Food

How did a meatball from Staten Island with a 45-year pedigree wind up with a shrine to itself in Bridgehampton? The journey of Tony Meatball began in 1971, when Anthony and Joanne D’Andrea, first-generation Italians, opened the RoadHouse, a restaurant some three miles west of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Wear your ugly holiday sweater to the tree-lighting party at Baron’s Cove in Sag Harbor tomorrow at 7:15. There will be live music by the Lynn Blue Duo from 6 to 10 p.m. The next Artists and Writers Night at Almond restaurant in Bridgehampton gets underway at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, with a theme of “Protest Prose and Notes on Comfort.”

It is especially hard to write a review of a place that you wanted to like, thought you should like, and hoped to like, but it ends up being a rather expensive disappointment. Such was the case with Tauk at Trail’s End.

The Amagansett Farmers Market will host a Buy Local, Give Local holiday market on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Shoppers will have the opportunity to purchase comestibles made by Anke’s Fit Bakery, Bonac Bees, Browder’s Birds, Peconic River Preserves, and the Amagansett Sea Salt Co. For a Thanksgiving alternative, Momi Ramen will be open today from 5 to 10 p.m. Tomorrow, the restaurant will serve from noon to 11 p.m.

This is your last chance to dine at Café Max in East Hampton.The restaurant is to close after Nov. 26 after 25 years in business. Till then, however, there is a $22, three-course prix fixe dinner offered all night, all week. Winter farm shares at Quail Hill Farm are available, and will provide the holders with items such as root vegetables, fresh greens, herbs, winter squash, carrots, garlic, dried beans, and wheatberries from Friday, Nov. 18, until February.

Babette’s restaurant in East Hampton is offering a $21.95 prix fixe dinner from 5 to 9 p.m. on Sundays. Need ideas for Thanksgiving celebrations? The Highway Restaurant and Bar in East Hampton can provide all the side dishes and desserts needed. All you to do is prepare the turkey. The Scarpetta Beach restaurant at Gurney’s in Montauk will be serving a four-course Thanksgiving prix fixe next Thursday from noon to 8 p.m. A children’s menu will be offered, as will activities for children between noon and 4 p.m., allowing parents to sit back and enjoy a holiday respite.

The first Thanksgiving of 1621 was simply referred to as a harvest celebration. An Englishman named Edward Winslow described it in a letter to a “loving, and old friend”: “I never in my life remember a more seasonable year, than we have here enjoyed — for fish and fowl we have a great abundance, fresh cod in the summer — our bay full of lobsters, all the springtime the earth sendeth forth naturally good salad herbs: Here are grapes, white and red, very sweet and strong also.”

The poet Walt Whitman was a frequent visitor to Greenport because his sister Mary Elizabeth Van Nostrand lived there. He described it as a “handsome situation” that was “unsurpassed for health.” He must have been eating a lot of oysters!

Elizabeth Yastrzemski, a baker and floral and garden designer, will lead a workshop on the making of beach plum jelly next Thursday night at 6 at the Rogers Mansion in Southampton. Those interested can register by calling the museum. The cost is $35, or $25 for museum members. Rowdy Hall in East Hampton has reintroduced its dinner-and-a-movie special. Sunday through Wednesday, a beef or turkey burger can be ordered along with a voucher for the East Hampton Cinema, for $22.

Head down to La Fondita, the Mexican take-out shop in Amagansett, for Dia de los Muertos. The Day of the dead menu will include pork, chicken, or chile and cheese tamales, chiles en nogada (poblano peppers stuffed with meat or cheese), churros (fried cinnamon-y pastries), and champurrado, a warm chocolate beverage. The special event will be celebrated tomorrow through Sunday. Baron’s Cove in Sag Harbor will mark Halloween weekend with a live music lineup every night from tomorrow through Monday, and specials on nibbles including clams casino, oysters on the half shell, pretzel bites with dipping sauce or melted beer cheddar, sliders, smoked white bean dip with bread and crudités, fries, and a cheese plate.

I first learned about Long Island cheese pumpkins about 23 years ago. I was working as a pastry chef somewhere out here, and it was that time of year, the time of year that I would have to crank out many, many pumpkin pies. So I started working on my supply list: industrial quantities of Libby’s canned pumpkin, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, lotsa eggs. And then the head chef presented me with a crate full of pretty, pale, squat pumpkins, a variety I had never seen before.

A Sunday-night prix fixe at Babette’s restaurant on Newtown Lane in East Hampton, will be offered from 5 to 9 p.m. The cost is $19.95 and features a choice of turkey meatballs, barbecue tofu, steamed edamame, and crisp goat cheese dumplings, among other items, for starters, followed by entrees such as chicken mole enchiladas, vegetable pad thai, roast chicken, salads, and Atlantic cod. Dessert is included as well. On Saturday at Baron’s Cove restaurant in Sag Harbor, Matty Boudreau, the chef, will serve up a menu in honor of Oktoberfest from 1 to 5 p.m. Bratwurst, sausages, grilled corn, German-style pretzels, apple cider, seasonal brews, and more will be offered.

Is there a food or food product that you remember from your childhood with great fondness? Have you ever revisited that food in the hopes that the taste satisfaction would match your memory of it? Did it?

The fall menu at Baron’s Cove restaurant in Sag Harbor includes dishes based on locally sourced ingredients, such as scallops with spaghetti squash from the Milk Pail farm, roasted North Fork fennel and radishes with brown butter vinaigrette, parsnip soup, and cauliflower beignets with a spicy carrot dipping sauce. Maude Muto, the owner and chef at Hampton Herbivore, and a member of the team at the Wellness Foundation of East Hampton, will demonstrate how to make a delicious plant-based dessert at a potluck dinner on Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton.

