East september

the east hampton star magazine

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september 2016 volume 3

GOING DEEP • Sea-to-Plate • 400 ACRES perfect sunday lunch • reads from amber waves Kathleen king • David LoEwenberg • Argentine asado PLUS: Fiction by Patricia Marx • Trouble in a Sag Harbor Paradise

bounty secret spearfishing • tate’s cookies: sweet revenge argentine asado • last, great potato farmers Changes Trouble Sag Harbor’s Black Neighborhoods PLUS: Fiction by Patricia Marx

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out here

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Atlantic Avenue Beach, Amagansett, July 2016 Photo by Doug Kuntz

OCEAN I am in love with Ocean lifting her thousands of white hats in the chop of the storm, or lying smooth and blue, the loveliest bed in the world.

In the personal life, there is always grief more than enough, a heart load for each of us on the dusty road. I suppose there is a reason for this, so I will be patient, acquiescent. But I will live nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting equally in all blast and welcome of her sorrowless, salt self.

Mary Oliver

CONTENTS

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September 2016 • Volume 3

“

80

Everything that comes from the farm is aligned with our fundamental spirit that embraces beauty, quality, sustainability, and creativity.”

30

over the hedge 20 22

happenings

Lawn Envy

26

My Favorite Farmer

27

Nature is perfect.

True Crime

24

One Small Thing

25

Police blotter Don’t turn away.

28

U-Pick, U-Taste

Clamzilla

29

Endless Summer Hair

Hamptons International Film Festival

Golden days of October 30

People Watching

The Hampton Classic • september 2016

On Fire

Argentine asado 35

A Higher Sour

36

Sweet Scoop

Largest clam contest

Perfect surfer blonde

10

32

Scott Chaskey

Apples, pumpkins, berries, wine, and beer

Find yours. Eat well.

24

At the Common Table

BOUNTY

The Kvass Kween

Liza’s treats

neighbors 40

Mr. Cool

David Loewenberg

buzz 38 The bee list From honey to allnatural meat, East End entrepreneurs have been busy as bees

8 out here 14 Contributors 16 The Wheelhouse 17 East Illustrated 18 letters & Notes

homer parkes, durell godfrey, carissa katz, doug kuntz

50

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CONTENTS

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60

“

the bounty issue

I never wanted to be famous, I wanted my cookies to be famous. And they are.”

400 Acres

The Wesnofske Farm

By Carissa Katz 50

A Fish Tale

From ocean to plate

By Carissa Katz Photos by Homer Parkes 56

Sweet Revenge

Kathleen King’s impressive comeback

By Laura Donnelly 66

Lunch Under the Cherry Tree

Sunday with interior decorator Tom Scheerer

By Laura Donnelly Photos by Homer Parkes 72

Going Deep

Chasing fish in the big blue

By Levi Shaw-Farber Photos by Peter Correale 12

• september 2016

66 nowhere else 60

A Place of Our Own

78

bookish 80

A historically AfricanAmerican community faces changes

By Michael Shnayerson

halcyon days Catch & Release

An unlikely friendship

By Irene Silverman

56

Katie Baldwin and Amanda Merrow

Two farmers tell stories of what they’re reading, and why

fiction 82

After Jimmy

A new short story

By Patricia Marx

credits: pickens family, homer parkes, john wesnofske

42

42

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contributors

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Patricia Marx is the author of several books, including the novels Starting from Happy and Him Her Him Again the End of Him (both of which were finalists for the Thurber Prize). Her latest book, Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties, was published in 2015 when she was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. A former writer for Saturday Night Live and the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon, she writes for The New Yorker.

After Jimmy, on page 82, is a new short story for EAST. Carissa Katz, the managing editor of The East Hampton Star, wrote about agriculture for the paper as a cub reporter some 20 years ago. She revisited some of the same themes of those award-winning stories in her profile of the Wesnofske family in this issue, page 42. Although she’s capable with a clam rake, her trip aboard the Capt.

Ron out of Montauk for a separate story in the magazine, page 50, marked the first time she had reeled in anything larger than a snapper.

East End food-media personality, Laura Donnelly, EAST’s food editor, made the pies for the Waitress movie, once helped Alec Baldwin lose weight, and has written for Texas Monthly magazine and Town and Country, among other publications. Appearing regularly on radio and TV, she was a researcher for National Public Radio and NBC News for 15 years. She writes the “Seasons By The Sea” column and restaurant reviews for The East Hampton Star.

Her stories, “Sweet Revenge” and “Lunch Under the Cherry Tree” appear on pages 56 and 66.

Born and raised in New York City, Homer Parkes has had work published in the Wall Street Journal, Interview Magazine, and Edible, among other publications. An East Hampton summer kid, who now lives in Los Angeles when not visiting family here, Parkes is a personal trainer and a skilled chef when he’s not behind the lens photograhing our sea-to-plate feature for this issue, page 50, and Tom Scheerer, the decorator, cooking lunch for friends and family, page 66.

Irene Silverman had two young kids and a terrific babysitter when she first darkened the doors of The East Hampton Star. She was hired on the basis of three years’ reporting for The New York Post and a book called Nine to Five and After (unfortunately published the same week as Sex and the Single Girl; it sank like a stone), and worked summers at The Star for the next 20 years or so until computers enabled year-round telecommuting from faraway places.

She and her husband, Sidney, live in Amagansett.

Doug Kuntz came to East Hampton as a boy in 1962 and almost immediately began working with the commercial fishermen of Amagansett. He founded a documentary project that went on to become the critically acclaimed book, Men’s Lives, published 30 years ago. His first published photograph appeared in The East Hampton Star in 1976. He’s since done thousands of photography assignments worldwide, and most recently spent five months in Greece, Turkey, France, and Germany documenting the Refugee Crisis. His photos appear regularly in EAST. In this issue, see “Ocean,” on page 8.

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• september 2016

Biddle Duke Editor David Rattray & Helen Rattray Publishers Alex Coulter Art Director Levi Shaw-Faber & Bess Rattray Associate Editors Michael Shnayerson & Michael Halsband Editors at large Walter Bernard Design Consultant Contributing Writers & Editors Colleen DeBaise Lang Phipps Amanda M. Fairbanks Christina Robert Jack Graves Carl Safina Baylis Greene Mark Segal Carissa Katz Irene Silverman Jennifer Landes Christopher Walsh Fiction editor Iris Smyles Food editor Laura Donnelly CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Philippe Cheng Chloe Gifkins Morgan McGivern Zoe Cohen Durell Godfrey Craig Macaughton Dell Cullum Tara Israel John Musnicki Sasha Frolova Doug Kuntz Priscilla Rattazzi ILLUSTRATORS Durell Godfrey Peter Spacek ADVISERS AND FRIENDS Philippe Cheng Gretchen Vater Geof Drummond Carissa Waechter Graphic Design Matt Charron Paul Friese Jordy Mark SALES Jane Bimson Min Spear-Hefner Dan DeSmet John Wyche Zach Zunis Business manager Robin Kuntz PR and Marketing Chelsea Audibert Russell Bennett, Everything else, which is a great deal Bella Lewis, Editorial Intern

eastmag.co EAST (2016, No. 3) is published four times a year, in June, July, August and November by The East Hampton Star, 153 Main Street, PO Box 5002, East Hampton, NY 11937.

Subscriptions and circulation: EAST is distributed as an insert in The East Hampton Star on the applicable publication dates and at select locations around the East End of Long Island. To become a subscriber please call: 631-324-0002, reach us via email at classy@easthamptonstar.com, or go to www.easthamptonstar.com and click on subscriptions.

We welcome your letters, comments, queries, ideas. Send them to EAST, P.O. Box 5002, East Hampton, N.Y. 11937 or editor@ehstar.com

THE WHEELHOUSE

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Pluck, Cluck, Luck — The Bounty Issue

chelsea audibert

“It’s not as hot as hell.”

So said a roadside sandwich board on a sweltering evening in late July outside the Incarnation Lutheran Church on Montauk Highway near Bridgehampton. The words could be interpreted a number of ways. My mind went here: No matter how hot and bothered you are, if you are reading this you’re above ground, and breathing, making you one lucky S.O.B, so count your blessings and don’t pretend this is damnation, because it ain’t.

Maybe that’s a stretch, but it was very hot, and the world up here does seem like it’s going to hell in a hand basket.

I’m pretty sure “it’s not hot as hell” hit some sort of bull’s eye simmering inside more than a few passersby.

In taking stock of blessings, after family and friends, farmers and fishermen merit the top of the list, for doing good work, choosing a hard road, and taking chances — to feed the world. For nearly four centuries they’ve defined this region, farmers tapping in to some of the most fertile loam in the world, and fishermen harvesting the bounty where the sandy coast turns sharply, and rich, warm southern waters meet the cold, rocky north.

Farmers and fishermen here have good reason to sell their tractors and hang up their slicks. But they don’t. They carry on, risking it all, year after year, in the belief nature will provide.

There is also a bit of magic to working the land and the sea. A seed becomes a watermelon, a few acres of mud, a gold mine of clams. As Anthony Sosinski, a Montauk lobsterman told EAST earlier this summer, every time he pulls up a full trap of lobsters, he marvels: “It’s not work.”

This would be a much more common kind of place, a resort distinguished mainly by its pretty beaches and pretty houses, were it not for farmers and fishermen. We’ve told the stories of a few of them in this, The Bounty Issue, each inspirational and illuminating: the Wesnosfkes, who are among the last of the legendary Long Island potato farmers (400 Acres, page 42); the next generation, at Amber Waves Farm (Bookish, page 80), helping change the way we eat and how we think about food; Kathleen King, the creative, determined founder of Tate’s Cookies (Sweet Revenge, page 56) who inherited her grit from her dad, a farmer in North Sea. I am not alone in being devoted to and charmed by Iacono Farm. By its chickens and its eggs, but also by Eileen and her late husband, Sal, his jokes and the 1960s tunes he played at their place on Long Lane in East Hampton, where you go to pick up your birds. They took such a chance in the early ’50s when they went all in with the idea of just selling poultry. But it worked, and I’m sure I’m not alone in believing darkly that when Iacono’s goes, nothing will be the same. Hence that shiver when Sal died eight years ago. But all is well for now: His son Anthony, above, has taken over, carrying on, doing good work.

“Don’t hesitate to go out on a limb, that’s where the fruit is.” What is it about the Lutherans and their roadside signs? This one was outside St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Greenport, spotted around the time we went to press. It hit another bull’s eye, as we worked through this Bounty issue about land and sea, about reaping and sowing, the fallow and the feast. About doing good work, and taking chances.

— Biddle Duke east@ehstar.com 16

• september 2016

illustration by durell godfrey

east illustrated

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PETER SPACEK cartoon

• september 2016

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letters & notes

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sunny guo

‘Montauk’s Best Kept Secret’ To the editor: Re: “Trailer Park Luxe,” page 61, July, by Levi Shaw-Faber.

Even though most of us call it The Trailer Park the legal name is Montauk Shores Condominium and it was at one time, and possibly still is, the only manufactured home condominium community in New York State. Because the original condo purchasers had good judgment — and a little luck — they were able to circumvent a major resort chain from acquiring the property at public auction.

My wife, Anne, and I have owned a lot almost since the inception of the community. We purchased the first resale of a vacant lot, netting the original purchaser a profit of fifty percent. Many laughed at the price we paid but there was no doubt in our minds that it was a solid investment. Truly, this has always been great place for family.

I am not sure I agree with “. . . the formerly humble neighborhood . . .” because 40 years ago 98 percent of our residents were second homeowners, smart enough to buy a summer home on the Atlantic Ocean. Those residents mirrored the outside community of Montauk, people from all walks of life.

While I have not seen the inside of the Stelle family trailer, the exterior is well done. Some of his designs have since been imitated by other residents as mentioned in the article. However, renovations and upgrading of trailers have been ongoing since our arrival in 1978. Some of the renovations included complete gutting of the home or replacement.

In 1978, our new trailer also came in on wheels, on a metal frame, and was basically the same construction as the Stelle unit, including the “crappy appliances and the fake wood finishings” also noted in the article. In 1990, we renovated ours at a cost of $45,000. The original trailer cost was $8,000. Five years ago, we installed a new three-bedroom, two-bath custom manufactured home in place of the original trailer. This new home is indistinguishable from a stick built home.

People continue to upgrade, renovate, or replace their homes, and that speaks volumes of the pride our residents take in a community once known as “Montauk’s Best Kept Secret”! If this were not fact, people would not be paying in excess of a million dollars for some of them.

Sincerely, Hugh T. Herbert 18

• september 2016

ON the cover

Montauk Shores Condominium

Strike! by Paton Miller • 60 x 60 inches, oil on panel This painting is from the collection of Jean Mackenzie of Southampton. It’s installed on the exterior of the Clamman Seafood Market. Miller, born in Hawaii, lives and works in Tuckahoe.

correction An error was inserted in the editing process into an article about the death of Jackson Pollock, Terminal Velocity, August 2016, page 60. The article incorrectly reported that the artist had been featured on the cover of the August 8, 1949, issue of Life Magazine. The Life article on Pollock was in that August issue, but it was not a cover story. The cover was about 17-year-old Debbie Reynolds, the actress.

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over the hedge

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Lawn Envy

doug kuntz

For decades, the ideal garden and the pristine-green lawn has come at a steep price: chemicals that poison the land and water (and, sometimes, even people). But today, as Christine Sampson reports, there are alternatives — and they are beautiful, because pure nature is perfect.

I

t’s startling but true: Many of the poisons commonly

used on our landscapes and lawns today have their roots in war.

When World War II ended, chemical manufacturers had a surplus of nitrogen and the factories aplenty to produce more and more and more. Nitrogen is a primary component in explosives.

It’s also a powerful fertilizer. The industry switched from making bombs to pushing perfect, nitrogen-fed lawns. As G.I.s returned from Europe and the Pacific, suburbs and bedroom communities grew — and so, too, did the neighborhood lawn envy that swept across the nation, fueled by an advertising blitz paid for by chemical companies.

That snippet of history is one of the first things Charlie Marder, above, in his garden in Springs, shares to illustrate how Americans ended up pumping oceans of nitrogen and other chemicals into our back yards and gardens.

Running one of the region’s most prolific landscaping companies for the past 40 years, Marder’s Garden Center in Bridge-

20

• september 2016

hampton, Marder is, one customer at a time, trying to undo decades of extensive environmental damage at the hands of chemical companies.

Research has tied human exposure to certain pesticides and fertilizers to illnesses such as cancer, Parkinson’s disease, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and endocrine disruption, along with environmental problems like the algal blooms we’re seeing in East End ponds (which are potentially deadly to creatures that live in the water).

With awareness increasing about the dangers of chemicals in our environment, the demand for chemical-free lawns and gardens is growing among both contractors and customers.

But the transition, for customers, isn’t just about ditching the chemicals. It requires some concessions about what we have been sold to believe perfection looks like.

Beautiful lawns and gardens are possible without pesticides, insecticides, fungicides, and chemical-laden fertilizers, experts say. But properties maintained chemical-free look a little different,

sunny khalsa

Marder said. You can still have a green expanse, but you’ll have to get used to clover, perhaps the spread of buttercups, and a little crabgrass, which he says every truly healthy lawn should have anyway. Flowers and vegetables grown the green way may not look totally unblemished, but they will be healthier to eat.

“You have to look at your turf differently,” Marder said recently. “You have to look at it as a garden that you’re eating. You walk on it, you bring it into your house, your kids play on it, your dog plays on it. The mower blows particles into the air for you to inhale.”

And the populace is getting on board.

Jason Norris, who started his landscaping company six years ago, Norris Organics in East Hampton, said his list of clients grew by a factor of six in his first year, to more than 80 customers, and it keeps growing.

“Even if customers want chemicals, we tell them they have to find another provider, because we won’t go back on our methods and what we know is right to do,” Norris says.

Compost tea, a brew of decomposed organic matter and water, is one place to start to nourish a healthy, chemical-free yard. Mr. Norris makes his own. “It gets bubbled in with water and either molasses or some kind of fish enzyme, and makes a living fertilizer that re-creates the biomass, the biomass being the soil.”

Bridge Gardens, a five-acre public garden on Mitchell Lane in Bridgehampton, took the final step toward all-organic landscaping last year when it stopped using chemicals on its rose garden. Rick Bogusch, the garden’s manager, said the re-

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chelsea audibert

over the hedge

Warning signs about pesticide use are everywhere, but pesticide-free signs like this one in East Hampton Village are few and far between. sponse has been positive, even if it means the blooms aren’t quite 100 percent flawless: “We’re not putting anything toxic into the groundwater, so I think it’s worth it in that respect, to put up with a little extra black spot.”

