Food

When reviewing restaurants, I almost always sample their fried calamari offerings. Just about every restaurant out here has it on the menu. It’s a good test of the chef’s abilities. Is it lightly crisped and tender? Are the tentacles included? Is it served with an imaginative sauce or just a tepid marinara?

Ride a Hampton Jitney busto the North Fork to visit the Shinn Estate, Paumanok, and Palmer Vineyards for wine tastings, with a stop for a catered lunch. A $100 fee includes all. Sponsored by Wainscott Main Wine and Spirits. In Montauk, Navy Beach restaurant reopens tomorrow at 5 p.m., serving dinner through Sunday night as well as lunch on Saturday.

I had what I called a “dinner for swells” the other night. “Swell” is a word I learned from Lee Bailey, the cookbook author, lifestyle and entertaining expert, bon vivant, and Bridgehampton resident, a native Louisianan. It is an old-fashioned term used to describe important people you want to impress. In other words, you gotta step up your culinary repertoire.

The South Fork Kitchens Cafe in the student center of the Stony Brook Southampton campus will offer grab-and-go salads, soups, and sandwiches. The cafe is a cooperative food center. In observation of Passover, both Nick and Toni’s and Rowdy Hall in East Hampton will have a la carte menu specials from tomorrow through April 30.

This spring I had the honor of moderating the Peconic Land Trust’s “Long Island Grown: Food and Beverage Artisans at Work” panels for the third time. Sponsored by Edible East End, they manage to get the best people from the North and South Forks who are involved in farming, fishing, winemaking, beekeeping, baking, duck wrangling, cooking, mushroom growing, candy creating, fermenting, brewing, and more.

It’s mid-April and the weather forecast calls for temperatures in the 30s at night. Harold McMahon Plumbing sends out a form every “spring” asking clients when they’d like their outside water turned on. The form warns against turning it on before April 15. But the cheery flats of pansies are out at Wittendale’s, so spring must be drawing nigh. Right? This is zone 7a and 7b, after all.

Lisa Kaplan will be the speaker at the wine talk at Wainscott Main Wine and Spirits, on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. Her subject will be “The Wild Man of Walla Walla: Charles Smith’s Washington Wines.” The sixth annual Taste of Tuckahoe benefit will take place on Friday, April 22, at 230 Elm in Southampton

The Golden Pear Cafe will offer a new Healthy Kids breakfast and lunch menu that will feature healthy and enticing choices. Stratis Morfogen, a Manhattan restaurateur, is opening a branch of the Jue Lan Club, his Chelsea Chinese restaurant, on Elm Street in Southampton later this month.

Almond’s Brussels Sprouts

"What Do You Mean, the New California? The Case for Santa Barbara,” is the title of the wine and tasting program at Wainscott Main Wine and Spirits. Steve Clifton, a winemaker for Palmina Wines and La Voix Winery, will present the program at the wine shop on Wednesday from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The Dock in Montauk is slated to reopen for the season tomorrow, April Fool’s Day, perfect timing, it seems, for George Watson, its owner, who is known as a trickster.

What are you supposed to do when you are trying ever so hard to stick to a nutritious diet and you travel a lot? At home, every aspect of what you eat is under your control. When traveling, almost none of it is. Interestingly, it seems like airport terminals have gotten better about offering healthful choices (hummus, sushi, fresh fruit), but the airlines have gotten worse.

Airplane Carry-Ons

Kurt Vonnegut once said of critics: “He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.” As a restaurant reviewer, my job is to literally attack that hot fudge sundae or banana split. And then to analyze it, take into account my guests’ opinions of it, deconstruct its components, contemplate its freshness, price, presentation, and finally to praise or criticize it.

An Easter brunch will be served at Baron’s Cove restaurant in Sag Harbor on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Outdoors on the lawn, there will be Easter egg hunts for kids at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. The 1770 House in East Hampton will serve a Easter Sunday dinner a la carte beginning at 5 p.m.

Il Capuccino Italian restaurant in Sag Harbor is back with a reopening tomorrow night. A new bar menu and a fresh lineup of specials will start the spring season. Cavaniola’s Gourmet cheese shop, which sells cheeses, sandwiches, soups, and other prepared foods in Sag Harbor, will be opening in Amagansett in early May.

For those who care about stocking the refrigerator with the freshest produce on the East End, March is the month to begin signing up for membership in a community supported agriculture program, or C.S.A.

