Food

Highway Diner and Bar

    The Highway Diner and Bar is now open on Montauk Highway in Wainscott. Created by David Kuperschmid and Gunnar Myers — the restaurateur behind the former Napeague Stretch restaurant on Napeague and New York City’s Tenth Street Lounge — the family-friendly eatery is in the space that formerly housed Rugosa. The building has undergone extensive renovations, and now offers a relaxed setting for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or just drinks. The new restaurant is open daily from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., with earlier breakfast hours to be added soon.

    I have great memories of family Thanksgivings. Of course, in the good old days, the women did all the cooking while the menfolk watched football. Afterward, as we all digested and got a bit slowed down by the big meal, the gents would return to the den to watch yet more football and the women would gingerly wash all the silver and special plates and glasses that only came out for this one day a year.

Boa Thai

129 Noyac Road

North Sea

488-4422

Dinner nightly, closed Tuesdays

   The charming Boa Thai restaurant is a bit of a hidden gem.

    Even in the aftermath of Sandy, still very much on the minds of those dealing with its effects or trying to help those severely affected, people still have to eat, and so Long Island Restaurant Week is on. Through Sunday night, participating restaurants will offer a three-course prix fixe for $24.95. On Saturday, availability is limited to before 7 p.m.

   Thousands of potatoes still sit beneath the soil, awaiting harvest and root cellar storage at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, which, according to Scott Chaskey, produces 20,000 pounds of the vegetable each year. To be dug and stored over the next few weeks, the crop will go primarily to winter-share members of the farm’s community-supported agriculture program, although a few local restaurants will get some as well. Varieties still to be harvested include Kennebec, Bintze, and Keuka Gold.

   An interesting offshoot of the well-established craft-beer movement is growing at Rowdy Hall.

   Theo Foscolo, a manager of the East Hampton restaurant, made a batch of root beer for Rowdy Hall’s annual beer dinner in March. The reaction was positive, and Miss Lady Small Batch Root Beer was born.

    The Hampton Seafood Company, which has a lineup of daily soups and lunch specials, is offering free delivery to businesses in East Hampton Village between 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. from Mondays through Fridays. The shop also has two discount programs. A “loyalty card” allows customers who have their cards punched each time they buy something to claim a 15 percent discount after the 10th purchase.

    Teachers, emergency medical technicians, firefighters, and police are being offered another card that entitles them to a 10 percent discount on every purchase.

    I have always loved Halloween. I love candy, I love being scared, and I love to wear costumes. Growing up in a small community in California, when our family went trick or treating, my brothers and I, all hopped up on sugar, would walk or run door to door and our parents would trail behind in the family station wagon. We knew all of our neighbors, and would end up at the Kuntsles’ house, our Swiss friends who would have an awesome Halloween party with popcorn balls and plenty of games like bobbing for apples.

    The Plaza Cafe in Southampton will participate in Cancer Awareness Month by donating $5 from every prix fixe dinner served on Wednesdays throughout  October to two local organizations, Lucia’s Angels and the Ellen Hermanson Breast Center.

    It’s that time of year . . . kind of. One day it’s 70 degrees, next day it’s 42. This puts me in the mood for casseroles. Hearty or light, rich or delicate, it’s a good time to utilize the end-of-season corn and tomatoes and incorporate them into whatever kind of casserole, stew, or chili you like.

    It could be a rich, cheesy penne dish like one from the famous Al Forno restaurant in Providence, R.I., or the light and spicy chicken chili recipe that I wrestled from my good friend Beverly Kazickas.

    A bite of a Tate’s Bake Shop gluten-free chocolate chip cookie brought a woman to tears at the International Fancy Food Show in July, said Kathleen King of Water Mill, the company’s founder and owner. “Oh my God, I never thought I would be able to eat a good cookie again,” the woman told her.

    Those whose appetite for films was not satiated by the Hamptons International Film Festival might well consider Rowdy Hall when planning dinner and a movie. Beginning on Monday, the East Hampton restaurant, just a few doors down from the theater, will once again offer discounted movie tickets, at $8.50, to diners who purchase an entree for lunch or dinner from Sundays through Thursdays. For burger fans, a $20 special offered at dinnertime Sundays through Thursdays, also beginning on Monday, will include both the burger and a movie ticket.

Afternoon Tea

   The very much anticipated Topping Rose House is finally open. The meticulously renovated and restored former Bull’s Head Inn is not completely finished but the restaurant is up and running, smoothly and beautifully.

