Aperçu: a quick restaurant syllabus
Long before there was a Nick & Toni’s there was a Ma Bergman’s at their same location on North Main Street in East Hampton. They used to make pizza and pastas in the kitchen and Ma would serve them in one of the other two rooms or porch of the first floor of her home. You could hear the family watching television upstairs, and sometimes the kids would come down in their pajamas to say goodnight to Pa, who was the chef. John Duck’s in Southampton was more of a real restaurant. Before driving back to New York Sunday nights folks used to stop in there for a family style meal with food served from big bowls. The pace was leisurely. No one worried about traffic on the Expressway. In Bridgehampton Bobby Van’s was a good local hangout where Truman Capote held court and Bobby Van played the piano and everyone stayed up late, even during the week. Twenty years ago that’s the way restaurants were in the Hamptons. You didn’t need a reservation and people still had this quaint notion of going out just to eat, oblivious of seeing and being seen.
But just as a food revolution took place in America, so too did things change here. Now we have it all: the latest and best of foods, the glamour and, of course, the wait for the table. Not to mention all these worries about which restaurant to go to and which table to be at. As the maitre d’ says to Steve Martin, after an interview for a table in LA Story, “What makes you think you can afford the duck?”
Bobby Van’s is still a good hangout, for the food and for the scene, especially if you are young, stay up late and miss romping around with your peers at the playground. Basilico’s offers the right mix of Mediterranean fragrance and Southampton chic. Della Femina, with sketches of some Hamptons upper echelon folks on the walls, is a food powerhouse and a power powerhouse, radiating out from the front corner table.
Nick & Toni’s is the celebrity clubhouse, created at that magic moment when the names that appear in the columns in boldface started to gather in the Hamptons. It’s a hangout for the rich and famous (yes, Spielberg does have his table, but Alec Baldwin also likes that table), but still fun for the home team (off-season midweek $19.95 pre-fixe including a movie ticket). The nine tables in the front room are where you’ll probably be seated next to Gywnth or Gogo or, on one recent night, Christy Brinkley with husband Peter Cook and former husband Billy Joel, but if you are a well-adjusted person, you should have no problem with the other rooms.
The staff, led by Bonnie, will really treat you just as well as they do the biggies. Well, almost. They might not do this for everyone, but when Barbra Streisand and husband-to-be James Brolin knocked at the door of a closed Nick & Toni’s one mid-week looking for grub, they cooked her a plate of pasta which she ate quietly in the corner while on her cell phone the whole time. But, then, what else do you do in an empty restaurant?
Nick & Toni’s has just undergone a minor renovation: new lighting, new paint, new dishes for the olives, a carpet in the back room. Not a big deal to the world at large, but to the regulars it’s the North Main Street equivalent of the new look at Le Cirque 2000. Insider tip: stay late for an extra glass of grappa, and you might very well wind up in a conversation with a mogul or a movie star.