The Am O’Gansett Parade starts off the early St. Patrick’s Day hoopla on Saturday and Indian Wells Tavern on Amagansett’s Main Street will do their part with a $20 corned beef and cabbage special all day. Rowdy Hall in East Hampton will start their Irish food and drink specials next Thursday and continue on March 19 and March 20, the day of the Montauk St. Patrick’s Day parade.

St. Patrick’s Day has turned into a silly affair in this country. What began as a religious holiday in Ireland has morphed into an excuse to get buckled, fluthered, ossified, scuttered, and stocious on green beer. There, you just learned some Irish slang for getting drunk. Needless to say, my people have a lot of terms for this national pastime.

Keith and Margo’s Murder Mystery Events will present excitement and skullduggery at the Southampton Inn on March 12. A package deal includes the dinner, open bar, and an overnight stay, along with a chance to participate in the sleuthing. Slow Food East End will hold a “spring market dinner” at Almond on March 24. The dinner will celebrate native and traditional East End foods.

Breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day. Or is it?! You can read studies supporting this theory, and you can find research that refutes it. It definitely makes sense for children.

To say Kosovo, a landlocked country on the Balkan Peninsula, has had a complex history is an understatement. Before the breakup of Yugoslavia during the early 1990s, Kosovo was a region of that country, populated for centuries by Serbs and Albanians.

Colin Ambrose, the owner and chef of Estia’s Little Kitchen in Sag Harbor, has received the Slow Food organization’s Snail of Approval award from the international group’s East End chapter. A new Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee shop will be opening in Sag Harbor. The company, established in New York City in 2003, has a location in Amagansett in addition to its five Manhattan shops.

Would it be all Rachel Dolezal of me to write about African-American chefs and cooks? Every year during Black History Month it seems there are no books, articles, shows, movies, anything, about the contribution of black chefs throughout our history. There should be a museum, a comprehensive historical compendium, something. Having previously dedicated a whole column to my idol, Edna Lewis, her “Taste of Country Cooking” and numerous accomplishments, it’s time to focus on some other significant African-Americans who have contributed greatly to the cuisine of our country. It is a fact that every president who has lived and worked in the White House was cooked for and served by African-Americans. There was a brief blip on the radar, of Jackie Kennedy firing the kitchen staff and bringing in all French chefs, but this changed back immediately when Lyndon Johnson became president. He brought along with him Zephyr Wright, who cooked for his family from 1942 to 1969. He consulted her on th

Richard Olsen-Harbich of Bedell Cellars will be on hand at Nick and Toni’s restaurant in East Hampton next Thursday for a five-course dinner paired with wine. The Peconic Land Trust’s spring lecture series at Bridge Gardens in Bridgehampton will begin with “The Cocktail Party,” a talk on March 6 with Vaughan Cutillo of the Montauk Brewing Company, Michael Kontokosta of Kontokosta Vineyard, and Noah Schwartz, the chef at Noah’s of Greenport.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I have been to the Highway restaurant and bar’s Thursday Thai night three weeks in a row. It is that good.

Slow Food East End will sponsor a “Shuck Em” Valentine oyster brunch on Sunday from noon to 3 p.m. at the Art of Eating in Amagansett. Wolffer Kitchen in Sag Harbor is taking reservations for a Feb. 21 wine dinner with Miguel Martin, a winemaker at Palmer Vineyards.

Despite this week’s snowfall, a sure sign of spring is the announcement of a seeding workshop at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett on March 19 from 10 a.m. to noon.

The Peter Martin Weiss trio will be playing at Page for a jazz brunch on Valentine’s Day from noon to 3 p.m. Watch the Superbowl at Townline BBQ on Sunday with a whole roasted pig, and raffles during each quarter of the game.

But how does it taste? I know that’s the number-one question on your mind about the new, history-in-the-making, right here on Long Island, this-recipe-was-formulated-by-the God-of-all-fish-cookery-Eric Ripert(!), etc., etc. Dock to Dish Montauk Fishburger introduced at the Bridgehampton School on Friday. Well, you’ll just have to wait a few paragraphs.

For those thinking of Valentine's Day dinner the 1770 House in East Hampton will feature a dozen "amorous and warming" dishes. A once-monthly ladies night at the c/o the Maidstone inn on East Hampton’s Main Street will take place on Tuesday from 6 to 8 p.m., when all cocktails and wines by the glass will be offered at half price in the lounge.