchup, garlic, onion, liquid smoke. They’re light and spicy and nice and sweet, sweet and sugary. They taste like barbecue. It gets garnished with candied orange zest. It cuts the richness of the dish and gives you a nice, fresh taste in your mouth.”
For his personal favorite, Mr. Farrell buys scallops in Montauk and serves them over truffled cream corn. The scallops are pan-seared with a little brown butter, thyme, garlic, salt and pepper, and drizzled with the lobster glaze.
“It’s a really nice dish, people love it,” Mr. Farrell said. “When people hear ‘lobster glaze,’ they say, ‘Whoa, that sounds delicious! Lobster glaze!’ So that’s a big-seller, too.”
The 16-ounce New York Strip is prime beef dry-aged for 30 days, Mr. Farrell explained, and served a la carte with four sauces to choose from.
“It’s unbelievable tasting, and the New York strip is a very tasty cut of beef and it’s one of the more popular steaks out there, anywhere,” he said.
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ost Popular:
Fois Gras; appetizer; $17.
Chef’s Favorite:
Fluke Crudo; appetizer; $15.
Signature:
Slow Braised Beef Short Ribs with Creamy Polenta and Local Apple Gremolata; entree; $29.
Executive Chef Gretchen Menser slices the grade-A, local fois gras into 3-ounce portions and pan sears it, she explained, so it’s served crispy on the outside and medium rare on the inside. She serves it with sauteed local apples and apple cider gastrique.
“It’s something that I love to eat very much, so I put a lot of heart and soul into it when I make it,” she said. “Even though it’s widely known, it’s still a specialty thing for people to eat. So when we put it on the menu, people get excited. It’s an indulgence.”
The Fluke Crudo is prepared with cucumber ribbons, diced jalapeño peppers, Easter egg radishes, lime juice and extra virgin olive oil, all topped off with Hawaiian pink salt, Ms. Menser said.
“It’s my favorite because we get to use local fluke,” she reported. “It comes in super beautiful, sushi grade. It looks really beautiful when it’s thinly sliced and put on the plate. It’s a light, refreshing, happy plate of food.”
The short rib concoction is one that Ms. Menser has perfected over the course of her career, she said. The meat is seared and tossed in a large roasting pan with red wine, tomato purée, onions, celery, carrots and spices. It braises in the liquid for 3½ hours until tender and is served over a creamy polenta with a sauce reduced from the braising liquid. The apple gremolata is made with orange zest, lime, lemon, fresh horseradish, pepper, lemon juice and olive oil.
“It’s something I’ve done for a long time in many restaurants that I’ve worked at. I’ve kind of developed this recipe,” she said. “It’s turned out to be super flavorful and all the spices give it a very interesting flavor. It’s just kind of my thing.”
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ost Popular:
Scottish Salmon Tartare with Capers, Shallots, Olives and Citronette; appetizer; $15.
Chef’s Favorite:
Roasted Day-Boat Halibut, Mashed Potatoes, Wild Mushroom Broth and Crisp Leeks; entrée; $30.
Signature:
Roasted Local Fluke with Lemon Brown Butter and Fennel Confit; entrée; $25.
Salmon season is under way, explained Chef Kebin Penner, and wild salmon will soon be replacing the Scottish salmon used in the tartare. It’s prepared Mediterranean-style with a variety of olives, lemon juice, olive oil, capers and chopped parsley.
“It’s a really light, refreshing tartare,” Mr. Penner said. “Most of the time I do tartare dishes, I do a more Asian-style of preparation with them, but this is like a taste of the Riviera. You want a big explosion of flavor, but you don’t want to be filled up, so to speak, or overwhelmed by it.”
Mr. Penner’s favorite dish—the Roasted Day-Boat Halibut—comes from his days at Della Femina, which was recently sold and reopened as East Hampton Grill.
“Since it closed up, I decided to take the dish back and put it on the menu here,” Mr. Penner said. “Della Femina’s best-selling dish in probably the history of the restaurant is now on the menu here.”
The halibut, which Mr. Penner called a fairly neutral canvas, is matched with the smooth potato purée and crisp leeks, and the thyme in the broth pulls it all together, he explained.
“Mushroom, thyme and leeks are a classic combination of flavors,” he said.
According to Mr. Penner, hungry diners frequently visit the restaurant specifically for his signature pan-roasted local fluke served with a sauce made from lemon juice, brown butter and chicken stock.
“It’s been on the menu since we opened just over a year ago, and it’s our best-selling dish, hands down,” he said.
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ost Popular:
Orecchiette with Sausage and Broccoli Rabe; appetizer/entrée; $12/$18.
