Eat and Run
Where did all this start? We know that man has been eating since…well, since men and women first sat around the fire and asked “Mastodon again?” But when did they start eating not just for sustenance, but also for the sheer pleasure of it all?
We know man has been riding horses for many thousands of years, but when did he first convince a horse of the need for jumping over obstacles for no earthly reason—except perhaps to see which purveyor of opulently priced luxury goods has seen fit to spend its profits erecting barriers in front of horses? However the gastronomic and equestrian traditions got started, and whatever their combined millennial age might be, they have surely reached some sort of collective high point right here in Bridgehampton at the Hampton Classic Horse Show.
Let’s start with the food. No, forgive me, let us start with the show jumping and work up an appetite. This year, about 1,200 horses will be stabled under the tents at the Classic. Let us note that the horses have their tents and the people have theirs. Food and drink flow in both places, and neither one is easy to get into. Horses need real qualifications for admission, while people merely need things like money or friends. Horses, both the winners and the losers, can be said to work hard and earn their place at our show and other shows. People too earn their places and on occasion it is also through hard work. But what the two-legged and four-legged friends of the Classic have in common outshines the differences: for one thing they all look fabulous. It comes quite naturally to the horses, whether they are bounding over jumps, trotting around practice rings, standing serenely in their stalls, or gazing across fields thinking about the old days on the steppes of Central Asia. People of course put more effort into achieving their fabulousness, and the batting average is not quite as high as it is with horses—but I guess, as a species, we do have more to worry about, mostly having to do with fellow members of our species.
Competition is another characteristic we all have in common, although it has become more and more apparent to me over the years that humans are by nature more ferocious than horses. Given the choice, few horses of my acquaintance would choose to spend the afternoon galloping up to a blockade in order to jump over it, and then gallop up to the next one. Why not just walk around it? All of the rest of us involved in equestrian sport, however, find this activity tremendously exciting. And when things slow down in the show ring, we don’t. Our competitive urges are manifest throughout the tents, especially on Grand Prix Sunday. Just catch the clothes, the conversation, the tabletops, the food and drink, and the minions who facilitate it all.
Food, no less than anything else at the Classic, is a signifier of time and place, of status and style, of who we are and how we want to be perceived. A stroll through the patrons’ tents during Grand Prix reveals a complex sociological world as well as some swell lunches. A more formal connection between good food and exciting sport has been forged over the past several years by the involvement of the Long Island Chefs Association with the Classic. The chefs organize a lunch for the press on Opening Day, and a party for major sponsors on the final weekend. They clearly make an enormous effort, and the results are spectacular. Using mostly local produce and local finfish and shellfish—the freshest and the best—they showcase the bounty of Long Island as well as their own talents and the excellence of their restaurants. On tasting the quality of the food and seeing the creativity behind the finished dishes, one cannot fail to notice that Long Island chefs are second to none, including those cooking at our famous island neighbor to the west.
This pairing of food and sport enhances what is already the largest and most glamorous outdoor jumper show in the country. Allow me to qualify that statement for any statisticians or other readers who find the unembellished truth more interesting than my version. If your parameter is the total size of the prizes, or even the largest amount of money going to a single winner, then the Classic is not quite the biggest. If your gauge is the number of horses entered, again we are not—but if it is the number of people attending, we are. Although I must point out that with our human bias we only count horses once, no matter how many events they enter, but we count attendees for each day they show up, no matter how many times. If you measure the number and prominence of the sponsors, the Hampton Classic is clearly the top show in the country. And when it comes to the less quantifiable—beauty, atmosphere, cache, essence, and stature in the equine world—then no show comes close to the Classic. For those of us who have been involved with the Classic over many years, it has become a force of nature, comparable to our big skies, long horizon and vast ocean—there, mutable but dependable, changing in temperament but constant in spirit, tangibly beautiful with metaphysical implications. Perfect, if you happen to have an appetite for life and an accompanying appetite for lunch.
Michael Braverman is a member of the Board of Directors of the Hampton Classic Horse Show. He writes for Hamptons Magazine, hosts the television broadcast of Bridgehampton Polo, and believes in eating and drinking on the job.