Food

“Bah humbug,” you may think after reading this review. Or “She sure is a Grumpy Cat!” Sorry, but this job is essentially to provide a community and consumer service. Therefore, I am obligated to tell you about a recent evening I spent pushing food around my plate and being treated indifferently for a few hours, and then paying for it.

For New Year’s Eve

Those looking toward the last night of December to have an evening meal out and ring in the new year have numerous choices as to where they might go.

Holiday Meals

When it was suggested to me that I participate in a latke-making party and write a story about it, my initial response was, “Hmmm, doesn’t sound like much of a food story. Grated potatoes fried in oil? How interesting or complicated can that be?” When I heard that a number of children would be helping, I thought, “Now it’s getting interesting.” And when I learned about all the delicious varieties of latkes in existence, I was much enthused.

Winter memberships in Quail Hill Farm’s community supported agriculture program in Amagansett are still available and cost $395 for a family. A first-time fee for new members is $50. Individual shares are $250. 

The bounty can include carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage, burdock, squash, beets, celery root, parsley, dried beans, wheat berries, and smoked hot peppers, among other things. Carissa’s Breads is also offering season-long bread shares through Quail Hill, and people can buy loaves individually on Friday pickup days.

Cavaniola’s Traditional Swiss Fondue

It is important to use the best ingredients for best flavor. Supermarket cheeses probably won’t yield the same results, so I strongly urge you to get the best cheeses you can for this fondue recipe.

Cavaniola’s very kindly shared its recipe for fondue, and the results were spectacular. If you want, the shop will blend the cornstarch and grate the cheeses for you beforehand. Bring cheese to room temperature before beginning.

Serves two to three.

3 oz. grated Gruyere

3 oz. grated Emmental

This is the time of year when warm, comforting foods are very appealing. What can be even more appealing are melty-cheesy dishes like Welsh rabbit, Kentucky hot brown, fondues, and raclette. The fun of fondue and raclette is that they are interactive meals. You simply set out the ingredients and let everyone do their own thing. While some would consider fondue a meal, I prefer to have it as a fun first course, followed by a light, yet heartily packed vegetable soup like ribollita.

Tutto il Giorno

56 Nugent Street

Southampton

377-3611

Dinner, Thursday through Monday

Lunch, Saturday and Sunday

If you are a fan of Tutto il Giorno in Sag Harbor, you will definitely like Tutto il Giorno in Southampton. For starters, you have a better chance of getting a table. The Tutto in Sag Harbor is a tiny, or should I say “piccolo” restaurant with a mere 38 seats that fill up fast. The Tutto in Southampton is much bigger and airier, but has similar, attractive decor and plenty of banquettes with pillows.

Tree Lighting and Treats

Food will be a part of holiday festivities at two local restaurants this weekend.

Tomorrow at 7:30 p.m., the Topping Rose House in Bridgehamtpon will serve hot chocolate, hot toddies, mulled wine, and Christmas cookies during a tree-lighting ceremony. Children from the Our Lady of the Hamptons school will sing carols.

On Sunday, after a tree-lighting event at c/o the Maidstone inn in East Hampton, the Living Room restaurant there will offer a Swedish holiday dinner menu for $42 per person.

Highway Diner and Bar

290 Montauk Highway

East Hampton

527-5372

Dinner Wednesday through Sunday

Lunch Saturday and Sunday

Holidays at Harbor Grill

The Harbor Grill in East Hampton is once again offering a deal for those who purchase restaurant gift cards for the holidays. For every $50 gift card, the purchaser will receive an additional card worth $10; for every $200 gift card, a $50 gift card will be issued as well. The offer will be good until Jan. 1.

Book on Sweets

For those whose Thanksgiving plans don’t include trussing and roasting a turkey at home, there is the following list, by no means exhaustive, of places where one could eat or get takeout for the holiday next week.

Pierre’s restaurant in Bridgehampton will serve an a la carte Thanksgiving dinner all day next Thursday — turkey along with lobster, lamb, and burgers. Child-sized portions will be available.

Lights! Carrots! Action! It was Colin’s Carrot-Palooza at Estia’s Little Kitchen last week, as splashy a media event as you can expect for a Wednesday . . . in November . . . for a vegetable. There were local rock star chefs and their Daucus carotas, served raw, steamed, and in various dishes. The carrots, that is.

South Fork

Kitchens Cafe

Student Center

Stony Brook University

239 Montauk Highway

Southampton

Open from 11-2 Weekdays

A few weeks ago a friend asked if I would like to sample some of the best, freshest, cheapest food available, in other words, one of the best-kept secrets on the East End. How is it I didn’t know of this special place, this little jewel of a cafe, open five days a week for lunch? One reason could be that it is essentially a Russian nesting doll.

Heading out to Montauk for a weekend drive? Inlet Seafood restaurant, which has a harbor and Block Island Sound view from its high spot on East Lake Drive, is serving lunch and dinner Fridays through Sundays, and a Sunday brunch.

Zagat Comments

The 1770 House restaurant in East Hampton has asked its fans to sign in to the Zagat dining guide website and weigh in on the eatery. Zagat is doing its first survey of Long Island restaurants in several years. Comments can be made at zagat.com/vote through Jan. 6.