Younger homeowners are most apt to demand chemical-free yards, according to Tony Piazza of Piazza Horticultural, Southampton.

“Prior to now, there was almost an ignorance where people didn’t realize that what they were doing was harmful to themselves and the environment,” he says. “I’m 53. Younger people are questioning this.

They want toxin-free, organic lifestyles, and I think it’s coming from that, and from pioneers like Edwina von Gal and her Perfect Earth Project.”

Von Gal, left, a landscape designer with an international reputation, founded the Perfect Earth Project in Springs with a broad agenda: to educate consumers, retrain and certify landscapers to be “Prft (chemical-free) professionals,” and to convert public spaces into “Prfct places.”

Among the places branded as “perfect” by

von Gal’s organization are the grounds of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, the Garden of Hope in Brooklyn, and numerous community gardens New York City.

Right now, says von Gal, the mainstream garden and lawn-care industry promotes “a death-based process, as opposed to a life-based process.” She compares organic landscaping methods to one’s own diet and exercise habits.

“It’s not easy,” she says, “but you’ll be healthier for the effort. Most landscapers will probably tell you going without chemicals doesn’t work and is more expensive. We don’t feel that has to be true. They never learned how. It’s our job to teach them.”

Perfect Earth will host its biannual benefit at the Springs home of artist Cindy Sherman Sept. 3 from 3 - 7 pm. Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi will be the emcee, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie headline the musical lineup.

Info at www.perfectearthproject.org • september 2016

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chelsea audibert

over the hedge

My Favorite Farmer Bhumi Farms, one of the South Fork’s newest and smallest community-supported farms, has joined the local charge toward a new food frontier. By Christina Robert

T

here is a New Yorker cartoon from 2007 that shows two sophisticated women standing at a bar. One is saying to the other: “I hate to admit it, but a man with a big carbon footprint makes me hot.”

Hotness has been at odds with a healthy planet for a long time.

It is a big reason it’s taken many of us so long to get with the program. A new generation, however, is in its prime and is changing all that. In fact, it’s amazing how far we’ve come in the past nine years with regard to what’s hot and what’s not. Elon and Sergei and Larry and Mark and all the Jeffs are revolutionizing how we live. And for the most part, I am okay with that. They are smart, they understand the challenges of our time, and they know how to code, which most of us do not.

Last month, a friend of mine invited me for a ride in his new Tesla. We 22

• september 2016

set out at midnight — so we could have the road to ourselves. At a certain point he pushed a button labeled, “Ludicrous.” I let out a delighted scream as we accelerated from zero to 100 in about three seconds. I actually felt the pull of G forces on my face; I was two blocks from my house.

I’m proud to be part of the species that’s going to make it possible to travel by high-speed vacuum tube.

Giant Sub-Zero fridges are so 2007. A Powerwall battery pack is what sexy looks like now. And, if I read enough WIRED magazines, I can relax into at least a momentary belief that the Trekkies will solve all our problems.

Deep down, I know that’s a delusion. Clean tech may be sexy, but it can only take us so far. We certainly don’t want SpaceX or Google or some A.I. lab deciding where our food comes from: How we feed ourselves is pretty fundamental to what kind of future we will get.

Let’s just say that big business and food production are not a good match. I can say this with conviction because I went to a conference in Washington a few years ago on the future of food, which was peopled by many of the big thinkers on this topic: farmers, food producers, soil experts, scientists, and policy makers. I took away two absolutes. The first was that “efficiency” — the key to big profits — is the enemy of nutritious food; the second is that if we want the living world to thrive, we need to cook and we need to know the provenance of our food.

Which is why (way more than driverless cars), we need food innovators like Frank Trentacoste, left. Conscious farming is right up there on the hot-o-meter these days. His bright yellow Bhumi Farm stand on Pantigo Road opposite Amy’s Lane in East Hampton is about as cute as it gets. Bhumi isn’t big, in fact it is the smallest of the C.S.A.’s (community supported agriculture farms) out here. But what it lacks in size, it makes up for in quality.

Bhumi’s produce is not just organic; it is super-organic. The reason for this is that Farmer Frank, as he likes to be called, thinks of himself first and foremost as a “soil farmer.” He believes our food is only as good as the soil in which it is grown in. So, in addition to being the only certified organic farm between Montauk and Watermill, Bhumi re-nutrifies its soil with beneficial macro and micro nutrients.

Trentacoste equates what they do at Bhumi to humans who take high-grade multivitamins. He works with bacteria and fungus and uses probiotics to boost all the good stuff in the soil. He believes in the medicinal properties of food, and, on a broader scale he understands that positive change begins at root level.

Purpose aligned with passion is a powerful mix.

The tech guys have that, but Bhumi has something more. Trenacoste’s is a labor of love, from a man who is in thrall to nature and understands we need it far more than it needs us.

It wasn’t always this way. Not long ago Trentacoste

chelsea audibert

over the hedge

was living in Manhattan, working in finance. He credits yoga with slowing life down for him. (Bhumi is named after the Hindu goddess of the earth.) His interest in growing food was piqued by his visits to Amagansett on weekends to stay with his brother, a member of Quail Hill Farm, the original C.S.A. out here and consciousfood beacon. Most people go to Quail Hill to pick up their farm share and leave. Trentacoste found he wanted to stay. Soon he was volunteering at other farms in the area, and he got hooked.

I love stories about people who have the guts to re-invent themselves. Becoming a first-time farmer takes guts. I once attended a soil-association conference in the U.K. where a roomful of farmers burst out laughing when they heard that city folk might one day start taking to the plow. They intimidated the hell out of me. But Trentacoste is made of tougher stuff. He says he loves a steep learning curve.

The suburban boy from Nassau County with an M.B.A. from N.Y.U. and a 13-year career on “the buy side” of the hedge-fund business, is now in his third year as a farmer. And, Bhumi Farms is blossoming. Trentacoste started with five leased acres and is now up to 17.

It hasn’t all been easy. Crows have eaten his melons. Crops have failed, but Trentacoste has also made many a chef happy with the quality and variety of his produce.

Bhumi is part of a sustainable and healthy food movement that’s burgeoning here, with entrepreneurs making and selling everything from juices, bread, and granola, to cheese, prepared meats, salt, honey, and all manner of sauces and pickles. Amagan-

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sett alone is home to four farm C.S.A.’s. Bhumi is the little guy that offers little extras. Trentacoste’s farm is the only C.S.A. to deliver.

It also sells summer-long or shorter-term farm shares, depending on customers’ needs. The farm also delivers share boxes to the city. Another treat is an on-farm chef who prepares food from the farm’s ingredients and, if you want something really special, will cater a meal.

I had my first Bhumi experience last summer when a friend told me about the farm’s delicious salad greens. I remember arriving late one afternoon, parking on the side of the road, and rushing to the farm stand, above, worried it might be closed. I’d promised my mother I would pick up some corn for dinner, and I wasn’t sure they would have any. What struck me immediately was the peaceful energy of the place. The guy working the cash register was relaxed and smiling, the flowers in the fields were glowing in the late-afternoon sun. There was plenty. I could take my time.

After a few minutes, the quiet part of me that secretly wants to live closer to the land and slow down and connect more with my neighbors, suddenly felt safe enough to emerge. This time it was me who didn’t want to leave.

I’m grateful to Farmer Frank and the other health-conscious food providers out here who work so hard to feed us well. The change they are accelerating is profound and soul-quenching.

Look, perhaps I didn’t read enough science fiction as a child or maybe I was more interested in boys than calculus, but I inherently believe it’s going to be connection to each other and the earth that results in a livable, happy future. Eat well. Have fun. Go Bhumi.

• september 2016

23

over the hedge

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True Crime From the Sag Harbor, and East Hampton village and town police logs.

A New York City man was staying with friends at a Monroe Drive house in Montauk on August 4. When they all went out for the night, he left his 2003 Toyota in their driveway. They returned at 4:30 a.m. and did not notice anything wrong. After sleeping for a couple of hours, he went out onto the deck, only to find it littered with smashed tomatoes. Stepping out into the yard, he found that his car had also been littered with smashed tomatoes, as well as lettuce and melted butter. He called police and cleaned off the car.

An Amagansett woman told police last Thursday afternoon that her black Tommy Hilfiger wallet had been stolen from her handbag after she left it unattended during lunch at Rowdy Hall in East Hampton. She provided police with a description of a man who had been sitting next to her, and said the wallet had contained, among other things, a $100 bill. An officer spotted a man matching the description on Fithian Lane and Main Street.

The man, who seemed intoxicated, denied the theft. The officer searched him and did not find the wallet. Later that day the manager of Rowdy Hall reported finding it in a toilet bowl tank, and remembered that the man in question had paid with a $100 bill.

Larry Dear of Cedar Street told police that his watch, which he valued at $30,000, fell off his wrist while he was swimming in the ocean on Sunday near Main Beach in East Hampton Village.

A couple carrying a baby reported to police that they were followed into a Race Lane parking lot in East Hampton on Aug. 8 by someone screaming at them, “How dare you carry your baby like that, you should be ashamed of yourself! I’m calling The Star. I’m calling the police.” The couple wrote down the woman’s license plate number, and police told her to stay away from them.

A woman reported that on Sunday around noon, one of four or five young adults in a silver sedan tossed a live lobster onto Main Street near the Sag Harbor Variety Store. She turned the creature over to a traffic control officer who left it with the harbormaster.

One Small Thing . . .

DON’T TURN AWAY — People will tell you that their daily beach

walks are like happy pills. The sun, the thrum of the surf, the familiar faces. Even in the winter, or in the weather, it’s a pick me up. For one man we met recently, walks on the beach in East Hampton were restorative and fun at first when he started on the routine years ago, then they went downhill. The garbage — the plastic in the scum line, the trash at the beach road heads and littered about on the sand — first made him sad, then angry. He would start out happy, only to turn furious. His walks became a source of angst. If he saw trash he simply could not turn away.

Doing nothing would be like fleeing the scene of a crime; turning away was, he said, a misdemeanor in itself. Picking it up was a moral imperative. “If you see it, it’s yours,” explained the man, who said he calls himself “Meanderthal,” but otherwise seemed like a completely regular guy. He began picking up the trash. At first, one piece, then another. Pretty soon he needed to bring a bag on his walks for the trash he collects. He made it part of the routine: walking and collecting trash. “It changed everything, making picking up litter part of the walk,” he said. He could see he was making an impact. But the best part was that instead of being angry, his walks were gleeful again. It was a little thing, but it made all the difference.

— EAST

Plastic Ocean An art exhibit at the Montauk Lighthouse.

Focusing on plastics pollution in our oceans, our roster of artists have created their work with recycled and locally found plastic material.

These artists, along with the collection of marine biologists, sustainable fashion designers, ocean lovers and adventurers, "Plastic Ocean" aims to educate, excite and inspire visitors to imagine an existence with less waste.

Curated by Scott Bluedorn.

Contributing artists: Cindy Pease Roe, Billy Strong, Peter Spacek and Rossa Cole.

A Lincoln Street woman said on Sunday that a goat was in her neighbor’s yard. This was deemed legal as long as the goat remained on private property, and police took no further action.

The manager of Baron’s Cove Inn called police on Sunday and reported that a man had asked for a room key to see what a room looked like. Half an hour later the man went to the front desk and said, “I’m leaving and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Upon checking the room, it was discovered that he had showered and used the toilet, bed, phone, and WiFi. 24

• september 2016

@ The Montauk Lighthouse Open Daily 11 am - 5 pm 631.668.2544 montaukoceansinstitute.org

over the hedge

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Endless Summer Hair Darting between Sag Harbor, the city, and Palm Beach, Marc Zowine — possibly the most in-demand hairstylist on the East End scene — creates the perfect surfer blonde.

durell godfrey

T

he bend-over is the secret to a good, fast blow-dry.”

This, according to Marc Zowine, right, chatting on a bustling July afternoon at Salon Xavier in Sag Harbor, where Zowine had Dwyer Derrig, right, bent at the waist, her hair freshly shampooed and his blow-dryer positioned at the nape of her neck.

“The bend-over also gives it height and volume, so it’s not so flat.”

Ten years ago, Derrig, a radiant, vivacious blonde, paid a visit to her girlfriend, who was sitting in Zowine’s chair at what was formerly the M Salon in East Hampton.

Zowine took one look at Derrig’s hair and told his assistant to “get her a smock.” The two have been together as customer and stylist ever since. Zowine’s a rarefied breed among high-end (read: top-dollar) hairstylists: He cuts and he colors.

Which is why “I’ve never cheated on him,” says Derrig, an East Hampton resident who stops in for a touch-up every four to five weeks. “He knows how to do blondes and his cuts are always great. He’s the it guy.”

Zowine is a uniquely East End phenomenon: His chair is in Sag Harbor, and he loves it here, but there’s a whole lot of city about him, which is exactly why some local customers are devoted to him. He’s booked months in advance in the summer, and his client list is speckled with celebrities (but we’re not naming names).

The son of a Lebanese father and an Italian mother, Zowine grew up in Connecticut and upstate New York. In 1987, after graduating from Hunter College with a degree in economics, he started working in the finance department at NBC Studios. But five years into the 9 to 5 grind, Zowine had grown bored of cubicle work.

At a dinner with Michael Kors, the fashion designer and longtime family friend, Kors remarked that Zowine would make a great hairstylist. Partly on a whim, he enrolled at the Wilfred Academy of Hair and Beauty and, shortly afterward, changed careers. He worked for a time at John D’Orazio and Frédéric Fekkai (city salons, for the non-cognoscenti) before finally embarking on his own.

When not at Salon Xavier — where he can be found every Thursday and Friday from Memorial Day until Labor Day, and every Friday during the off-season — Zowine works out of his NoMad apartment, where the master bedroom has been transformed into a salon, with sweeping views of the Empire State Building. His East End escape is a two-bedroom beach cottage in Bridgehampton.

Zowine darts between New York, the South Fork, and Palm Beach, depending on the time of year. “It dawned on me that I wanted to have as much fun as my clients,” said Zowine, who travels to Florida in the winter and routinely visits clients’ private homes. “Why not go where they go?”

“

For color, Zowine specializes in something called “surfer blonde,” chunky, commingled streaks of light and dark blonde that resemble the effect of a long summer day at the beach. It’s the antithesis of the symmetrical, pale-streaked “Bergdorf Blonde,” which he can also do, as well as deep brunettes and sultry reds.

“Hair is the sexiest thing. It’s absolutely the most important thing to a woman,” said Zowine, in between sips of a sugar-free Red Bull. “I like to evolve along with my colors. The color I did 10 years ago is certainly not the color I’m doing right now.”

His trim physique belies a love of food.

“I love to eat,” said Zowine, who generally adheres to a highprotein diet, though Round Swamp Farm’s brownies are a weakness.

Six months ago, Natasha Esch, who owns MONC XIII, a home furnishings store in Sag Harbor, snagged a last-minute cancellation with Zowine.

“I used to go into the city to get my color done, and that was a real hassle,” Esch said, echoing others. Esch previously saw Sharon Dorram, a well-known colorist at Sally Hershberger, a salon on the Upper East Side. Zowine, who constantly tweaks each client’s formula, uses three colors and two levels of bleach to weave five different colors throughout Esch’s striking, multi-hued hair.

Before putting on a black smock, Esch said, “I tried Marc and I’ve never looked back.”

— Amanda M. Fairbanks • september 2016

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NATE BEST

There is music, but there is no tent. Mother Nature, the senior partner in all growing endeavors, almost always cooperates. A series of long tables are arranged end to end, longer than a football field, in the apple orchard of Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, one of the oldest C.S.A.s in the country. This is for Quail Hill’s annual At the Common Table dinner, this year Sept. 17, a feast prepared by the best of the East End’s chefs, made with fruits and vegetables grown on the farm and served with local fish, cheeses, and wines. Mason jars filled with pickled ramps and beans adorn the tables, along with colorful flowers and other rustic touches at each of the 200 place settings. A band plays quietly nearby, and twinkly lights and paper lanterns are strung between the apple trees. Between courses, Scott Chaskey, pictured here, Quail Hill’s farm director, godfather of soul, seeds, poetry, and all things botanical, climbs up a precariously tall apple-picking ladder to give a speech and share some verse.

grant gordon

happenings

Adventures, surfboards, SUPs, kayaks, gear, clothing, lessons, camps . . . and the best, local, expert advice

happenings

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U-Pick Farms, Beer & Wine Tasting Seasons Pumpkins: Late September, October and November Berries: Late summer Apples and pears: Late summer and fall

Wine/Beer Tasting 7 • Wölffer Estate Vineyard

Beer and wine tasting: Anytime!