Chef’s Favorite:
Insalata Scarola with Escarole, Hard-boiled Egg and Radish; salad; $11.
Signature:
Gnocchi with Crispy Pork Belly and Calabrian Chilies; appetizer/entrée; $15/$21.
Being an Italian restaurant, it’s all about the pasta, said Executive Chef James Gee. And while the orecchiette is a simple pasta, it’s one of the most popular.
“I took it off the menu one time and there was an uproar,” he said. “So I put it back on.”
As the orecchiette boils, Mr. Gee cooks Italian sausage, removed from its casing, with chili flakes and sliced garlic until the meat looks ground. He mixes it in with chopped broccoli rabe and the pasta is added to the ingredients.
“There isn’t really a sauce, per se,” Mr. Gee said. “Everything just holds together.”
Mr. Gee said he eats the escarole salad almost every other night. It’s tossed with a mellow anchovy dressing, he said.
“It’s made with salt-cured anchovies that we source from Italy,” he said. “They’re not the ones in a tin that you open up and they’re swimming in oil. The flavor is much more unique and tasty to me.”
Italian food is actually very simple, Mr. Gee said, like hand-made potato gnocchi with pork belly, which is cooked at 200 degrees for 12 hours and then crisped with a little olive oil, Calabrian chilies, lemon juice and arugula. The dish is finished off with a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese.
“These are great dishes for me,” he said. “It’s simplicity and using great ingredients. I don’t get too extravagant.”
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ost Popular:
“Köttbullar and Klimp”; entrée; $32.
Chef’s Favorite:
“Swedish Smörgåsbord”; appetizer; $18.
Signature:
Sautéed Seasonal Forest Mushrooms, Toasted Brioche and Flavored with Brandy; appetizer; $18.
“Köttbullar and Klimp” is a spin on Swedish meatballs, explained Executive Chef James Carpenter. The lamb meatballs are served with local kale, a tomato-based broth and Mecox Bay Dairy ricotta gnocchi.
“Ricotta gnocchi are much lighter and airy, as opposed to potato,” Mr. Carpenter said. “Potato can sometimes be very dense, like little hockey pucks. People want to have the Scandinavian experience of the dish, but it’s also something very familiar to them, comforting.”
The colorful smorgasbord is one of the restaurant’s classic crowd pleasers, Mr. Carpenter said. It features homemade gravlax, herring, shrimp skagen and grain mustard sauce.
“It’s a little sampling, a Swedish pupu platter, if you will,” he said. “You get to taste a couple different things. I can order the gravlax, but then you’ve committed to one thing, so this is kind of fun.”
However, committing to the seasonal forest mushroom appetizer wouldn’t be a mistake, Mr. Carpenter said. The signature dish is sautéed with a little brandy, cream and served over brioche toast points, he said.
“This is something that we put on the menu when we started. And the thing that makes it special is I use these beautiful, local, organic mushrooms,” he said.
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ost Popular:
RL Burger; entrée; $19.
Chef’s Favorite:
Beer Braised Shortrib; appetizer; $18.
Signature:
Tuna Tabbouleh; appetizer; $15.
The RL Burger isn’t the run-of-the-mill beef on bun, said Executive Chef Dana Lamel. A mix of chuck and sirloin is placed on a Portuguese bun and topped with aged Vermont cheddar cheese, red onion jam and candied spiced bacon.
“It’s just a really good tasting burger, it really is,” he said. “All of the flavors work really well together to the point where you get it and you don’t even need ketchup or anything on it. All of the components are there. The onion jam does it. I can’t take credit, it’s the onion jam.”
To prepare his personal favorite, Mr. Lamel braises short ribs with a dark beer, something heavy like a stout, and cooks it overnight. He then heats the meat in a pan with some of the braising liquid, seasons with salt and pepper and sets it in a jar with a flip top. He tops it with a poached egg and shoestring fried potatoes.
“It’s a fun dish and the presentation is different,” he said. “I, myself, am a huge fan of eggs. I think they’re great because it’s the only protein that can be its own sauce as well. I love having that yolk break into the meat with the braising liquid. It makes a really nice, rich sauce that the meat is sitting in.”
The chef’s personal touch on the Tuna Tabbouleh makes it the restaurant’s signature dish, he said.
“A lot of people do tuna tartare, so this is a little bit different,” Mr. Lamel said. “It’s bulgar wheat, which is a grain, cooked off with vegetable stock and chilled down.”
The grain is tossed with diced raw tuna and tomatoes, scallions, chopped parsley, mint, harissa vinaigrette and mint yogurt.
“It has spice—not a lot, but a little kick,” he said. “It’s my own touch to it. It’s different than what everyone else is doing, and we’ve gotten positive feedback on it.”
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