Amid the busiest weeks of the South Fork’s tourist season, occasions to stop and recall what is truly important, such as life and good health, can be vanishingly rare.
But service was paused at Gosman’s Topside, Inlet Cafe, and Clam Bar restaurants on Friday afternoon so that these blessings could be celebrated by the tight-knit staff that has remained remarkably stable over the past decade, including through last year’s sale of Gosman’s Dock after eight decades as a family-owned business.
Unbeknownst to Kate Hobbes, an employee of many years who assumed the title of general manager this year, succeeding the longtime manager Christopher Gosman, the staff had prepared a kind of ceremony and celebratory feast to mark the conclusion of a 12-week chemotherapy regimen, which had quickly followed surgery. It was Ms. Hobbes’s second bout with the disease.
The staff, dressed in pink, had also decorated the rooftop Topside restaurant to acknowledge breast cancer awareness. A note had been included with patrons’ checks and was also posted at the bar. “Kate has been with Gosman’s for over twenty years and is the reason the restaurant you know and love is back this season,” it read. “Despite surgery and chemotherapy aligning with the season’s opening and first half, Kate — the hard worker she is — took on the role of general manager, ensuring you see the same familiar faces and enjoy the cl The note added that donations made on site or via a QR code would be matched by Stephen Deckoff, the new owner of Gosman’s Dock, and forwarded to the American Cancer Society’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer initiative.
Ms. Hobbes arrived around 4 p.m. to find her mother, Barbara Hobbes, along with family, friends, and staff waiting for her. A table had been arranged with a bouquet of pink roses, a bell, and a message: “Ring this bell, three times well, its toll to clearly say, my treatment is done, my course is run, and I am on my way!” The bell was rung.
“She can be fierce,” her mother said to the gathering. “She can be soft, and she can be strong. She can be fragile and at the same time be courageous. She can do all these things in one day. We see your brave spirit and love who you are and what you are.”
Steven Giugliano, another veteran staffer who was a principal organizer of the celebration, read a statement.
“You’ve led us through a new era,” he told Ms. Hobbes, “not just for the restaurant but for yourself personally, and you did it with such quiet strength that we sometimes forgot everything you were carrying behind the scenes. You made it look effortless, even when we knew it wasn’t. You were here every day guiding us, supporting us, pushing forward, even while facing something most people couldn’t begin to imagine. Many of us tried to tell you to take time off, to rest, to let things slow down. But your nature, your heart, your perseverance just wouldn’t let you. And honestly, most of us would not be able to do what you did: to keep showing up, to keep leading, and to keep caring for your team the way you always have.”
Reopening the restaurant this season, he said, “was a huge milestone, but doing it while navigating your own journey showed us a kind of courage that’s rare.”
“We know this chapter isn’t fully closed just yet, but what we do know is, we’re with you, we’re proud of you, and we are so lucky to have you at the heart of this team. So tonight, we raise our glasses to your strength, your grit, your heart, and to the days ahead, which we hope are filled with nothing but good news, loud laughs, and maybe just a little less work.”
An emotional Ms. Hobbes then spoke. “To have a support team is one thing,” she said. “To have family is another. But to have two families . . . if I don’t show it enough, I do appreciate each and every one of you. And I don’t want to talk about this ever again!”
For Mr. Giugliano, a Brooklyn native and summer resident of Montauk from birth, honoring Ms. Hobbes was especially important. “Kate is such a selfless person, such a hard worker, that she deserves it,” he said. “She made it look easy. It didn’t look like she was facing what she was facing. She put on a brave face every day, and I think we took that for granted sometimes. So it was important that we show her that we recognize that and that we appreciate her.”
Following the sale of Gosman’s Dock last year, which has brought new management to the main restaurant on the 11.5-acre complex at the mouth of Montauk Harbor, the Topside, Inlet Cafe, and Clam Bar staff faced an uncertain future. “All winter,” Mr. Giugliano remembered, “all everybody talked about was ‘Is Kate coming back? We need Kate to come back.’ She was the glue that kept us together. I don’t know that we would all be here without her as our captain.”
Mr. Gosman, in attendance on Friday, said, “Even though I was stepping away this year, it was really important to me that longtime staff and customers still had the same positive experience dining at our restaurants. Having Kate at the helm was absolutely crucial for that to happen.”
As a high school teacher in Brooklyn, Mr. Giugliano spearheaded efforts that raised almost a quarter-million dollars for cancer research over three years. Now teaching at the middle-school level, he recalled those initiatives as “a lot of fun, just teaching the kids how to be a person built for others. I get a lot of pleasure out of making people aware of that.”
Mr. Giugliano lost his mother to cancer in 2020, “so I know firsthand. I’ve seen it up close and personal.” When his mother had completed a treatment regimen, “the first restaurant she came to was here,” he said of the dockside Inlet Cafe, below Topside. “She was nervous about coming out in public. Kate was there, and Kate was so comforting to her. My mom felt so at ease because of the connection with Kate and the story that she shared, the advice and the strength that she gave her.”
“Kate is a quiet person,” he said, “and she does big things in quiet ways.”
“She’s a wonderful lady,” Richard Edwardes, a now-retired former manager at Gosman’s, said of Ms. Hobbes. “I’m glad she’s on a good road to recovery.”
“You grin and bear it, you move forward,” Ms. Hobbes had told her co-workers and well-wishers. “The doctor didn’t like it, that that was the advice I gave the first time around. But in all honesty,” she said, gesturing to the panorama of land, sea, and sky around her, “life could be a lot worse.”