139 Sagg Road, Sagaponack and 3312 Montauk Highway, Sagaponack www.wolffer.com

8 • Channing Daughters Winery

U-Pick Farms

1927 Scuttlehole Road, Bridgehampton www.channingdaughters.com

1 • Lisa and Bill’s Farm Stand Pumpkins

9 • Duck Walk Vineyards

Corner of Wainscott Main and Beach Lane, Wainscott

231 Montauk Highway, Water Mill www.duckwalk.com

2 • Fairview Farm

10 • Southampton Publick House Brewery

Pumpkins

19 Horsemill Lane, Bridgehampton

62 Job’s Lane, Southampton

www.fairviewfarmatmecox.com

www.publick.com

3 • Milk Pail

11 • Montauk Brewing Company

50 Horsemill Lane, Bridgehampton

www.montaukbrewingco.com

62 S Erie Ave, Montauk

durell godfrey

Apples and pumpkins www.milk-pail.com

4 • Seven Ponds Orchards

5, 6 • Hank’s Farm Stand and Pumpkintown

65 Upper 7 Ponds Road, Water Mill

240 Montauk Highway, Water Mill

Apples and berries (631) 726-8015

Raspberries, blackberries, pumpkins www.hankspumpkintown.com

12 • Greenport Harbor Brewing Company

234 Carpenter Street, Greenport and 42155 Main Road, Peconic www.greenportharborbrewing.com • september 2016

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Clamzilla

Anyone who thinks there are few Bonackers left in Bonac should attend one of the least-known, bestmanaged, most-congenial happenings of the year, the East Hampton Town Trustees Largest Clam Contest.

durell godfrey

S

usan Ceslow, a real estate broker by trade, takes her

clamming very, very seriously. By her own admission, she is almost exclusively a competitive clammer, taking a week of vacation time and watching the tides with a girlfriend to scratch up a potential winner in the East Hampton Town Trustees annual Largest Clam Contest.

The contest is held typically in late September or early October — year-round residents’ favorite time of the year — at the trustees’ offices on Bluff Road in Amagansett. The precise date depends on the trustees, who make the call at one of their summer meetings. No date has yet been set for this year’s clam contest.

The winning bivalve sits on a pillow of honor, a crown on its hard, cold head. These things are big; a sasquatch would consider them too large for eating raw on the half-shell. One would be enough to make chowder for a family of four.

Rules can vary slightly from year to year, but the gist is that there is a winner chosen from among the adult and youth clamdiggers for each of four waterways: Napeague Harbor (which produces the overwhelming majority of overall winners), Three Mile Harbor, Lake Montauk, and Accabonac Creek. Prizes — all donated — are given out: buckets, clam rakes, booze.

Ceslow’s planning and hours in the water paid off last year 28

• september 2016

when she dug a two-pound, 6.3-ounce clam from Napeague Harbor and walked away with top honors. “You really have to dig for them,” she says, “and you know when you’ve hit something that might be a winner.”

There is a chowder contest as well. And for those who are not winners, there are free clams on the half-shell and hot chowder, which, most years, is made by East Hampton Town Councilman Fred Overton from an old family recipe that calls for clams and potatoes in equal proportion, no fewer than 50 pounds of each — with tomatoes. Note that Bonac chowder traditionally hews to the Manhattan style, unlike its milky New England cousin from across Long Island Sound.

To be sure, records are kept. Lori Miller Carr in the town trustees’ office got off the phone to look up the all-time record-breaking clam. As it turned out there is a tie, with two entries coming in at 2.9 pounds apiece, one dug by Gene Cebulski in 1994 and another pried from the bottom by Linda Calder in 2012. In 2014, there was a bitter accusation that clams purported to have been dug in one place were actually taken in another, but normally the competition is good-natured and well-attended. Those who get there late on judging day risk missing Overton’s chowder.

— David Rattray

Fred Overton’s Bonac Chowder It takes Fred Overton 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.

Clams and potatoes in equal amounts — 50 pounds apiece — are the main ingredients. (The Seafood Shop in Wainscott sells 10-pound “setups” of clams with their juice. Mr. Overton uses five setups.) Then, 8 to 10 pounds of onions — “I don’t like too many onions, they overpower the soup,” he said — and about eight 28-ounce cans of canned whole peeled tomatoes.

The number of tomatoes “depends on what it looks like,” he says. Bonac chowder should not be too red.

Borrow a vat from the firehouse if you can and line the bottom with quarter-inch strips of salt pork (one package lines one vat). Add equal amounts of clam juice and water: 10 quarts juice, 10 water. Add potatoes, chopped onion, diced tomatoes, and “just a pinch of thyme.” Simmer.

Put the clams in last, “not until after the potatoes are done. Otherwise they get rubbery.”

Season to taste. Some people add carrots or celery.

This recipe serves at least 200.

The Hamptons International Film Festival arrives in the golden days of October

I

f you’re merely tolerating the frenzied pace of August, you’ll love October. The Hamptons International Film Festival, now in its 24th year, happens over Columbus Day weekend — with golden sunshine, leaves just starting to turn, tranquil skies, and parking places aplenty, arguably the most beautiful time to be here on the South Fork.

Between February and June, Anne Chaisson, its executive director, said the festival received 2,700 submissions from filmmakers all over the world.

Over the past six months, a screening committee has viewed each entry, as the films generating the most buzz inch up the chain of command. Depending on the year, 125 to 150 films ultimately make the cut, with this year’s final lineup to be announced Sept. 20.

Attendees can see the best of independent film — whether long, short, fiction, or documentary — from Oct. 6 to 10 on 12 screens from Westhampton to Montauk. This year’s special categories include compassion, justice, animal rights, conflict resolution in world events; there will also be a selection focusing on Long Island. In a break from years past, the annual awards ceremony, which takes place on Sunday, Oct. 9, will be open to the public.

Starting late next month, individual tickets can be purchased online, with the most exclusive lanyard pass, the Founders Pass (which includes access to all screenings, panels, and opening and closing night events), going for $1,500. As a nonprofit organization, the festival also runs a SummerDocs series presented by Alec Baldwin, with documentary films being shown at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Next up, on Aug. 27 at 7 p.m., is A Perfect Candidate, about Oliver North (remember Iran-Contra?) and his campaign for the U.S. Senate. In addition, a visiting-artists program also works with South Fork students in elementary, middle, and high school.

For those hoping to get an inside track on the Oscars race, the Hamptons International Film Festival has an impressive track record. “For six years in a row, we’ve played the film that was chosen as best picture,” said Chaisson, who is hoping for lucky number seven.

— Amanda M. Fairbanks

happenings

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A People Watching Classic

Some people go the Hampton Classic for world-class equestrian competition. Some of us go for world-class people-watching.

Some of the riders gracing the Grand Prix field are Olympians.

But have you seen the hats? the America’s Cup meets Wimbeldon meets The Hunger Games. If your extra-large sunhat has been sitting in the closet since Coachella, it’s time to break it out. Join the parade of elaborate hats, colorful outfits, and Botox. If you’re lucky you’ll spot someone wearing a creation from the Marders garden center, where the company’s creative team makes chapeaux that are like Rose Bowl parade floats for your head.

The Classic is a mini-city — shopping, food, stables, unique and fascinating horse services (blacksmiths and farriers) — on 60 acres north of Bridgehampton dedicated to the luxurious equestrian lifestyle. Need a yacht? Check. A Birkin? Check.

Classic Benz break down? Pick up a new E-Class between events. Not into the shopping? Maybe go for a pony ride or watch a blacksmith at work. And, of course, there are the ponies and the breathtaking show-jumping events in the Grand Prix and Hunter Jumper rings. Concession stands serve food from all over the world.

The classic runs from August 28 to September 4 in Bridgehampton, at 240 Snake Hollow Road. General admission is $10 for 6 years and up or $20 per carload. There’s free general admission on Monday.

Senior citizens attend free from Tuesday through Thursday, and kids attend for free on Saturday. hamptonclassic.com — EAST Staff 30

• september 2016

all photos: durell godfrey

T

he Classic is the Kentucky Derby meets

On Grand Prix Day at the horse show, the ladies (and some men) show off their finery. Joy Marks, top left, is famous for her outfits and hats.

She’s pictured here being interviewed by Cognac Wellerlane. Some are lucky enough to wear confections from Marders, bottom.

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BOUNTY

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On Fire

Ruben Oscar Manfredi, Argentine asadero

Bored with your basic barbecue? Consider un Asado, estilo Argentino.

Laura Donnelly digs in to tenderly grilled beef and open-fire-roasted lamb.

Pass the chimichurri sauce! Photos by John Musnicki

T

here are few things as primal as a whole animal impaled

on a cross and grilled over an open outdoor fire. If you are offended by this image or concept, please turn the page; this isn’t just a delicious and festive way of life in some cultures, it is also a revered and necessary one. In Argentina, a country known for its spectacular beef, cooking meat over an open fire is known as an asado, which simply translated means “roast.”

Sebastian Muñoz is a polo-pony trainer by day and moonlights as an Argentine asado chef. He recently teamed up with Colin Ambrose, a local chef and restaurateur, to host an authentic asado in the garden behind Ambrose’s restaurant, Estia’s Little Kitchen in Sag Harbor.

Several huge grills were set up, and on the ground a ring of rocks protected an area of burning firewood on one side and char32

• september 2016

coal on the other. The grills were used to cook corn and a variety of other vegetables, including squash and eggplant, as well as sausages and four cuts of beef. The central fire on the ground was for a whole lamb.

“It is very important for the coals to cook down so they don’t flavor the meat,” explained Amalia Salado, Muñoz’s girlfriend and helper. “And all we use is lemon juice and salt on the meat.”

Muñoz led off with entraña, the Spanish word for flat cuts of beef such as hanger or skirt steak, and followed that with cooked ribs, ribeye, and asado de tira, another rib section. Each has its own fat content and flavor. The 35-pound lamb took about two hours, splayed out a few feet from the coals.

Meanwhile, Ambrose had prepared three chimichurri sauces to go with the various meats, and slathered the grilled corn with

BOUNTY butter, chilies, and lime. A simple leafy-green salad rounded out the meal.

Francis Mallmann, the Patagonian chef, author, and restaurateur (who is also a cohort of the gang at Amber Waves Farm in Amagansett; see page 80) has made cooking over open fires an art form. He followed his first hit book, On Fire, a stunning photographic account of his asado adventures, with two more, along with documentaries and videos of him cooking every conceivable Argentine food in every landscape.

Mallmann uses a variety of methods: cooking on a grill; cooking on a cast-iron grill known as a plancha; a curanto, which is cooking in a pit with hot stones (a method that has been used for thousands of years), and asador, the aforementioned cooking of the whole animal on a wood or iron cross, roasting slowly at some distance from the fire. Cooking in ashes is known as rescoldo.

Generally, cooking over open fires takes time, and has a ceremonial, almost ritualistic feel. It’s a group activity. While some consider the cooking and eating of meat in the great outdoors as a macho, testosterone-fueled activity, Mallmann insists it is a tender and fragile act, feminine in fact, requiring great respect for the animal and how it is treated, in life and afterward.

It was a hot and humid evening in Estia’s garden, made all the more so by the various grills and fire on the ground. But the food was delicious, simply prepared and seasoned and served with lemonade and Macari wine from the North Fork. Under the open sky, next to a garden, it was an education about an ancient cooking method, respected and revered around the world.

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It took two hours of turning the lamb on the cruz to get it perfect.

Waiting for the feast • september 2016

33

BOUNTY

> Sebastian Muñoz grills four different cuts of beef for a traditional Argentine feast.

Estia’s Red Chimichurri 1 large red pepper, flesh only 3 dried arbol chilies 4 dried guajillo chilies 1 cup diced red onion 1/2 cup whole Muir Glen organic canned tomatoes, drained and chopped 2 Tbsp. lemon juice 1 tsp. red wine vinegar 12 cloves garlic Salt to taste Remove stems and seeds from dried chilies and rehydrate in two cups of simmering water. Drain when soft. Chop garlic in a food processor, add red pepper and rehydrated chilies, tomato, lemon juice, and vinegar. Pulse until smooth then pour into a bowl and add diced red onion. Place in a covered jar and allow to sit, refrigerated, for two days.

Colin’s Grilled Corn 20 ears of corn, silks removed but husks intact.

Put husks back in place and tie with twine, close to the cob. Trim rest of husk away so there is only about four inches of husk wrapping each cob.

Make a compound butter with the following: 1 lb. softened butter 2 Tbsp. Estia’s House Blend Seasoning (recipe below) 2 Tbsp. ground dried guajillo peppers Juice of 3 large limes Combine all ingredients. Spread a tablespoon of compound butter on each ear of corn, add a slice of lime, and wrap just the cob with tin foil, leaving tied husk exposed. Cook on grill, turning occasionally, for about 15 minutes or until done.

Estia’s House Blend seasoning 2 Tbsp. ground white pepper 2 Tbsp. ground black pepper 2 Tbsp. toasted ground cumin seeds 6 Tbsp. kosher salt Combine and store in an airtight container.

34

• september 2016

BOUNTY house in Sag Harbor she offers me a glass of ice-cold, refreshing pineneedle tea. It’s delicious and reminds me of the weird spruce gum our grandfather used to give us as children.

“And now I’ll show you how to make it,” says Ernestus, pictured here.

We wander out to her front yard, and she randomly picks pine needles and fir sprigs from various bushes and trees.

“The prisoners in the gulag in Siberia would drink this to prevent scurvy. It is full of vitamin C and antioxidants. And it’s free!”

Ernestus pours a quart of boiling water over the handful of needles and leaves it to steep until it cools. Next, she opens her refrigerator and pulls out some beautiful magentacolored spicy beet kvass and pours it into tiny pressed glass cordial glasses. We toast.

“Nazdarovya!” I say, mangling her native Russian. She winces at my pronunciation and says, “Just say ‘cheers.’ ” Nadia Ernestus is known around these parts as the “Kraut Kween.” She founded Hamptons Brine, a line of raw, lacto-fermented sauerkrauts and kvass, two years ago, and the product has taken off. The difference between her sauerkraut and the stuff you can buy sloshing around in plastic bags or at the ballpark on your hotdog is that hers is uncooked and unpasteurized, thereby preserving all of the valuable probiotic benefits.

Eating raw sauerkraut on a regular basis can benefit your immune system, lower LDL cholesterol, assist in managing type 2 diabetes, improve digestion, and decrease allergies. It’s also supposed to cure hangovers, though I haven’t put it to the test. Yet. Ernestus makes three varieties of sauerkraut and three types of kvass. The Kraut Kween realizes that the business has gotten big enough that she could expand, but has decided not to.

“I have an artisanal, handcrafted product. That’s good enough for me, I don’t need to be a sauerkraut mogul. My house is paid off, and I buy my clothes at the Salvation Army and L.V.I.S. Bargain Box.” Her only extravagance is good, healthy, organic food. She entertains frequently and thinks nothing of feeding 30 people at a time.

A typical feast might be venison stew (venison provided by local hunters), roasted vegetables, and lots of her fermented products.

Another peek into her refrigerator reveals

A Higher Sour

“Kraut Kween” Nadia Ernestus of Hamptons Brine makes wholesome and probiotic kvass and sauerkraut that have become so popular she could found a business empire. Instead, she’s keeping it humble.

Lena Yaremenko

W

hen I arrive at Nadia Ernestus’s

>

the importance of nutrition. cabbage with yellow beets and jalapeños I’ve become a fan of — actually, I’m in one jar, mushrooms in another (yes, she addicted to — her spiced beet kvass and also forages for mushrooms and often finds sauerkraut. I like to chop it up and mix chanterelles in other people’s neglected it with shredded Lacinato kale, chopped lawns), and cranberries in raw honey. Some dried apricots, and Marcona almonds. of her favorites are fermented green beans As a woman said upon trying it recently with snow peas, and asparagus and corn. at a local farm stand: “It hits the spot I When she begins to explain the fernever knew I had.”

— Laura Donnelly mentation process, I scribble furiously.

“Stop writing while I am talking to you!” She barks at Russian Sauerkraut Salad • Serves 6-8 me. “You should be listening 1/4 cup chopped parsley 16 oz. sauerkraut, drained while I am talking!”

1 Tbsp. sunflower oil 1 finely sliced or grated apple Ernestus, who emigratBlack pepper to taste 1 cup chopped green onions ed from Russia in 1981, has 1/4 cup chopped dill three children in their 20s; they all cook, make their own Mix all ingredients and refrigerate for a few hours sauerkraut, and understand • september 2016

35

BOUNTY

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Sweet Scoop

Joe and Liza’s ice cream is fast becoming the South Fork’s favorite.