   A three-course prix fixe at the Gulf Coast Kitchen, a restaurant at the Montauk Yacht Club in Montauk, has a Creole take. The menu for the $29.95 special changes weekly.

   It takes Fred Overton, the East Hampton Town Clerk, two days to make 30 gallons of chowder. He does the kitchen prep the day before and puts everything together in two 15-gallon vats on the morning of the East Hampton Town Trustees’ Largest Clam Contest.

    Fall harvest time brings lots of celebrations of local bounty. The Wolffer Estate Vineyard harvest party will take place at the vineyard in Sagaponack on Oct. 7 from noon to 5 p.m. The rain date is Oct. 8.

    It takes a family to make a bagel — and to run a bagel mini empire.

    “Izzy was the bagel maven,” Paul Wayne, a partner in Goldberg’s Famous Bagels in East Hampton and Montauk, said of his grandfather, Izzy Goldberg, who started the family in the bagel business in the years after World War II.

    As he talked on Sept. 16, he cut a brisket into paper-thin slices. Rosh Hashana would begin at sunset, and the demand for brisket, corned beef, and pastrami was strong. As was the call for challah bread, which the store continued to make throughout the day.

Opened, Closed

    Tom Colicchio opened his restaurant at the Topping Rose House in Bridgehampton last weekend. The restored 1842 Greek Revival mansion will also house a luxury inn. The 50-seat eatery will have a locavore focus, with a vegetable-centric menu that includes dishes made with produce grown on an on-site garden plot.

    I moved recently from East Hampton Village to Sag Harbor. All of my friends think I should miss my oceanfront childhood home but I really don’t. I now have my dream kitchen. It’s big enough for a table that will seat six, it has a fireplace, and there’s a six-burner Garland stove, a dishwasher (a small luxury I have been living without for two years), and windows galore.

   Where most people’s houses are landscaped by trees, shrubs, or flowering plants, Michael Cinque’s, set back from Montauk Highway opposite an Amagansett gas station, is surrounded on three sides by grape vines, 100 or more, neatly trained against wire trellises but growing so closely up against the windows that you can reach right through and touch them.

    Now that Labor Day has passed, restaurants are rejiggering for the fall season.

    Beginning next Thursday, Bostwick’s Chowder House in East Hampton will be serving on Thursday through Sunday, opening at 11:30 a.m. for lunch, and continuing through the dinner hours.

   About two dozen members of the Conservative Synagogue of the Hamptons in Sag Harbor celebrated their new cookbook recently with a “Munch ’n’ Brunch” at the home of Marcy and Emil Braun in Bridgehampton. In attendance were many of the women and men who provided the recipes, who brought tastes of dishes including flourless gateau de mousse chocolate, mushroom quiche, Aunti Gertie’s apple pie Canarsie, and Egyptian charoset.

It’s Marvelous

    Tomorrow from 4 to 7 p.m., the new Mary’s Marvelous store on Newtown Lane in East Hampton Village will have an opening party featuring free hors d’oeuvres, and samples of smoothies and baked goods.

    The new store, where Bucket’s deli used to be, will be the second location for the takeout food shop first opened by Mary Schoenlein in Amagansett 10 years ago.

    Kathleen King, who has forged a baking empire with her goods now sold under the Tate’s Bake Shop name, garnering accolades from foodies such as Ina Garten and Rachael Ray, will sign copies of her new cookbook, “Baking for Friends,” at the mint-green painted shop on North Sea Road in Southampton on Saturday from 3 to 5 p.m.

Swallow East

474 West Lake Drive, Montauk

668-2500

Noon to 11 p.m., daily, late bar menu available until 1 a.m.

Seasonal

   What fun we had at Swallow East the other night! Winston Irie was playing, the evening was beautiful, and the restaurant was packed but not insanely, unmanageably so.

   There is news for the Mary’s Marvelous fans out there who have been wondering when Mary Schoenlein, the Amagansett food shop’s owner and executive chef, would open the doors of her new location on Newtown Lane in East Hampton Village.

   Smokin’ Wolf

221 Pantigo Road

East Hampton

324-7166

Monday to Friday from 5 p.m.

Saturday and Sunday from noon

   Four men on a mission delivered 34,000 pounds of fresh local produce last year to food pantries in Southampton, Sag Harbor, Springs, East Hampton, and Amagansett, the harvest of the three-acre East Hampton Food Pantry Farm on Long Lane.

    The farm, now in its fourth year of operation, has recently built a 34 by 100-foot hoop house, which will extend the growing season into the fall and winter, increasing the range and volume of food it can produce for those in need.