The locals are gathering at Momi Ramen in East Hampton on Wednesday for locals night. From 5 to 10 p.m., Sapporo draft beer is two-for-one, and free snacks will be served at the bar. Baron’s Cove restaurant in Sag Harbor is open year round, and on Saturday will have a fall festival from 1 to 8 p.m. featuring barbecue brisket, ribs, beer-can chicken, and smoked striped bass, along with sliders, burgers, and hot dogs.

A warren of small rooms has been opened up and lightened. The floors and trim are dark, the walls off-white, and there are a few hints that this location was, in fact, once a service station, such as the old-fashioned bell hose outside that gives a little “ding ding” when you drive over it.

As early adopters of the Slow Food movement, East End foodies may find the WLIW21 Metrofocus feature on the movement and its adherents old news. Yet to many around the region, the coverage of the East End’s farmers, chefs, and schoolyard gardens may prove edifying.

You can “come to the table.” by joining the East End’s Slow Food chapter. Members can participate in Slow Food dinners and other events that highlight the role of local agriculture and locally grown food. A three-course prix fixe at the Living Room restaurant in East Hampton, at c/o the Maidstone inn, has dropped in price to $35, from $49.

You'll flip for flapjacks!. Pancakes will be served at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor following a talk on Saturday at 5 p.m. by Craig Carlson, the author of a memoir, “Pancakes in Paris: Living the American Dream in France.” At Momi Ramen in East Hampton, a bar menu offered on Fridays and Saturdays from 8 to 10 p.m. includes oshinko (Japanese pickled vegetables) and eda­mame for $5; two types of gyoza, a Japanese-style dumpling, for $8, and kara-age, fried items, for $8.

Your mind may already be turning to pumpkins and apples this time of year (or mush, depending on how busy your summer was), but it’s time to get to work. If you want to save some of the glorious corn, tomatoes, herbs, and more to enjoy throughout the winter, you need to get cracking.

There is something about a small, cozy restaurant that creates an atmosphere of jollity and camaraderie. Estia’s Little Kitchen is such a place.

It took longer than anticipated, but last month a 1977 Citroen H van rolled into the Kirk Park Beach parking lot in Montauk and Bex Waffles was open for business.

Get rowdy at the eighth annual Oktoberfest at Rowdy Hall restaurant in East Hampton from 3 to 5 p.m. on Saturday. The Hayground School Farmer’s Market will remain open through the end of September. Its hours are 3 to 6 p.m. on Fridays and it takes place on the school grounds at Mitchell Lane in Bridgehampton.

Explore the foodie world of the North Fork with the 10th annual North Fork Foodie Tour on Sunday from the Agricultural Center in Southold. Participating locations include Deep Roots Farm, Lavender by the Bay, Macari Wines, 8 Hands Farm, and the North Fork Roasting Company. At “Garden to Table: Eating for Wellness,” a program on Saturday at Bridge Gardens in Bridgehampton, Rick Bogusch, the garden manager, will lead a trip to the site’s vegetable garden to harvest fresh vegetables, and will demonstrate how to create a delicious salad from them, which will be shared.

It’s that time of year. Perhaps you are sending a daughter or son off to college, or in my case, helping a son set up his first singleton apartment. Hopefully, by now, you have taught your offspring one of the most important life skills: how to cook for his or herself. If you haven’t, woe be to those children, for they will be eating Domino’s pizza and Subway sandwiches and bagels from the cafeteria.

Sometimes reviewing restaurants is fun and swell and delicious and sometimes it is a chore and a bore and requires a good supply of Bromo-Seltzer. (That’s old-school lingo for antacids.) Reviewing restaurants when our season is in full cry requires the driving skills of Mario Andretti, the military acumen of Gen. George Patton, and the stamina of an illegally fortified Lance Armstrong.

Zigmund’s Bar is revving up to be an off-season regular with live music events and a nightly happy hour from 5:30 p.m. till sunset, featuring $5 specials of rosé, beer, and lamb chops. The Living Room restaurant at c/o the Maidstone inn on East Hampton’s Main Street is taking reservations for two upcoming special dinners. On Sept. 15, wines from the Frank Family Vineyards in California will be served with dishes designed to complement the selections. Swedish cuisine will take center stage at the Living Room on Sept. 29, with a five-course tasting menu reflecting the heritage of the inn’s proprietors to be served for $95 per person plus tax and gratuity.

The whole family can have fun at pizza night at Amber Waves Farm behind the Amagansett Farmers market on Tuesday from 5:30 to 7. The cost is $35 per person, or $25 for members of CMEE or the Amber Waves C.S.A. program. Space is limited, and preregistration is required with CMEE. Vicki’s Veggies in Amagansett is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year with a celebration tomorrow from 3 to 6 p.m. which will include refreshments and other activities.

When eggplants were taken from India to England long ago, they were considered an ornamental plant. They are the only major vegetable of the nightshade family (tomatoes, squash, tobacco, peppers, potatoes) that came from the Old World. According to Harold McGee in his book “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen,” “an early ancestor may have floated from Africa to India or Southeast Asia where it was domesticated.” Eggplant was being eaten in Italy by the 15th century and in France by the 18th.

Dan’s Harvest East End will be held at the McCall Vineyard and Ranch in Cutchogue on Saturday. Geoffrey Zakarian, a chef who has appeared on the Food Network’s “Chopped” and “The Kitchen,” along with his newest show, “Cooks vs. Cons,” will be the host. Tickets are on sale for Gala in the Garden, a Sept. 10 benefit at Estia’s Little Kitchen in Sag Harbor that will be hosted by Colin Ambrose, the eatery’s owner and chef, and his wife, Jessica Ambrose.