36

• september 2016

durell godfrey

O

n the Friday before July Fourth weekend, Liza Tremblay, right, delivered a thousand pints of ice cream and 500 ice cream sandwiches to local farm stands, and another 30 large boxes of ice cream to half a dozen restaurants. Panicked texts and phone calls started coming in by early Sunday: Supplies were already running perilously low, demand was outpacing available freezer space.

“In a given year, we sell about 30,000 pints of ice cream,” explained Tremblay, 36, who co-owns Joe and Liza’s Ice Cream. “And, almost all of it happens in three months.”

Like so much on the South Fork, summertime is high season for ice cream sales and Joe and Liza’s is the only commercially sold ice cream made locally. There are shops, the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton comes to mind, that make and sell their own ice cream, but Joe and Liza’s is the only local brand competing with the likes of Breyers, Ben & Jerry’s, and Haagen Dazs.

Joe and Liza’s most popular flavor is vanilla, followed by cookie jar, chocolate, pistachio, coffee, and strawberry. Almond restaurant in Bridgehampton, the Mill House Inn in East Hampton, and Noah’s in Greenport have scooped up the local ice cream for their desserts.

Joe and Liza’s also sells ice cream sandwiches and 10 flavors of ice cream and sorbet at its corner kiosk at the Amagansett Farmers Market. Re-opened by the Amagansett Food Institute last summer, the market only sells food and beverages made in New York State. Confessing to a particular fondness for Joe and Liza’s blackcherry flavor, Kathleen Masters, the institute’s executive director, says: “It reminds me of the ice cream I had as a child.”

As the brand-name suggests, Liza Tremblay is one half of a growing food-business. Joe and Liza Tremblay’s 800-square-foot ice cream facility in Sag Harbor is just a stone’s throw from Bay

Burger, which they also run together. They met in college, when her Smith College roommate introduced her to Joe, who was studying at Tulane University in New Orleans. The two immediately hit it off and were married six months after their college graduations. Shortly afterward, they paid a visit to her parents in Sag Harbor. The newlyweds lamented the lack of a good burger joint, and stored that thought away for a few years as they worked in the food business in New York.

In 2005, the perfect building for a burger joint came on the market. Sensing the time was right, the Tremblays pooled their resources, and on Memorial Day weekend of 2007 Bay Burger opened.

Along with their businesses, their family has since grown to include Leo, 5, and Rose, 1.

Early on, a division of labor presented itself, with Joe grinding the meat and baking homemade buns, while Liza experimented making ice cream. Though she’s always cooked, ice cream was completely new so she did what any beginner would do: She enrolled in a three-day course offered by the guy whose claim to fame includes Cookies and Cream, Milky Way, and Snickers ice cream, all of which he made in 1978 at a restaurant he owned in

Philadelphia. At his Ice Cream University in New Jersey, Malcolm Stogo preaches the virtues of quality.

“His main thing is to buy the best ingredients you can, because people can taste the difference,” Liza said. “He said ‘don’t worry about the cost, just always buy the best stuff.’ ” As you’d imagine, dairy is key, and for the past five years, Liza has worked with a Poughkeepsie dairy to create a proprietary base, made of only pasteurized milk, cream, sugar, and eggs — and devoid of any preservatives, stabilizers, or gums found in most other store-bought ice creams. To make her cult-following vanilla, for instance, she adds only vanilla extract and crushed vanilla beans to the base.

For now, the main bottleneck to growing the business is distribution, which the duo now handle entirely on their own.

“If we want to grow much past where we are now, we’d need a large distributor,” Tremblay said. “I don’t know if I’m ready to make that jump.”

Outsourcing the packing is also an option. “But then it’s not made in Sag Harbor.”

And “conceived in Sag Harbor but made in Connecticut” doesn’t hold quite the same appeal.

— Amanda M. Fairbanks

BUZZ

>

The Bee List

Colleen DeBaise, who runs the online business-news-buzz website The Hampton Bee, sleuths out a selection of fun stuff and fantastic services for each issue of EAST. Colleen, also a former

small-business editor for The Wall Street Journal, lives in East Hampton and chose the common newspaper-industry name “Bee” (think Sacramento Bee) because bees are emblematic of the hardworking East End entrepreneurs she loves to champion. Send suggestions to editor@thehamptonbee.com.

• Blood-orange-infused olive oil

Arlotta Food Studio

This $27 bottle is one of the most popular products sold by Water Mill-based Arlotta, which uses California olives to make artisanal oils flavored with fruits, seasonings and herbs. www.arlottafood.com

• Meat share

Goodale Farms

• Signature Two-Pound Loaf

Carissa’s Breads

You gotta like a baker so proud of her work, she brands it. Carissa Waechter uses wheat milled in Amagansett to make her loaves, which are imbued with the subtle taste of sea salt. www.carissasbreads.com

Get 30 pounds of all-natural, hormone-steroid-antiobiotic-free meat, from animals that were pretty happy (well, until the whole slaughtering thing). A beef share from family-owned Goodale Farms of Riverhead is $400 and includes various cuts of steak, roasts, ribs, stew, and hamburger. www.goodalefarms.com

• Cocoa noshes

BuckWHAT

philippe cheng

Buckwheat is a gluten-free superfood, in case you didn’t know. These snacks, sold for $3.75 a bag, are made with all-natural ingredients: almonds, dates, chia, cocoa, and buckwheat. BuckWHAT is run by sister-brother duo Leeann Rybakov and Edward Kartashevsky, whose family has a place in Springs. www.buckwhat.com

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• september 2016

BUZZ

>

• Purple carrot relish

Josephine’s Feast

Jam maker Laura O’Brien chooses seasonal ingredients from the East End to make this $10 purple carrot relish and a host of chutneys, preserves, and spice rubs — slowly, by hand, and without extra sugar. www.thegoodfarmdelivery.com

• Rosato Merlot Pétillant-Naturel

Channing Daughters

If you are in-the-know, you refer to this trendy champagne knock-off as “pét-nat.” That also saves you from trying to pronounce the actual French name, which is pay-tee-yanh na-tu-rel.

This $27 rose sparkler from Channing Daughters made Bloomberg’s Top 10 Wines annual list. www.channingdaughters.com

• Free-Range Heirloom Eggs

The Good Farm Delivery

These pale blue and green eggs from family-owned Iacono Farm in East Hampton are one of the many fresh products that can be delivered to your door by the Good Farm Delivery, a service started by Megan Schmidt in 2013. www.thegoodfarmdelivery.com

• Liquid honey

East End Apiaries

Robin Blackley of Southampton rather fearlessly manages swarms of bees — “my girls” — and sells these $15 jars of pure honey at farmers markets, never at supermarkets. www.eastendapiaries.com

• Turkey crisps for dogs

South Fork Pet Company.

These all-natural treats for pets, made in Amagnasett, are $14.99. www.southforkpet.com • september 2016

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neighbors

>

Mr. Cool

By Colleen DeBaise

As the owner of three frequently packed restaurants, David Loewenberg is like a circus ringmaster — smoothly entertaining the customers, thinking fast on his feet, and juggling about a dozen dishes in the air at any given moment. Every year, new food joints come to conquer, only to crash and burn, but he’s learned the secret to longevity.

O

n any given summer weekend, David Loewenberg is jumping between his popular restaurants — Beacon in Sag Harbor

(now in its 18th season), Fresno in East Hampton, and Bell & Anchor in Noyac — working the floor, greeting guests and switching up the music if need be. “At the Beacon, sometimes I walk in, and there will be a big line and an energy that’s pumping” like adrenaline, he says. “I’ll put on a little bossa nova, a little smooth jazz, and my manager Kristy will look at me and say, ‘That’s right.’”

Thirty-five years in the restaurant business have honed Loewenberg’s instincts. But he’s also got a preternatural calm that stands out in a high-intensity industry known for its nerve-fraying chaos and amped-up kitchen staff. Eric Ripert, a famed chef who is also a Beacon patron, has described Loewenberg’s demeanor as “a peaceful and pleasant elegance” that belies how hard he’s working.

It’s not easy to run a restaurant (let alone three of them) in a place where the peak season is ruthlessly short, the commercial space is expensive, and the clientele demanding. Not many survive. Loewenberg, who lives in Sag Harbor, has figured out a way to endure. His oldest, the Beacon, is in its 18th season.

Restaurants come and go in the Hamptons.

What’s your secret?

We’re old school. We’re not trendy. People talk about farm-to-table — we’ve been doing this forever. It’s our desire to know where fish comes from, or when corn is high, or when tomatoes are incredible, or when the fruit is bursting. The key to longevity is to like what you do, and to have systems in place, and to work handin-hand with seasons that aren’t so busy.

You’re a former city kid. What prepared you for the East End scene?

I had been working at restaurants in Manhattan since I was 14, washing dishes, bussing tables, prepping food — doing whatever possible to learn the business. I knew one day I wanted to operate a restaurant.

My wife, Sarah, and I met at a restaurant [Periyali, on 20th Street] and got burnt out. I was always trying to open a business, and it never happened. We fell in love with Sag Harbor, in the winter! Once I moved out here, I really connected with very strong operators, like Jeff Salaway from Nick and Toni’s. I fell into this incredibly fun and exciting world.

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• september 2016

What’s the best part about working on the South Fork?

I can’t imagine not having Sag Harbor as my base. I love the shoulder seasons — spring and fall. I love the harvest out here. To live out here, you need to make hay. I put my head down in the summer and I pick it up in the September or October, when it naturally slows down. My restaurants respond — we go to five days.

It gives you time to cook, to travel, to go to other restaurants. But as much travel as I’ve done . . . how can you not love it out here? It’s really just beautiful.

What’s the most challenging part?

Keeping really good help. My staff is paramount. I’m really big about training.

I have people that come back every season. We want to maintain continuity. If we had to hire a brand new staff each year, it would be very difficult. We notoriously pay more than in the city, because it’s difficult to get good help. I’m very conscious of labor costs. I’m very conscious of food costs. People will come in and say, “Oh my God, it’s a Saturday in August, I’m waiting for a table — you must be raking it in.”

But profitability is tough.

Bell and Anchor (which Loewenberg co-owns with Sam McCleland, chef) is summertimeonly; Fresno (open since 2004) and Beacon (2012) are both year-round. What’s the thinking there?

The building screams “summer!” — it’s above a marina, and when the wind starts blowing, you can feel it shake. I love being there during a storm, because it’s really sexy. But we had to learn how to make it work. The first couple years weren’t easy.

We learned that when people line up, you take them. You learn how to manage a menu and serve a restaurant that fills up in 10 minutes.

What’s the common link with all your restaurants?

There is a sense of hospitality, of management, of a system that plays in all of them.

Each restaurant has its own personality.

But once they have a system, they have a continuity. All of the menus are Continental — there’s a great steak, a chicken, a vegetarian dish — but each chef has his or her own flair and will utilize some of the same ingredients with different energies.

doug kuntz

Loewenberg at his Sag Harbor restaurant, Beacon, recently

You’ve walked away from restaurants, such as 95 School Street (which you opened at the age of 28) and more recently, Red Bar and Little Red. Why? School Street was in the beginning of my ownership years. I negotiated the space, I folded the napkins, I designed the menus.

But I was young and naive in my business savvy. I probably would have done things differently if I had been older. I left when I felt I could no longer grow with it. With Red Bar [now owned by a former partner, Kirk Basnight], it just felt like the timing was right.

It can’t always be smooth sailing. Can you remember any special catastrophes?

Our job is try to make everything as seamless as possible — and that inevitably doesn’t happen. Sometimes, the only good thing about an evening is that it eventually ends. I’ve had power outages, deliveries not coming due to traffic, staff not being timely. You have to make it seem like it’s business as usual. At the Beacon, there have been squalls that come in, and we have to batten down the hatches.

I have a canopy but there is a leak here and there. We’ve had no one fall off the deck. But we’ve helped save the day. We have saved as many as five or six wedding rings that have fallen off. Usually they are newlyweds — and I hate to say it, but it’s the husband — and they are playing with the rings, and all of a sudden it falls through the slats. We’ve had really good luck retrieving them, with wire — and prayer...You try to make it look as smooth as possible.

Do you hang out with other restaurant types?

It’s a small world out here. There’s definitely a camaraderie. I really respect Mark Smith and Joseph Realmuto at Nick and Toni’s, Jesse Matsuoka at Sen, and Maurizio Marfoglia and Rachel Luria at Dopo La Spiaggia. During high season, it’s few and far between that you get to see everybody. It’s nice to let someone else pour a glass of wine for you.

What would you tell someone looking to open a restaurant in the Hamptons?

There are a lot of folks who come out here, and think they are going to light the place on fire. Go for it — but be careful. Really make sure you understand what you’re doing and your demographics. I’m actually excited when people come and have a new energy and style, because it pushes you to do the best you can.

How do you stay so calm?

It’s the medication. [Laughs.] I try not to take it seriously. I try to step back and breathe. I’ve learned to laugh at myself a bit.

There were years when it was very intense. But after years in the business, you build a sense of maturity and a reserve. It’s food.

It’s hospitality. I do practice yoga, I do ride a bike, I do love spending time with my daughter and my friends. It’s not just work. But I think the key is that I really like what I do.

• september 2016

41

Clyde Wesnofske fills a planter with seed potatoes in April as he and his sons work a field off Cooks Lane in Bridgehampton.

400 Acres

With its open vistas of brown furrows, then low green plants dotted with white flowers running in parallel lines to the horizon, Bridgehampton used to be famous not for movie stars and mansions, but for potatoes.

Today, the Wesnofske clan holds on against all odds: a squeeze on farmable land, the increasing difficulty of getting to market, and the deeper question of who will carry on.

carissa katz

T

By Carissa Katz

he steady wind coming off the bare fields at Wesnofske Farms in Bridgehampton played the big metal equipment barn like a drum on a cloudy day in late March. Inside, planters, tractors, harvesting trucks, a plow, and a spray rig sat clean and idle, ready for another season on the South Fork’s largest remaining commercial potato farm.

In a few short weeks, Clyde Wesnofske, 81, would return from a winter in Florida to help plant the land now overseen by his sons Rick, John, and Michael, the third and possibly last generation of Wesnofskes to farm an ever-shrinking expanse of Bridgehampton fields.

“The planting equipment has all been fine-tuned. We’re basically waiting on the calendar and the weather,” John Wesnofske said from the warmth of a tidy office at the rear of the barn.

On the walls around him were his own photographs chronicling the seasons on the farm: his father by a big green tractor in one of them, neat rows of leafy green potato plants in another, • september 2016

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the brown fields during spring planting and fall harvesting in two more.

By the end of the third week of April, freezing nights and early-month rains behind them, the planting was in full swing, with father and sons working together from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., almost 10 days straight to get seed potatoes from Maine into the South Fork soil. First the plow, up one long row, down another, then the planter, with Clyde at the wheel, following a few rows behind, dispensing potatoes and fertilizer in equal measure, transforming acre by acre from the dull brown of winter to the hopeful auburn of spring.

This year, they’re growing potatoes on 225 of the 400 or so acres they own or lease, resting the remaining land with cover crops to build up the soil.

“Years ago, when we had so many acres, we’d start toward the end of March just to get everything planted,” John said.

Back then, the Wesnofkes farmed close to 700 acres, including land they still own today and more that they leased. These days, it seems there is less land to rent with each passing year, cutting planting time by at least a half.

Looking north at a certain angle from the cluster of barns at the corner of Cooks Lane and Scuttlehole Road, the stretch of cultivated fields offers a glimpse into another era, when eastern Long Island was a promising new frontier for farmers squeezed off their acreage farther west on the Island by the forward march of development.

C

lyde’s great-grandfather, Martin Wesnofske, emigrated from West Prussia in 1874, part of a wave of Poles leaving Europe by the hundreds of thousands at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. He farmed in Flushing, Queens, at the edge of the Hempstead Plains. Clyde’s grandfather John Wesnofske established his own farm 10 miles west of there, in Hicksville, in 1900, and Clyde’s father, Remi, farmed in Hicksville, too, taking over the family spread with a brother before establishing one of 44

• september 2016

his own nearby. As development closed in, he looked upstate, in Steuben County, and even as far as Washington State and Tennessee for better prospects.

In 1942, Remi bought the farm at the corner of Cooks Lane and Scuttlehole Road, and a decade later another farm at the intersection of Scuttlehole and Brick Kiln Roads. By 1953, he had sold his house and remaining farmland in Hicksville and settled in Bridgehampton with his wife and four children.