Slow Food Reps

The Jamaica Specialties shop in East Hampton has weekly lunch specials for $8.95 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Mondays through Thursdays. Every Friday there is a fish special, with different fish — kingfish, porgy, red snapper, and more — served Jamaican style. A fried fish special is $12, while steamed fish is $15; the specials are served with a choice of rice, yellow yam, boiled dumplings, or boiled banana.

In Montauk

Long Island Restaurant Week

As the weather cools, restaurants offer bargains to lure diners from the warmth of hearth and home. Long Island Restaurant Week will begin Sunday and continue through Nov. 9, with more than 165 restaurants offering prix fixe, three-course menus for $27.95.

Participating South Fork eateries are 1770 House and the Living Room at c/o the Maidstone in East Hampton, Almond and Topping Rose House in Bridgehampton, and the Cuddy and Page at 63 Main in Sag Harbor.

I am a huge fan of fall vegetables, almost all of them. They are durable, adaptable, and malleable. Many can be eaten raw, or cooked a number of ways — roasted, steamed, fried, pureed, stir-fried. And they play nicely together, such as celery root cooked with potatoes for a mash, or butternut squash cubes roasted with carrots, sweet potatoes, and shallots.

Blue Canoe

104 Third Street

Greenport

477-6888

Daily, noon-9 p.m.,

Friday and Saturday, noon-10 p.m.

Blue Canoe in Greenport is just plain fun. It’s on the water, has an expansive outdoor dining area, an eclectic menu with an Asian slant, great oysters in several guises, and a friendly staff. It is casual, but the food is pretty spiffy.

East End Food Hub Grant

The Amagansett Food Institute has received a $25,000 grant through the United States Department of Agriculture’s Local Food Promotion Program. The grant will be used to study the feasibility of a food hub on the East End, where locally produced food could be collected, marketed, and distributed to institutional and wholesale buyers.

A consultant will be engaged to determine whether a food hub could help members of the food institute expand their businesses.

Wainscott Main Wine and Spirits

A fall menu at 75 Main in Southampton is centered on local produce and includes dishes such as truffle-crumb stuffed breast of chicken served with polenta, garlic, and broccoli rabe; marinated skirt steak, and blue crab-crusted halibut.

On Mondays at 75 Main, pasta entrees, served with a soup or salad to start, are $16, and on Sundays there are steak specials: a burger, flatiron steak, marinated skirt steak, or hanger steak served with soup or salad for $18.  In addition, the restaurant offers a three-course prix fixe Tuesdays through Fridays for $29.95.

I do not like (insert little organ that controls our emotions here) New York. As a matter of fact, I very much dislike New York. Not the state, the city. It is dirty, noisy, nearly impossible to negotiate, expensive, nerve-wracking, just all around dreadful. I’ve never lived there and I never will.

The festival is coming, the festival is coming, the Hamptons International Film Festival is coming! By Thursday the swarm of over 18,000 black-leather clad cinephiles will begin descending upon our lovely villages. They know where the films are being shown, East Hampton, Sag Harbor, Southampton, Montauk, and Westhampton, but do they know where to eat? Have no fear, I am here to “direct.”

Restaurants will be lively this weekend, with the Hamptons International Film Festival in town and Montauk’s Fall Festival taking place, but for some it will be a last hurrah before they scale back or shut down for the season.

If you spend an hour with Nadia Ernestus, you will learn that sauerkraut is more than the base for choucroute garnie or something you put on a hot dog. Ms. Ernestus is the force behind Hamptons Brine, the producer of three kinds of raw sauerkraut and two versions of kvass, or sauerkraut juice.

Ms. Ernestus, a Sag Harbor resident who came to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1981, traces the beginning of her interest in fermented foods to a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes. “I wasn’t overweight, and the doctors didn’t offer anything but drugs,” she said.

A series of classes at Wainscott Main Wine and Spirits, to be held on Wednesdays through November, offers an education for aspiring oenophiles. Each begins at 5:30 p.m. and costs $10. On tap for Wednesday is “First Person: The Case for Stewardship. Taste — Why It Matters,” to be presented by Liz Willette Danneels of Grand Cru Selections and Jordan Salcito, the wine director at Momofuku Restaurant Group.

Montauk Yacht Club

A prix fixe for fall at Almond in Bridgehampton is offered Tuesdays through Thursdays, and on Sundays, between 5:30 and 7 p.m. Three courses, with different choices nightly for each course, are offered for $29. Among the entrees are whole roasted dorado, marinated Sagaponack beefsteaks, and roast chicken. An appetizer and dessert are included as well.

Manly Mondays

It began, as no doubt many wonderful things do, At the Common Table. This is the annual dinner served out in the orchard at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett. The food grown at the farm is transformed by local chefs into a feast for 200 people. There is music; there is no tent. Mother Nature, the senior partner in all growing endeavors, almost always cooperates. Along with various other items for auction was lunch for two prepared by and shared with the Quail Hill farm team. My college friend Mallory won the lunch and invited me along on a late September Wednesday.

Java Nation in Bridgehampton, a coffee roastery that for 18 years had been in Sag Harbor, celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this month.

Duryea’s Lobster Deck in Montauk will remain open daily through the Columbus Day weekend for customers to order and eat on the Fort Pond Bay-front deck starting at noon. The takeout seafood market will be open through the Christmas holidays. Seafood can be pre-cooked for customers, upon request.

Champagne at Gig Shack