Having seen what happened farther west, he became one of the first Suffolk County farmers to line up behind the county’s purchase of farmland development rights in the early 1970s. “When you take farmland out of production and build

on it, it’s gone forever,” Remi told the Suffolk County Legislature in 1976, after it had tabled a vote to get the program off the ground. “I farmed in Hicksville in 1952 and I saw 80 percent of good farms go to blacktop and concrete.”

But not everyone was thrilled the see the county spending tax dollars on the purchase of development rights. In fact, the program was so controversial that even after a majority of the Suffolk County Legislature finally voted in September 1976 to approve funding for the first round of acquisitions, the legislators who had voted against it filed for and won a temporary court injunction aimed at stopping the program altogether. The basis of their concern? The cost of the program in the face of an uncertain fiscal climate and that it would benefit only the East End while all of Suffolk would pay for it.

Today, aside from their house lots,

all the agricultural land the Wesnofskes own is preserved. Still, even as land that can never be developed as housing, “it’s worth more now than it was for the development rights back then,” John said.

The Wesnofkes’ story — from Martin on down to Remi and Clyde and his children — is the story of agriculture on Long Island over the past century and a half, potato farming in particular.

J

ohn, Rick, and Michael are the fifth generation of Wesnofskes to raise potatoes on Long Island.

(Another brother, Robert, an engineer, lives in New Jersey.) Their sister, Victoria Corwin, works in the farm office. All four of them married the children of farmers.

“Of all the people who should have known better than to marry a potato farmer. . . .” John’s wife, Julie, joked on a visit to the barn one morning in July. Also descended from Polish immigrants, she has potato-farming roots on the South Fork that run even deeper than her husband’s, going back to her great-grandfather, Alexander Tiska, who settled in Bridgehampton just after arriving in the U.S. at the turn of the century.

Julie Wesnofske’s great-grandparents were killed in a car accident, leaving nine children, including an infant who had been in the car with them. The farm they worked so hard to establish was auctioned off and the money used to support the children, who were sent to live with different relatives. Her grandfather, Anthony Tiska Sr., the oldest at 14, went straight to work.

“He got into the rumrunning scene and eventually earned enough money to buy the original farm back and continued adding to it,” Julie said. Anthony Tiska Sr. set up some of his brothers, too, and some of his youngest siblings came to live with him. “By the time my dad inherited it from him, we owned 300 acres on Loper’s Path.”

Her father, Anthony Tiska Jr., grew potatoes for more than two decades, but in 1991, Julie said, “he auctioned off all his equipment because he didn’t see any

photos this page: john wesnofske

The view from a tractor while cultivating on Quimby Lane in Bridgehampton

• august 2016

45

Wesnofske Family Photo

future for potato farming.” That July, “he walked into a barn with a shotgun one day and he never came out.” She was 21.

“He never got to see me marry another potato farmer.”

When she met John, it was pretty much love at first sight. “We decided to get married about three weeks after we met.” Eleven months later, they did.

Whether their son, Remi, 14, and daughter, Abby, 16, will continue in farming is anyone’s guess. “It’s too early to tell with the next generation,” John said. “I go back and forth between that’s it or it would be nice if a nephew or something wanted to take over.” He wants his children and nieces and nephews to be able to make their own decisions about their future, just as he did. “When we grew up, we didn’t come down to the farm. . . . Our parents didn’t make us farm. That’s probably why we’re farming now; they didn’t force us to do it.”

Of the brothers running Wesnofske Farms, Rick alone went to school for agriculture. John didn’t come back to the farm until after graduate school, where he earned an M.B.A. in finance. When he and his brothers decided they were ready 46

• september 2016

to take over the operation, Clyde “handed it over to us pretty quickly,” John said, and mostly stepped aside to let them run it as they saw fit.

“Farming is still a way of life, but it’s a business, too, and if you aren’t a good businessman or woman you aren’t going to survive.”

Rick has three children. The oldest, Ricky, studied engineering. His daughter, Emily, is in college, and his son Andrew will start his senior year in high school in September. Michael has three daughters, Samantha, 16, Emma, 13, and Lucy, 12.

Abby, who has her father’s smile, says she’s not interested in following in his footsteps, but when she talks about growing up on the farm and spending her summers hanging out with her cousins, it’s clear how deeply connected she is to the land she was raised on.

“The kids, they would be the fifth generation on my side of the family to farm in Bridgehampton,” Julie said. “I would love it if they kept it going.” But she knows more than anyone the challenges of the profession and the toll it can take.

“If you don’t love it, it’s an impossible life,” she said. “You can’t move, you’re restricted in your options. There’s so many things you can’t control. Every year there are new regulations . . . the weather. . . . It doesn’t matter how hard you work sometimes, and sometimes there’s not a lot of return on the work. It’s hard to start over the next year with some hope, but if you love it, you do.”

“Farmers, it’s not something they do, it’s who they are,” she said.

“Farming is still a way of life, but it’s a business, too, and if you aren’t a good businessman or woman you aren’t going to survive,” said Dale Moyer, recently retired from the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County, where he was a vegetable and potato specialist for more than 20 years before becoming supervisor of agriculture programs. “I think folks like the Wesnofskes, that’s one reason they have survived. They understand there’s more to

John Wesnofske carissa katz

it than just being on a tractor: There’s marketing, economics, how you manage labor.”

The Wesnofske brothers “are very good at not just doing it the way it’s always been done,” Julie said. They’re always looking at new equipment and techniques to streamline and improve their operation.

It runs in the family.

“Remi, for somebody who didn’t finish high school, he picked up the knowledge of an engineer,” said Ed Wesnofske, Clyde’s younger brother. Remi was an innovator in his time, Ed said: He embraced rubber-tired tractors and four-row planters before most would give them the time of day, used aerial photography and scientific soil maps to scout new land, and adopted mechanized processing equipment early on. He also had farms in Homestead, Fla., and later Crescent City, Fla., so there was work all year round. It was Remi who determined that it wasn’t worth it to irrigate the South Fork potato fields, and Clyde and his sons have continued that practice.

Ed is the family historian, the only one of three brothers who didn’t pursue farming. His brother Raymond, who still owns land at the corner of Scuttlehole and Brick Kiln Roads, farmed for a long time on rented land, but when that was no longer available, he turned to commercial real estate. Ed became a professor, teaching medical sociology, religion, and social change at the State University at Oneonta. He can speak eloquently about the political upheaval, social trends, and economic tides that carried the Wesnofskes from West Prussia to Queens to Nassau, where, he said, “post-World War II suburban development made it impossible to farm. . . . Knowing what happened there made it possible for East End towns to seek to preserve farmland here.”

fter World War II Long Island potatoes became a brand.

There were as many as 70,000 acres in potato production island-wide. “Long Island was famous for its potatoes,” said Dale Moyer. As the cost of land and production rose, other states — Idaho, Washingon, Oregon, and Maine — stepped up.

Then came the fallout, starting in the 1960s, from dealing with pests like the Colorado potato beetle and the golden nematode.

By the 1980s, Long Island potato production had declined precipitously to just 7,000 to 10,000 acres, according to Robert Carpenter, administrative director of the Long Island Farm Bureau. “The potato growers that remain are still some of the best growers left today, families that have been doing this for generations.”

Today there are fewer than 2,000 acres in potatoes on Long Island, making Wesnofske Farms one of the last big growers of its kind in the region. Their farm is “huge for our area,” Carpenter said, while in the western U.S., a single potato farm could be 2,000 acres or larger.

On Long Island, only 50 percent of farmland is in food production today. Wine grapes have surpassed potatoes in acreage, and other non-food crops (such as nursery stock and sod) are ahead of both. But development aside, agriculture in Suffolk County is still a $240 million industry. In 2012 Suffolk County was “the third largest agriculture county in New York State in terms of dollars produced,” Carpenter said. Long number one, it was edged out by two upstate dairy counties when the yogurt boom drove dairy prices up a few years back. Those

Wesnofske Family Photo

A

Left, at John Wesnofske’s farm in Hicksville in 1919, the youngest of his five children, Remi among them, picked potatoes. While mechanized tractors were already in use on the farm, harvesting was still done by hand at that point.

Top, Clyde and Rick Wesnofske, hilling potatoes on Cooks Lane in Bridgehampton John and Julie Wesnofske with their children, Abby and Remi. If they follow in their father’s footsteps, they would be the fifth generation on Julie’s side of the family and the fourth on John’s to farm in Bridgehampton.

Bottom, cultivating at John’s great-grandfather’s farm in Hicksville in 1917 • september 2016

47

carissa katz

In April John Wesnofske surveys the fields off Cooks Lane midway through a 10-day stretch of planting.

48

• september 2016

have since dropped, and by the time the next census is done in 2017, he expects Suffolk will be back at the top.

Most large South Fork farms have diversified. Not Wesnofske Farms. They’ve stopped growing corn on land not in potatoes because it didn’t make financial sense, they don’t have a farm stand, and they’ve kept their hands out of what John calls “agri-entertainment”: Tractor rides for day-trippers or u-dig potatoes aren’t their thing. They just do potatoes, and they’ve worked things out so that they get most of their weekends off, too.

“We’re taking a chance doing this one crop,” John said this spring.

“Potato farmers are kind of the dinosaurs of the farming world, but these guys, they’re really good at what they do,” his wife said.

The farm supports three families, but although its barns are stocked with a fleet of specialized equipment, for much of the season you’ll find just the three brothers there handling everything. In mid-August migrant workers from Florida, most of whom have worked for the family for 15 years or so, arrive to help bring in the harvest and man the grading and packing line.

Though he’s not a farmer, John’s nephew, Victoria’s son, Jonathan Corwin, has become an integral part of the Wesnofske Farms financial equation. He works for Hapco Farms, the largest produce packager and distributor on the East Coast and the main buyer of Wesnofske potatoes.

Hapco and Joseph Fierman & Son, a fruit and vegetable broker at the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, are among the last buyers left in this area for commercial growers like the Wesnofskes.

“Without Hapco and Joseph Fierman & Son, I don’t think we’d be doing it,” John said. “Someone has to buy them . . . that’s part of the problem with potatoes out this way.”

The yellow and white-fleshed potatoes the Wesnofskes grow will be graded at the farm, then put in 2,000 pound totes or five-pound plastic bags. Ten of those will go into a bigger master bag, and 800 of those master bags will be loaded on each tractor trailer that leaves Bridgehampton for the buyers’ distribution center. By the fall, the Wesnofskes’ potatoes will be in grocery stores around the Northeast, including Stop and Shop, Shaw’s, and Food Lion, often packed in the supermarket-brand bag. This year some will be in Long Island Stop and Shop stores under a new Island-grown labeling program that Jonathan Corwin is helping to develop.

And, plenty will end up on the Wesnofskes’ dinner tables. “When I was a kid, we had potatoes every single day,” Julie said. Not everybody will eat that many spuds, but there’s no denying potatoes are one of this country’s most popular crops. Asks John: “Have you ever met anyone that didn’t like potatoes?”

Not around here.

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Freshly caught black sea bass, headed for the plate.

Ocean to table in pictures, this and following pages

A Fish Tale

The story of how your tilapia ended up swimming in basil and wine on your dinner plate is probably a more convoluted journey than Finding Dory’s. But, as the concept of buying local expands to embrace seafood, it doesn’t have to be that way. On an express trip from the ocean off Montauk Point to Nick and Toni’s, Carissa Katz traces a few pounds of premium black sea bass. Photos by Homer Parkes

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his is a story about food. It starts on a boat with one man and a fishing pole. It ends at one of East Hampton’s best restaurants. It could be a very long story spanning several states, at least two continents, and dozens of pairs of hands along the way. But it’s not, and that’s what makes it worth telling.

It’s just after noon on a sultry day in early July when Capt. Ron Onorato steers his 29-foot sport-fishing boat through the Montauk Harbor inlet and into the open waters of Block Island Sound, bound for a spot two miles off the Point where he expects to find a jackpot of black sea bass.

Onorato is one of only a dozen or so commercial rod-and-reel fishermen operating out of Montauk Harbor. “To me, catching a fish on a hook is more exciting than dragging a net,” he says. He also runs a charter business, Capt. Ron’s Fishing, and had been out in the morning with paying customers searching for the same bounty.

“Today, to be able to make a living, you’ve got to do both.”

In 60 or so feet of water, with the Montauk Lighthouse in the near distance, the fish finder lights up.

“There!” He points out the rightsized blips that tell him he’s found his mark, grabs a pole from the cabin, pops on a lure, and drops his line in the water just off the boat. Not 30 seconds later, he’s reeling in two black sea bass. He drops his line again. Bam! Two more in less than a minute, and again, and again.

At this rate, he’ll catch his 50-pound

daily quota in an hour. But fish can be fickle, and after he makes it look all too easy half a dozen times, they seem determined to make him work for those last few pounds.

Undaunted, he refers to what he calls his “Book of Numbers,” a well-worn, meticulously kept record of sweet-spot coordinates that he says will be buried along with him when he dies. Then he steers a course for more fruitful waters, snagging a few more sea bass before turning his attention to porgy, a.k.a. Montauk sea bream, which has a daily quota of 800 pounds.

When he’s ready to call it a day, he texts Joseph Realmuto, the executive chef of the Honest Man Restaurant Group, whose South Fork eateries include Nick and Toni’s and Rowdy Hall, to see if he wants to claim the catch. The answer: an emphatic “Yes.” He’ll take it all, sight unseen, and it will be among the freshest fish on any restaurant table that week.

On the way back to port, the captain takes a detour to catch a pair of big bluefish. With two, he says, “Joe will have enough to put it on the menu.”

At the docks, he packs his fish out and weighs it at a dealer’s warehouse, where it’s iced down and set aside for Nick and Toni’s. Forty-nine pounds of sea bass, 16 of bluefish, and 6 of porgy.

Black sea bass “pay between $6 and $7 a pound to the boat,” he says, but every sale is a negotiation with the dealer, who buys the fish off the boat and sells it onward. For Ron’s catch, which has a ready buyer willing to pay a premium, the price

to both fisherman and dealer will likely be on the higher side.

“I don’t mind paying more knowing that I’m going to get that quality,” Realmuto, the chef, says the next day, after preparing a sample of the dishes he would serve at the restaurant that night. He was at the dock at 8 a.m. to get the fish, then back in the Nick and Toni’s kitchen with his chef de cuisine, Bryan Futerman, a leader in the local Slow Food movement, by mid-morning.

The sea bass would be the whole fish of the day, wood-oven roasted. “Some we’ll fillet, and we’ll do an amuse bouche of smoked-bluefish paté,” Realmuto says.

Along with a description of the specials, wait staff will tell patrons that it was “polecaught” just yesterday by Captain Onorato. “When you mention it to customers — what the fishermen caught, when they caught it, the steps used to catch it — they are very intrigued.”

At Nick and Toni’s “people tonight will be eating 28-hour-old fish.”

n the South Fork, ordering fish that fresh is harder than you might imagine. “It’s coming into Montauk, but some goes to the Fulton Fish Market [in the Bronx]. You’ve already lost two days there. It’s sent back by truck,” Realmuto says. “It could be another two days before we get a fish that was brought in 20 minutes from me.” And, of course, popular fish caught abroad or in other states will have an even more circu-

O

itous route from sea to plate.

As natural as relationships like the one Realmuto has forged with Captain Onorato might seem in a seaside community — especially in an age when the farmto-table movement has fostered a growing appreciation for the origin of so many ingredients on a restaurant’s menu — they remain uncommon these days.

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state-licensed commercial fisherman can still peddle his catch directly to a final consumer, but that triggers a whole new set of reporting requirements mimicking those for a dealer, who has to report a range of landing data including the true weight of the species caught based on certified scales that are legal for trade. That information is ultimately used by the federal government to “determine the total catch for a given year” and to manage the fisheries, explained Victor Vecchio, a fishery reporting specialist with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Realmuto met Onorato through the Dock to Dish restaurant-supported fisheries program, which is based on some of the same principals as community-supported agriculture. “It’s like ‘know your farmer,’ but it’s ‘know your fisherman,’ ” said Sean Barrett, its founder. “It’s restoring the identity of the commercial fisherman.”

Dock to Dish began as a direct-toconsumer program, then branched out to include restaurants. Members paid a set fee for a share of a fisherman’s premium catch but also took a certain poundage of their

Bait and Switch With a third of all fish mislabeled at the point of sale, it’s time for us, the consumers, to become more proactive in checking the sources of our seafood.

Rarely these days does a chef or seafood buyer know exactly how long a fish

has been out of the water and/or where it was caught, let alone who caught it.

Wild, traceable seafood is hard to come by. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fishwatch website, “up to 90 percent of the seafood consumed in the United States is imported.” Half of that is farm-raised, much of it in Southeast Asia. And, “a significant portion of . . . imported seafood is caught by American fishermen, exported overseas for processing, and then reimported to the United States.”

More surprising: Much of the fish we buy in the United States may not be the fish we think it is.

In a large-scale seafood fraud investigation between 2010 and 2012, the ocean conservation group Oceana found that a third of the more than 1,200 seafood samples tested in 21 states were mislabeled. Farmed fish was substituted for wild fish, more imperiled species were sold as more plentiful ones, and fish with higher mercury levels were sold as fish safer for high-risk groups like children and pregnant women. Think you’re getting red snapper or cod? It might actually be farmed tilapia. Wild Alaskan salmon? There’s a good chance it could be farmed Atlantic salmon.

Commercial fishermen “are pushing for better labeling, better tracking from source to stores. If the consumer becomes a little more knowledgeable they can at least get a better idea of where the fish they are getting comes from,” says Capt. Ron Onorato of Montauk.

Restaurants are increasingly working directly with local fishermen to make fresh local fish available to patrons. But seafood customers seeking to buy fish from local waters need to familiarize themselves with what’s actually available and what the seasons are. We need to be demanding customers.

“Is this in season now, and is this local?” is perhaps the most useful question at the fish counter. And don’t stop there. Don’t be shy. “Where was it caught? When?”

A quick local seafood primer: You can get local clams, lobster, oysters, ocean scallops, squid, skate, sea bass, porgies, monkfish, fluke, and flounder all year. Bay scallops come late fall through the winter. Tilefish is available all year with exception of late spring and summer. Tuna run May through late fall. Swordfish, June through late fall. Bluefish, in all but deep winter. And cod, all seasons but summer.

– C.K.

bycatch, the less desirable, cheaper fish like porgy or bluefish. The Dock to Dish mission, at its most basic level, was to connect consumers more directly with small-scale commercial fishermen who practice sustainable catch methods.

Its broader aims, as outlined on its website, were revolutionary concepts in the face of global seafood market realities: “to engage our fishermen and community members in a more transparent local food market with a minimized chain of custody” and “to fundamentally change seafood marketplaces by demonstrating to producers, through consumer demand, the economic and ecological value of traceable, sustainable seafood.”

“I was on board from day one,” Realmuto said. What appealed to him “first and foremost is the sustainability, and how it’s protecting our resources,” but he also liked that he was supporting local fishermen in the process. “By paying them a higher landing rate for their fish . . . as opposed to going through all the middlemen, it allows them to catch their limit and get paid for bycatch.”

Without the program, bycatch is often simply thrown back in the water. “It forces the chef to use a product we’ve never really used before,” Realmuto said, and that’s an education for the customers, too, showing them that porgy and sea robin, say, can be “as good as tuna or striped bass.”

“Traditionally, before the whole seato-table movement, fishermen would simply pack their fish out and sell it to a dealer

somewhere,” explained Vecchio, who has an office in East Hampton and is in charge of all of New York State. “Occasionally, fishermen could sell their fish at the dock if you were fortunate enough to be there at the dock when they were unloading.”

Once it’s at the Fulton market, “it can change hands anywhere between one and two dozen times as the brokers and merchants in the market swap and trade,” Barrett said.

“When so many people are handling it, you can see the fillets starting to break apart. A fresher fish, you can see the clarity in the eyes,” Realmuto said.

Another plus: “The fish is really delicious.”

When customers tasted the difference, they were hooked, too.

While Dock to Dish is no longer operating its C.S.F. or R.S.F. out of Montauk, its guiding principals left a deep impression on both restaurateurs and their customers. Chefs like Realmuto, Futerman, and many others on the South Fork and beyond have embraced the idea that buying local should apply to seafood, too.

One point that Dock to Dish worked to drive home for restaurateurs is that “wild, traceable, sustainable U.S. seafood is ultimately the highest-priced item on your menu,” Barrett said.

By sharing its story, “you create an environment where people are willing to pay higher prices.”

Realmuto may not be able to fill all the seafood slots on his menus with the catch from Captain Ron and small-scale commercial fishermen like him, “but we’re helping local fishermen, educating the staff, educating the client, and doing something we believe in.”

The final product on the way to a table at Nick and Toni’s

Sweet Revenge The saga of the rise and fall and rise again of the woman behind Tate’s Cookie’s, Kathleen King, borders on Shakespearean. At the very least, King laughingly says, it could be a “made for TV movie.” Laura Donnelly reports.

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f you’ve ever savored a locally

baked chocolate chip cookie, chances are it was a Kathleen’s cookie years ago, and now it is a Tate’s.

You see Tate’s in many airports across the country, just about every gourmet store in every state, and many places around the world. You will certainly find them in every supermarket and every farm stand on the East End of Long Island, where Kathleen King grew up and still lives today.

King was raised on her parent’s farm on Noyac Road, North Sea Farms. She and her older siblings, Karin, Kevin, and Richie, worked as soon as they could walk.

At the tender age of eleven, King took up baking cookies and selling them to the

farm’s customers — after all, she had to come up with the money to buy her own school clothes.

Even at such a young age, King was a stickler for quality. If her mother purchased some lesser-quality ingredients, cheaper chocolate chips for instance, to save money, little Kathleen would send her back to the store for the real deal.

King began with the basic Toll House cookie recipe printed on the back of bags of Nestle’s chocolate chips. But her recipe evolved from the somewhat soft and chewy original formula to a thinner, crisper version. By high school she was baking all summer, working 10 to 12 hours a day.

“When you grow up on a farm there’s

philippe cheng

Tate King, father and inspiration

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• september 2016

no meal ticket,” she said in a recent interview. “You pay for your own car, clothes, college. It stokes a different fire.”

It’s very clear where she got her work ethic. Her mother, Millicent (Millie), was a nurse for more than 30 years and took night shifts on private duty so she could be home in the mornings to get her four children ready for school. Kathleen’s father, Richard (Tate) King, farmed the land the family now owns which he took over from his father, Stanley, in 1957.

Kathleen King’s brother, Richie, still operates North Sea Farms.

After graduating from the State University at Cobleskill, Kathleen found a building near the railroad tracks in Southampton that had already been a bakery. So, at the age of 21, she opened Kathleen’s Bake Shop and expanded her line of goods to included more “traditional Americana” items, as she calls them, such as oatmeal-raisin cookies and pies. By 23, she was able to move to another building a few doors down.

King would drive an old van in and out of the city, carting shopping bags of cookies to Dean and Deluca, Balducci’s, and Zabar’s. Just about everyone who tasted her cookies wanted to buy them. Kathleen’s Cookies became a household name in the New York area.

By the time she was 40, King thought maybe it was time to take a break, relax a little. Besides running the bakery full time, she had also published her first of three cookbooks, Kathleen’s Bake Shop. Her bookkeeper suggested they partner with his brother. Each would own a third of the company, and she would remain as chief executive. She agreed.

The brothers, now owning a controlling interest, moved the cookie production to Richmond, Va., and started cutting corners to save money. “Nobody will be able to tell the difference,” they assured King.

“I’ll be able to tell the difference,” she replied and proved it when they did a blind tasting.

Now, if you recall, even at the age of 11, she had known that ingredients matter. Or, as her father would say: “If you start with shit, you end up with shit.”

Inferior ingredients turned out to be the least of her problems. Soon, the company that bore her name but was controlled by partners stopped paying its bills.

Vendors started going directly to the shop, and King would pay them with cash from the register. Employees’ checks started bouncing, according to press accounts of ensuing legal battles.

And then, having built her namesake company for 23 years, she was fired. The partners accused her of theft, locked her out of the bake shop, hired an armed security guard to sit outside, and filed a restraining order against her. One more thing: The

company was now $600,000 in debt.

The news got out, and little Southampton turned out big time for the hometown girl. Family and friends picketed at the shop. “No Kathleen, no cookies!”

When the dispute went to court, she recalls, she looked around the crowded courtroom and wondered, “What kinds of crimes did all of these people commit?” only to realize that most of the people in the courtroom had come to support her.

King admits now that she was naive.

“I grew up on a farm, I spent all of my youth baking. My parents didn’t raise a victim, but I’d never met people like this before. The whole experience was revealing in a good way and in a bad way… It could have made me distrustful and bitter. It didn’t. But it was frightening.”

It gets a bit worse before it gets better.

King owned the property, but the partners had the lease. There was a clause in the contract that said they could use the equity from the business to buy the building. The case went to the New York State Supreme Court, and the judge ruled that the partners could keep the name,

her name, Kathleen’s Bake Shop, and continue to expand the brand nationally. But the court also ruled that King could get the deed to her bake shop. She couldn’t use her own name, however. She would have to remortgage the building in order to repay her third of the company’s debt.

By 2000, King had decided to start again. She printed up some new labels for a new company, which she called Tate’s Bake Shop — Tate being the nickname of her “ father, Richard. It either came from childhood friends or his buddies at the Farmers Guild. “Tate” is short for “little tater” and Kathleen concedes that at 4-foot-10 he also kind of resembled a Tater Tot.

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hen I started Tate’s in 2000 I was pretty numb from all that had happened,” Kathleen says. “I was focused and in survival mode, operating and executing as quickly as I could. I had no money left and had to remortgage my building to get started. If it were not for the kindness and support of the community and a strong family foundation I could have • august 2016

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philippe cheng

Kathleen King at the family farmstand in North Sea

easily slipped through the cracks and become a victim of my own horrible decisions.”

King was resolute. “I made a foolish and naive business decision and I needed to prove to myself that evil people do exist and that I wasn’t stupid, just naive.”

And the rest of the story, as they say, is history. Tate’s soared.

And what became of the original Kathleen’s Cookies and the former partners? In a tasty and crunchy morsel of schadenfreude, they went out of business.

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n a recent interview, sitting outside her charming shop, I asked a variety of, to my mind, pertinent questions.

“What is your favorite cookie?”

“It’s still the chocolate chip, they have an addictive quality.”

As I prattle on about my favorites, she changes her mind and says she has a new favorite, a yet-to-be-named cayenne-and-blackcocoa-powder cookie. King brings me a sample bag. (For a pastry chef — which I am — this is akin to being in the studio with your favorite band as they record a new hit.) The cookie is dark and crisp. The cocoa comes through loud and clear with a hint of cinnamon.

Eventually the cayenne pepper hits your tongue, but subtly. I ask what kind of cocoa powder she uses for this cookie, you know, a bit of shop talk among professionals. Valhrona?

She hems and haws, she’s not sure. I don’t believe her, and I make a mental note to never play poker with this woman in charge of the quality control and product development for Tate’s Bake Shop.

A couple of years ago, a man named Alan Peyrat was surfing with his children in Huntington Beach, California. When they got out of the water they snacked on Tate’s chocolate chip cookies. He never forgot how good they were. When he learned in 2014 that Tate’s Bake Shop was for sale, he jumped at the chance, and his company, Riverside (through Riverside Micro-Cap Fund III), purchased Tate’s for a purported $100 million.

What does King like to do with her time since that staggeringly satisfying sale? For the last several years she has remained close to home to take care of her parents. Her mother passed away in May and her father died June 29, 58

• september 2016

Blueberry Muffins Throw out all your other blueberry-muffin recipes. This is the only one you will ever need. This recipe is from The Kathleen’s Bake Shop Cookbook by Kathleen King. Published by St. Martin’s Press. Makes 12

3 cups flour 4 1/2 tsp. baking powder 1/2 tsp baking soda 1 1/4 cups sugar 1/2 tsp salt

1 cup butter 1 1/4 cups milk 2 eggs, lightly beaten 2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease 12 muffin cups (3-by-1.5-inch). In large bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt. In medium-size saucepan, melt butter. Add milk and lightly beaten egg. Add butter mixture to dry ingredients and mix lightly just until moistened. Fold in blueberries. Spoon mixture evenly into prepared muffin cups. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted in the center of one muffin comes out clean.

at the age of 90.

“My father represented everything to me that the bakery should be about, especially integrity. And tenacity.”

King remains with Tate’s in an advisory capacity, developing new recipes and making sure the quality is up to her standards.

Petite, pretty, and looking much younger than her age, she says that her favorite indulgence is what she calls “cozy adventure travel.” She’s hiked the Canadian Rockies, Patagonia, and Picos de Europa in Spain. Last summer

she biked across New York from Niagara to Saratoga. She likes a long day of vigorous outdoor exercise followed by a good meal and a comfortable bed in a nice hotel. She’s not bejeweled; she doesn’t drive a massive S.U.V.

“Whose voice is in your head that is wise?”

“At this stage, my own voice, and it is very low drama. But it all comes from my mother and father. We’re all dealt something, and for me it was losing my business. I wouldn’t be who I am today, and there would be no Tate’s without what happened to Kathleen’s.”

She retired at the age of 55 to enjoy adventures with her husband, Zvi Friedman, and son, Justin, but she’s still a hometown girl. Her business manager told her she should write more cookbooks and have a TV show.

“No, no, no,” she says. “I never wanted to be famous, I wanted my cookies to be famous. And they are.”

King emailed me a few days ago to tell me the new cookie will be named “Cayenne Chocolate.”

Long live the King!

OCTOBER 6-10, 2016 Founders (all-access) passes discounted through Labor Day JOHN ALEXANDER, Ship of Fools, 2006 - 7, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the James F. Dicke Family

A Place of Our Own Sag Harbor’s African-American beachfront communities share a rich history, dating back nearly 200 years to the dawn of the whaling era. Now, their unassuming homes are being razed and replaced by a developer and his wealthy client, one of New York’s biggest investment managers. As the pace of change quickens, long-time residents fear their sanctuary is in danger of losing its soul.

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hey lie just south of Sag Harbor Village, on the bay side

of Route 114, leafy neighborhoods marked by small street signs: Eastville, Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills, Chatfield’s Hill, and Ninevah. For decades, Sag Harbor’s historic AfricanAmerican districts have constituted a quiet world apart.

Now that world is at risk.

Most of the houses down those shady streets are the originals — modest in size and appearance, some in need of sprucing up. Taken together, the neighborhoods look less like summer colonies than bucolic family camps, which is what they’ve been: getaways where generations could mingle, safe from bias on one of the few blackowned resort beachfronts in America.

In recent years, some homes have been sold to white owners, as many as 30 percent, to go by neighbors’ guesstimates. Still, for the most part, a sense of black community has remained, the white owners welcomed with street-side chats and invitations to barbecues and fish fries. Which is why the news of last winter hit so hard, and reverberates still.

At a routine meeting of Sag Harbor’s Historic Preservation and Architectural Review Board, Peter Cook, a well-known East End architect, unveiled preliminary plans for a roughly 6,500-square-foot house in Sag Harbor Hills, steps from the beach on three newly purchased contiguous lots. The owner chose to remain private, Cook said. Plans were to be filed by the L.L.C. that had bought the lots, “Mile High Partners.” Was the timing by chance, with most houses empty, the residents away in New York, or Florida, or the Bahamas?

A little sleuthing by The Sag Harbor Express revealed the owner to be one Robert Kapito, 58, co-founder and president of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, with $4.6 trillion in assets under management. Kapito’s annual pay is about $20 million; records show that he has earned about $250 million from BlackRock in all.

Kapito’s skin color — he is white — is not the cause of alarm among his prospective neighbors. Nor, they say, is his religion. (He is Jewish).

“This has nothing to do with religion or race,” declares Bill Pickens III, 79, a retired corporate executive and the unofficial historian of the enclaves. “It has to do with place.”

By that, Pickens means not just the impact Kapito’s house will have, if approved. He means also the other houses bought up discreetly in recent months by L.L.C.s connected to Kapito’s local business partner, lawyer Bruce Bronster. Neighbors have thrown around all sorts of numbers for how many. A spokesman for Kapito puts it at “under 10,” but that’s just the investment properties. When added to the properties purchased by Kapito and Bronster for their own

chelsea audibert

By Michael Shnayerson

pickens family photo

Anna C. Hawley, left, Bill Pickens’s ‘Aunt Nan,’ with unidentified friend, 1918, in what is now Sag Harbor Hills.

• september 2016

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use, the total is 12.

These quiet purchases raise a troubling question. Why is one of America’s richest money managers buying all these old houses in these historic black communities?

t a minimum, Kapito’s arrival seems sure to bring, as Pickens puts it, a new dynamic to the summer place he’s loved since childhood, when he came “in lieu of camp.”

Pickens’s Aunt Nan came as early as 1908, though only one of the districts, Eastville, existed at that time, a legacy of Sag Harbor’s whaling days. Free blacks in the early and mid-19th century came to the village to do the hardest jobs on long-haul whaling trips, working alongside laboringclass whites as well as Montauketts and Shinnecocks. (Not by chance is Melville’s Queequeg an Indian.) Eastville was originally the shantytown where black whalers lived between trips, along with their Na-

pickens family photo

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tive American shipmates, with whom they were buried together, and with whom they lie still, in the Eastville cemetery.

Aunt Nan, an English teacher at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, was one of the newly prosperous blacks renting the houses of those whalers’ descendants.

The new arrivals were doctors, lawyers, undertakers or, in the case of Pickens’s grandfather, a Yale-educated, nationally known orator and classics professor. But Eastville had no beachfront of its own, and African Americans weren’t always welcome at Havens, the village beach that lay between Eastville and Gardiner’s Bay.

That was the story with almost every stretch of beach in the United States, with two exceptions. Maryland’s Highland Beach had been bought up by a black developer and subdivided; so had South Carolina’s Atlantic Beach, proudly called the Black Pearl.

(Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard, is regarded as a third, but in fact was settled by white

Pickens’s father-in-law James H. Brannen, circa 1968, who served as a Sag Harbor Village trustee, in front of his boat on the beach at Ninevah 62

• september 2016

Methodists; it has drawn a consistent but small number of black visitors for decades.)

In 1947, two sisters, Maude Terry and Amaza Lee Meredith, decided to grace Sag Harbor with a sanctuary of its own.

The sisters bought land just past Eastville, land that included its own stretch of beach. They cut the property into 120 lots.

Beachfront lots went for $1,000, inland lots for $700 and up. So quickly did those lots sell that two more beachfront developments, Sag Harbor Hills and Ninevah, followed, totaling 480 lots in all. The founders’ names live on, with Terry Drive and Meredith Street. There’s a Pickens Place, too.

That was the start of a golden era.

“This was what I’d been dreaming of, as a boy in Bedford-Stuyvesant,” recalls marketing entrepreneur Dan Gasby, the husband of B. Smith, the actress, model, and former restaurateur, “only I couldn’t have dreamed it. A place where you could socialize with other black families and let your kids roam free? It was heaven on earth.”

The houses were humble, but that was the point: community, not competition. On any summer weekend, Count Basie might be seen strolling the lanes with Duke Ellington or Harry Belafonte, along with the actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. The Pickens’s first guest, at their new house in 1972, was the torch singer Lena Horne. Pickens’s son John has blurry footage on his laptop of Langston Hughes, the great poet, lighting his cigarette by a campfire in the dark, about to read a poem to Bill Pickens’s mother.

Modest as the houses were, dozens of prominent professionals summered on that crescent of white sand. The late Ron Brown, secretary of commerce under President Clinton, spent childhood summers here, as did his future wife, Alma; they lived for decades in a beachfront house. Edward R. Dudley Jr. was a New York Supreme Court judge. Roscoe C. Brown, legendary pilot in the Tuskegee Airmen, who shot up and derailed a supply train en route to German troops, was a longtime summer-house owner who died at 94 on July 2.

The ’70s and ’80s brought more distinguished figures. Ken Chenault, CEO and chairman of American Express, was here for

years with his family until security concerns induced him to move. Luther Clark, a Harvard-educated lawyer, works for a big pharmaceutical company; Dr. Al Cuyjet is a cardiologist, his wife a dentist; Ralph Dawson is a Yale-educated lawyer whose roommate was Howard Dean. The young novelist Colson Whitehead, author of the 2009 novel, Sag Harbor, among other books, lives here.

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or a generation or two, the houses stayed in “carry-on” families, which was to say black. One by one, though, grown children moved away, no longer feeling the need to “self-segregate.”

A few houses, with absentee owners, grew shabby. Others sagged as childless widows died. Some streets seemed almost frozen in another time.

A mile away, the rest of Sag Harbor went through a long fallow period, too, with many of the beautiful little clapboard or shingle houses clad in vinyl siding and weeds where roses once had bloomed.

But then — a good few decades after the rest of the South Fork had become “the Hamptons” — came Sag Harbor’s boom time. Mercifully north of the gridlocked highway, the storybook village with water

“The question for our new neighbors is: will you live here and participate?

Will you let us in and come meet us?” on nearly all sides was suddenly the jewel in the crown. Real estate prices skyrocketed, with water views rising far, far faster.

Inevitably, a few of the water-seekers began nosing around those sleepy old black communities, where one of the area’s finest white-sand beaches lay waiting. A few of the curious, no doubt, caught their first glimpses of that beach from the decks of their super yachts, moored offshore for the hot new Sag Harbor season. Like New World explorers, they scanned the beach with an acquisitive eye.

Residents of the black communities felt the encroachment gradually at first, then more so. Houses their parents had built for a song now sold for $1 million — or more.

The new record for a property is $4 million.

Those were the three contiguous lots bought

by Robert Kapito for his new home.

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apito is nothing if not a shrewd investor. He hasn’t purchased a beachfront property. None of those were for sale. But while his own is set back from the water, no house lies between it and the beach, so he’ll have water views. Three lots give him more square footage to build on.

Then there’s his fourth lot, catty-corner to one of the others, with a connecting path.

Peter Cook, Kapito’s architect, makes the case that all four lots add up to one package, even if the fourth shares only a kissing corner with one of the others. If so, it’s a package big enough, under Sag Harbor’s new code, to allow a house larger than the village’s limit of 4,000 square feet — a house of up to 6,565 square feet.

As Tom Preiato, Sag Harbor’s building inspector, explains, the village could declare that Kapito’s dangling fourth lot can’t be merged with the others. That would block the 6,565-square-foot house. But as Peter Cook argues, Kapito could instead build two somewhat smaller houses, one on that clump of three lots, one on the dangling fourth. At 4,780 square feet and 3,812 square feet respectively, each would still be bigger than any other house in the neighborhood. Together, in close proximity, they • september 2016

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tara israel

Bill Pickens, summer 2016

durell godfrey

Dr. Oliver Holder, bottom left, 103 years old, with his wife, Juanita, seated, with friends Audrey Gaul and her son Gordon, speaking to Mary Ellen Arrington, in turquoise, at the Eastville Historical Society fish fry in July. would add 8,592 square feet of residence to the immediate neighborhood.

Cook’s plans for the 6,565-squarefoot house call for seven bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, a detached gym and garage, a swimming pool and pool house, and a wraparound porch and second-floor balcony, the better to enjoy the view.

“From the renderings, it’s a beautiful house,” says Beverly Granger, a dentist who’s lived in Sag Harbor Hills for 65 years. “It’s just out of place in this community. This has always been a community of neighbors and friendships and smaller homes, and people in and out of each other people’s homes. My fear is that we’re losing the character of what made these communities magical and special.”

Kapito’s house size isn’t his neighbors’ only concern about his property. So is beachfront access. Back when Sag Harbor Hills was drawn up, a parking lot and public path were put in to accommodate all the owners whose houses weren’t on the beach. Those lucky enough to have beachfront lots owned their strips of sand right up to the mean high water mark. The rest of the families owned access to the communal beach in front of the parking lot — about 140 feet across.

64

• september 2016

Only things didn’t work out as planned.

One winter years ago — Pickens thinks the middle 960s — the owner of the house next to the parking lot claimed that chunk of land for himself. When the residents came back for the summer, they found a lawn where the parking lot had been, and a fence around it. The owner, Dr. Jonathan “Buddy” Gibbs, had kindly let eight spaces of parking lot remain to one side, for 80 families, with a new little path punched through the woods for them to get to the beach. The original path he kept for himself, set off by a gate.

No one challenged him, for Dr. Gibbs was a venerated figure who treated most of the neighborhood residents.

All this happened on Lot 38, the largest of the Sag Harbor Hills lots Kapito would buy years later. With Kapito’s house plans unfurled, neighbors remembered old grievances and nursed dire scenarios. Would Kapito keep and use Dr. Gibbs’s gate and private path to the beach, through the communally owned underbrush? Worse — much worse — might he claim the communal beach as his own?

Kapito has issued a statement to EAST that should ease those concerns.

“Sag Harbor Hills is a historic community that I have great respect for,” Kapito relayed through a spokesman. “I bought a property here because I want to build a vacation home for my family. I intend to comply with all building and planning codes and have no intention of asserting any claim to the beach in front of our property, which I do not own.”

Nor, Kapito says, will he use Dr. Gibbs’s gate and path. He will, instead, use the nearby parking lot path to the communal beach that everyone else uses. He says he is “committed to ensuring residents can continue to access the beach the same way they always have. I look forward to enjoying the beach with them.”

apito’s neighbors still hope he’ll scale down his house plans: Four thousand square feet would be nice.

“My house is 3,000 feet, it’s one of the largest houses here,” Pickens said. “Six thousand feet is a lot larger! It will cast a shadow, and when will you see the sun again?”

Anthony Brandt, chairman of the Sag Harbor Historic Preservation and Architectural Review Board, has only seen those preliminary plans for Kapito’s family residence, so he’s reserving judgment.

But he does wonder why Kapito is building a house this big in Sag Harbor Hills. “He could have had land anywhere, he’s rich enough to buy in Sagaponack. It doesn’t make any sense.”

As great a worry at this point are the other properties purchased by Kapito, as a passive investor, with real-estate lawyer Bruce Bronster, all through L.L.C.s. On those, Kapito is somewhat less reassuring.

“Regarding other properties in the area,” Kapito declared, “I am a passive investor with a local developer but am otherwise not involved with those properties.”

Some of the houses on those lots are in disrepair, even ruinously so. Tom Preiato, the building inspector, ticks off a few. “74 Hillside Drive East — that’s a Bronster project. It was an abandoned foundation that sat around forever, 11 Cadmus — that was a blight house in disrepair.” Another, at 10 Lincoln, wasn’t in much better shape. “I heard

K

O

Shelter Island Sound, 1917 Aunt Nan on left

pickens family photo

they paid the African-American owner $1 million and he was thrilled to take it.”

Still, if Kapito is merely intending to live with his family at numbers 116, 110 and 106 Hillside Drive East (along with the catty-corner lot at 55 Lincoln), why all the teardowns and fix-ups?

Jeff Bragman, a lawyer representing two of the concerned neighbors, Eglon and Renée Simons, is convinced that Kapito wants to flip the whole neighborhood, house by house.

“It’s similar to applications we’ve seen from Joe Farrell,” says Bragman, referring to the most prominent mansion developer in the Hamptons. “There is a damaging effect from demolishing existing homes and in-filling lots with oversized houses.

It encourages neighbors to sell out, and changes an intimate community into a haven for the super rich.”

Bronster says there’s no master plan.

“I have been a summer resident of Sag Harbor since 1991 and maintain a residence in the village,” he relays by email. “I will be moving to Ninevah because I love the area, the beach, the rich history of the communities and the people, who have overwhelmingly warmly welcomed me, my wife, and my two young daughters.”

Still, why all the other houses? By his own admission, Bronster has acquired nine investment properties in addition to the one he’ll live on with his family. “Of the nine, I plan on renting seven,” Bronster writes. “Two will be put up for sale.

I have no specific plans to acquire any additional properties unless they make sense economically.”

Is it too much to suggest that a neighborhood hangs in the balance of that word “unless?”

ut on Route 114, across from Eastville, Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills, and Ninevah, lies the fifth of the historically black districts, Chatfield’s Hill, where lots were sold to black families by a white developer in the 1920s. Without beachfront access, it’s always been the poor relation of the family, though as Bill Pickens points out, it’s where ex-Secretary

of State Colin Powell hung out as a kid.

Recently, a development company called Villadom Custom Homes bought up a wide swath of dense woods on Chatfield’s Hill, razed an old farmhouse on it, and erected six nearly identical, much larger new homes, at $1,645 million each, with gunite pools and Belgian-block driveways. So far, the houses look jarring and raw, bereft of almost any landscaping, denuding the community spirit that Chatfield’s Hill once had.

Is this the fate awaiting the waterfront black communities? Andrew Bedini, a white Sag Harbor resident who married into a black family in Ninevah and owns Java Nation in Bridgehampton with his wife, Cheryl, feels they’ve reached the tipping point already. The old folks kept their trees for shade and cool. New neighbors, he says, have clear-cut their properties and put in HVAC systems that whirr all day and night.

The old folks had no pools: What was the point, with the bay at their feet?

Now, Bedini counts seven, not including Kapito’s planned pool and those for the other houses he and his lawyer have bought. From their poolside speakers, the new neighbors blast rock; the old folks played jazz, Bedini recalls, soft and scratchy, its gentle riffs drifting into the summer night.

Bill Pickens is more upbeat than that.

It’s not paradise lost, he says, just a paradise that needs preserving. “This is where freedom was found — freedom for us,” he says. “And we cherish this place; it’s unique in the annals of American history.

“We want newcomers to share the elan, not just come in and build a house and flip it, and not care who buys the property,” Pickens adds. “The question for our new neighbors is: will you live here and participate? Will you let us in, and come meet us? Borrow some sugar?”

And then, with a grin and his penchant for rhymes, he puts it even more succinctly.

“Don’t annoy us,” he says. “Enjoy us!”

• september 2016

65

Lunch Under the Cherry Tree It’s a cherished family ritual that harkens back to calmer summer days gone by: the casual but delectable feasts for 10 to 20 cooked up by Tom Scheerer, the renowned interior designer.

By Laura Donnelly Photos by Homer Parkes

S

unday lunch at the Scheerer

house on the beach in East Hampton might appear as casually thrown together as the guest list, but the meal is meticulously prepared from scratch by Tom Scheerer (Tommy to friends and family). Never fancy, but always delicious; there could be 10 for lunch or 20, it doesn’t matter. Tom is prepared and unperturbed.

Tom Scheerer isn’t a chef. He is one of America’s top decorators. He’s worked on notable houses and clubs around the world — he recently completed a re-do of portions of the Maidstone Club and the Lyford Cay Club, among other projects. His work is frequently in design magazines, and a coffeetable book, Tom Scheerer Decorates, was published in 2013 by Vendome Press.

Scheerer calls some of his work “cheap and cheerful” but that does a disservice to its deep chic. He is fond of natural materials and thinks nothing of combining a piece from Ikea with a Thonet bentwood masterpiece. If he likes a discontinued wallpaper he has it re-created. He will design a piece of furniture if he can’t find something that’s just right. And, boy, can he cook!

To say the neighborhood around Georgica Beach surrounding the Scheerers has changed since the family moved in in 1945 would be an understatement. Many nearby houses have been torn down and replaced, driveways have sprouted security gates, and there are now massive cement barriers with iron chains to keep people off the uber-green, dandelion-free sod.

These estates have titles. Security cameras abound. In contrast, the Scheerer hedges are a bit shaggy, and the driveway is open and long — in fact, many friends just avail themselves of the parking and head to the beach. It’s casual and welcoming.

This summer home on the beach is reminiscent of how they used to be: doors and windows left open, no air-conditioning, a big metal farm pail by the door to rinse the sand from your feet. It is bigger than some, but not as big as most nearby. Upon entering, you walk smack into a Ping-Pong table ready for action. To the left is a cozy, book-lined den, better suited for the colder months. To the right is a dazzlingly white 68

• september 2016

dining room with blue accents. Scheerer’s artist sister, Jane, has done painted-driftwood assemblages that hang over the mantle. The dining table is huge, as it must be to accommodate the hungry hordes when they are unable to dine outside.

It is difficult to tell if the house has influenced Scheerer’s taste or if his taste has influenced the house. One thing that has remained constant for years is the striking, pink-coral-painted staircase and a sprightly geranium wallpaper leading to the upstairs.

There are some detectable Tom Scheerer touches, though. Note a tiny alcove, the “hat room,” leading to a powder room, painted one of his signature colors, Benjamin Moore’s Clinton Brown, and the collection of grab-and-go straw hats hanging on hooks.

Interestingly, the place where everyone usually gathers is a minuscule porch off the kitchen. In another era it was the “maids’ porch.” The family squeezes in to this little porch for its best and strongest ocean breezes. Nearby, a vegetable garden is modest, planted and tended by the household.

This is not “shabby chic.” It is quite orderly, but still casual and comfortable.

Tom Scheerer makes what he calls “a standard lunch” or “the same old lunch.”

It’s a variety of dishes on rotation. It could be little Iacono Farm chickens, marinated and fresh off the grill, with a salad, a lentil

dish with sausage, vitello tonnato (which he often varies by using either leftover pork or slices of turkey breast in lieu of the classic veal), spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce, or homemade pizza which he makes with lavash bread and a topping more similar to a French pissaladière, full of spice and anchovies.

Sometimes leftovers from Saturday night’s dinner are used. When he makes David Chang’s signature pork shoulder coated with sugar and salt then slowly roasted, he’ll incorporate the remaining bits and bobs into a Vietnamese fried rice the next day.

“The food combinations are important,” he says. “Most people don’t get that.

For instance, I would never combine Thai with Mexican. Also, the ‘smorgasbord’ style lunch is too much out here. Sometimes you go to someone’s house and all they do is open a bunch of containers: quinoa salad, snap peas with sesame seeds, kale salad, tomatoes and mozzarella, sliced beets.”

Scheerer is not a food snob, he’s simply firm in his convictions. His meals are almost always one dish with a salad. Guests are never, ever allowed to bring anything except cookies. “I’m not much of a dessert person.”

The Scheerer family bought the house from Ring Lardner, the writer, in 1945, and Tommy Scheerer was drawn to the kitchen at an early age, probably around 7 years old. He began by cooking breakfast for his three sisters while his parents enjoyed the rare luxury of sleeping in. Nowadays, his siblings and nieces and nephews and various significant others are allowed to do a little bit of the shopping or pick some vegetables and herbs from their garden, but the kitchen is his domain.

Like all truly good cooks, he cleans up as he goes, using the cracked marbletopped table in the center as extra counter space, disposing of fresh scraps in a compost bin by the sink. “Table to farm, as we call it,” he says, laughing.

On this particular day he is making a warm lentil salad on a bed of arugula surrounded by sliced tomatoes and hardboiled eggs. Grilled kielbasa slices go on top along with plenty of fresh herbs. This

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is accompanied by a brilliant invention he calls “roasted toast,” slices of bread slathered with a spicy-garlicky slurry and baked until crisp but still chewy.

Melon Fantasia is the simple and light dessert: thin slices of honeydew, cantaloupe, and watermelon laid out in a flower petal pattern and topped with lime slices and a few grinds of black pepper.

A favorite drink to go along with this summer lunch is a few pitted cherries and a peeled peach tossed in a pitcher and put in the freezer for an hour or so. At serving time, a bottle of Prosecco is poured into the pitcher, and the fruit serves as both ice cubes and delicious flavoring.

The three family dogs, all mutts, are circling the grill and sniffing at the kielbasa. As it is a pretty day, a picnic table under a cherry tree outside the kitchen door has been covered with a faded Indian bedspread and set with flowered plates.

Little juice glasses are filled with the fruity Prosecco. About twelve members of the family and a few friends wander up from the beach and tuck in.

The family laughs about one frequent guest who always shows up around the right time and feigns surprise: “Oh! You’re just about to eat? You’re just sitting down now?” She is beloved and always invited to join.

There is quiet murmuring while they eat. When asked what are some of their favorite “Tommy lunches,” they become animated. “Any salad where he mixes everything up!” pipes up a nephew.

“The lavash pizza!”

“Watermelon and feta!”

Last weekend’s pasta had been inspired by a River Cafe recipe, fresh Ligurian pasta with pesto, green beans, and peas.

This is a family that gets along, that enjoys each other’s company immensely. They are calm and nice, smart and funny, and all impossibly good-looking, with the piercing blue eyes of their matriarch, Idoline, a.k.a. Gogs or Gaga.

Every one of them appreciates the outdoor life and each other. They float through the house and the landscape, coming together and separating, gathering to play a game or ride bikes or take a dip in the ocean.

There is a quote from Tom Scheerer Decorates regarding his philosophy: “In the end, it’s all about being able to balance symmetry and asymmetry, deliberation and improvisation, harmony and dissonance. This is the nature of art and craft.”

I’d say it’s also the nature and balance of perfectly assembled yet casual meals, family gatherings, and life at the Scheerers. Idoline Scheerer, who her son says is the core of the family, sent me a note after the lunch: “All I can say is that I am the luckiest person in town. I have a big family that loves the ocean and good food. And we are lucky enough to be able to continue what has been going on here since 1945 when the Lardner family handed it over to the Scheerers.”

This is the nature of love.

Tom Scheerer’s Roasted Toast On this occasion he used a loaf of sourdough whole wheat bread from Bread Alone, and cut 24 pieces from the loaf. It was enough to feed 12.

Preheat oven to 350 1 loaf Bread Alone brand bread, each slice cut in half

(you can also use baguettes or any other bread) 1 stick butter, softened 1/4-1/2 cup olive oil 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese Salt and pepper 1 clove garlic, minced Chili pepper flakes to taste Approximately 1/4 cup minced fresh herbs (chives and

rosemary were used for this lunch, dried herbs

are acceptable to Tommy as long as you add

fresh parsley.)

Combine butter, oil, cheese, and rest of ingredients to make a sludge. Spread this on each slice of bread then layer them like roof tiles on a baking sheet or large casserole dish. Bake at 350 for 20 to 30 minutes, until lightly golden, crisp on the edges but still chewy.

Warm Lentil Salad with Sausage

Serves 12

2 packages kielbasa, cut into chunks and cooked in a

frying pan or on a grill.

2 lbs. French lentils cooked as directed with the following aromatics:

1 1/2 cups chopped onion

3 cloves garlic, chopped

3/4 cup each celery and carrots

1 bunch fresh thyme Fresh herbs for garnish, such as scallions and

parsley, chives, and enough arugula to layer

on two large platters

2 pints cherry tomatoes, sliced

12 eggs, hardboiled

Arrange arugula on two large platters, line edges with tomato slices and quartered eggs. Divide lentils between the two platters. Top with grilled/fried kielbasa slices and garnish with lots of fresh herbs. Serve.

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Peter Correale, yellowfin East Coast Canyons, 2015 Photo by Trevor Bacon

Going Deep Photos by Peter Correale Watching a surfcaster pull in a striper

from the shore or seeing a plover dive for bait a few yards from the sand, it’s easy to believe the ocean is crawling with life. That’s because the ocean comes alive around structure — the shoreline, reefs, wrecks, buoys, and other interruptions to the deep, dark water and the rolling underwater hills of the sea floor.

Much of the big, blue ocean is a dark, watery desert. Sizable life is few and far between, and finding big fish is challenging.

With modern fish-finding technology and super-fast boats, catching a trophy marlin, tuna, or mahi mahi is difficult, but it can be done.

And yet Peter Correale thought catching a fish out there with a rod and reel was too easy. Instead, he wanted to hold his breath, dive way down, come face to face with a 200-pound pelagic beast, and shoot it with a sling-powered spear. He’s among a small group that’s figured out a way.

Until a few years ago, nobody was spearing pelagic (that is to say, deep-ocean) fish in the Atlantic off Montauk. But persistence has paid off.

Searching around little-known man-made structures in the ocean three hours from the dock, Correale and his friends have confounded other anglers by spearing 100 to 200-pound fish.

Originally from New Canaan, Connecticut, and now splitting his time between Panama and Montauk, Correale, 32, has been a waterman since childhood. “My father got me into it: surfing, sailing, fishing,” he said recently. “It went from there and it became an obsession.” That obsession has grown into a business based in Panama, where he is one of a handful of spearfishing guides who take clients deep into the water, and around the world, to hunt and photograph fish.

Correale grew up inshore spearfishing for smaller species like striped bass and sea bass, and he still spends a few days a week diving around the Montauk Lighthouse. But, when the weather is right, he and his friends load up their 32-foot boat, Dog Tooth, and head to their secret spots to hunt deep under the surface. For his dives he descends up to 130 feet, holding his breath for up to two minutes.

Photography was a natural progression of this obsession. He and his friends wanted to document what they were doing and seeing. The following images are all from the waters in and around Montauk. But, exactly where, he’ll never tell.

— Levi Shaw-Faber

Loic Gouzer taking a ride on a giant mola mola East Coast Canyons, 2015

Chris Miller, primitive hunting with a pole spear Montauk Rips, 2015

Chris Miller, hauling a big yellowfin tuna onto the deck of his boat Sea Spearit East Coast Canyons, 2015

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halcyon days

>

Catch & Release Susanne Schad-Somers’s old farmhouse in Amagansett used to be.

The house, with its red door, red window shutters, red doormat, red rugs and chairs and roses and screaming-red rhododendrons, was torn down just last month, but its long-deceased owner, a psychotherapist with a medical degree from Columbia University and an adoring international clientele, remains nearby — in spirit, anyway.

Credit Stuart Vorpahl, top — bayman and dyed-in-the-wool-Bonacker, onetime East Hampton Town historian, and tireless defender of commercial fishermen’s rights — for that. He, too, is dead now, but he made sure, not long before Dr. Schad-Somers, bottom, succumbed to cancer in 1999, that she would be buried where she longed to be, a short walk from her house on Atlantic Avenue, in the East End Cemetery at the north end of the street, where local names are many and empty plots almost entirely spoken for.

Cars hurrying to the popular ocean beach at the other end of Atlantic pass the small graveyard without a backward glance, but bicyclists and pedestrians sometimes stop to study the inscriptions on the centuries-old tombstones of Schellingers, Hands, Edwardses, and other Amagansett families grouped together beneath tall cedar trees. Dr. Schad-Somers’s stone is easily found, not only because it stands apart from the others, shaded by a compact Japanese maple — her signature red, of course — but also for its singular inscription, no faded carving, but a bronze plaque that even after almost 20 years still looks new.

“Every year, Stuart made sure we got 78

• september 2016

a wreath for it at Christmas,” Vorpahl’s wife, Mary, recalled recently. “And Stuart said, ‘It has to have a red bow.’ ” The bayman from Bonac and the shrink from Manhattan, who first crossed paths at a mutual friend’s house, were the unlikeliest of fishing buddies. Dr. SchadSomers, a native of Germany who grew up spending summers on an island in the Baltic Sea, always took July and August off from her busy practice.

“Sometimes I’d go in through the back door at 5 a.m. ‘Come on, Susanne, let’s go!’ “ Vorpahl said in an interview not

long after her death. “She was a perfect crew person.”

Their first time out, he said, they went hand-lining for porgies off Northwest Harbor and caught “about 150 pounds on the ebb tide. She was in seventh heaven.”

On the water, they talked about anything and everything — national and local politics, the weather, where the fish were or weren’t biting, East Hampton history, mushrooms. The psychiatrist seemed to know a lot about mushrooms, though for more than a year the bayman didn’t know why and never asked. He did almost all of the talking; she listened. In fact, he had no idea what she even did for a living, and it didn’t occur to him to wonder until their second fishing season.

“I asked her one day, ‘How do you get your lunch money?’ ”

Once Dr. Schad-Somers began talking, it seemed she couldn’t stop. As a child during World War II, she told him, she fled the bombs over Berlin with her family to the relative safety of their vacation island, where they foraged in the woods for whatever food they could find. They ate a lot of mushrooms.

“She never talked much to him for a long time,” Mary Vorpahl said. “But then she opened up, about Germany, how they ate rotten carrots and potatoes, cramped in this hideaway place.”

The analyst, who came to America in the late ’60s, specialized for much of her career in aspects of sadomasochism and wrote several books on the subject. She talked to the bayman about that, too, knowing that what she told him would go no further.

“She used to say Stuart was her thera-

regina cherry

T

here’s a big hole now where

Russelll drumm

A story about Stuart and Susanne — a legendary bayman from Bonac and a shrink from Berlin who forged a rare friendship, a bond of mutual respect that lasts even after their deaths. By Irene Silverman

durell godfrey

pist,” Mary Vorpahl said. “She could get rid of all her anxieties, like if she’d had a bad week with her patients.”

In December 1992, Stuart Vorpahl was hauling his boat for the winter when he felt pain on his left side. “Susanne got word of it through my bride,” he said.

“She went on a scout from here to Chicago to find a heart surgeon.”

She got him in, fast, to N.Y.U.-Bellevue, where, he said, a doctor told him, “You are about ready to drop dead.” Emergency open-heart surgery saved his life.

There was no more trap-fishing after that, but the excursions continued. At Gin Beach once, at the Montauk breakwater, the two wandered into the middle of a bluefish broadside and caught 1,200 pounds in a single morning.

“All she had to do was put a diamond jig in the water,” Stuart recalled. “We’d just yank them aboard. I said, ‘Susanne, don’t even unhook them.’ Blood and guts and glory all over! She was some happy that day.”

Seven years later, in the spring of 1999, Dr. Schad-Somers called the Vorpahls from her house on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. “She says, ‘Stuart, can you get me

a handicapped parking sticker?’ ”

“ ‘ Who for?’

‘Me.’

‘What?’

‘I have cancer in both lungs. I have 4 to 10 months left.’ “

The Vorpahls visited her in the hospital soon after. Her time was running out, she told her friend the bayman, and she wanted to be buried in the cemetery near her house that she walked past so often.

“I said, ‘Susanne, that cemetery’s been closed for years.’ ”

“ ‘I don’t care. You do it.’ ”

Most of the larger cemeteries in East Hampton, other than the town-owned Fort Hill in Montauk, are run by boards of trustees, but Vorpahl hit a stone wall when he went looking for the trustees of the East End Cemetery. No one — not the town clerk’s office, not old maps, not records at the East Hampton Library — could help, until one day, a Town Hall secretary remembered an elderly man lugging in a box of bank statements five or six years before. Something to do with the cemetery in Amagansett, she thought.

The box was found in the basement.

Going through the papers, Vorpahl dis-

covered that the old man, the cemetery’s only surviving trustee, had deeded it over to the town.

Three weeks before she died, Dr. Schad-Somers received a letter offering to sell her one of the very few available plots in the East End Cemetery for $750, the going rate at the time at Fort Hill.

The red Japanese maple came from her backyard. Vorpahl and four other men dug it up and pushed it down the street in a wheelbarrow. He wrote what she’d told him to on her tombstone:

Dr. Susanne P. Schad-Somers January 17, 1939–July 29, 1999 A native of Berlin, Germany, who came to love Amagansett with its ocean, the beaches, the wild mushrooms, and commercial fish ing with Stuart B. Vorpahl Jr.

“She wanted it known she fished with me,” he said.

“Stuart loved to tell people, ‘Go down Atlantic Avenue and read Susanne’s marker,’ ” Mary Vorpahl said. “He was so happy he could do that for her. And she was so happy to know she was coming back here.’ ” • september 2016

79

>

michael halsband

bookish

Fields of Dreams

career of evil

Katie Baldwin and Amanda Merrow started Amber Waves Farm together in 2009 to grow organic, beautiful food, but their favorite crop is new farmers and “inspired, conscientious eaters.”

W

ith backgrounds in economics and environmental studies (Amanda) and international relations (Katie), they were unlikely farmers when they turned up for a farmer apprenticeship at Quail Hill in Amagansett more than a decade ago. But, emboldened by an instant friendship and just enough knowledge, they found a fallow field and scratched together $5,000 to launch what’s now a thriving farm enterprise and a community hub at the east end of Main Street in Amagansett.

In seven seasons, Amber Waves, a nonprofit, has increased its vegetable production from a single acre to eight acres, building a Community Supported Agriculture program that has grown from 18 original members to 150. The farm has returned wheat cultivation to the South Fork and branched out into other grains. The farm’s apprentice program has trained 14 aspiring farmers, all of whom are actively working in food and agriculture.

Says Merrow: “Everything that comes from the farm (from an heirloom tomato to a newly trained apprentice) is aligned with our fundamental spirit that embraces beauty, quality, sustainability, and creativity.”

Hail to that.

They are smart, driven, and informed. And here’s what they’re reading right now.

80

• september 2016

Katie Baldwin Seedtime, scott chaskey

Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds

by Scott Chaskey Scott’s first book, This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm, changed my life. It was a pivotal read at the right moment that inspired me to leave my city job, apprentice with him at Quail Hill Farm, and then go on to start Amber Waves. Seedtime equally inspires me now as fulltime organic farmer. It can be difficult to read about agriculture during the summer when we’re spending 90 hours a week at the farm, but my go-to for inspiration and motivation is

Seedtime. My favorite thing about Scott’s books is that his wise, lyrical voice comes right through the page as if you’re listening to him on tape. The perfect balance of poetry and thorough study of one of the most important topics of our time, Seedtime addresses the state and future of agriculture for farmers and eaters alike. The book is beautifully illustrated by his son, Liam.

On Fire: 100 Recipes by Francis Mallmann I’ve always liked cooking on an open fire. I love the way it looks, smells, and tastes. Some of my fondest childhood memories are backyard cookouts. My association with this kind of cooking was rooted in Texas barbecue, as I spent my formative years growing up in the hill country outside of San Antonio. Then I went to Uruguay. Game changer.

If I wasn’t a farmer I’m pretty sure I’d be working with Francis Mallmann. I think you make instant friendships only a couple of times in your life. With Paula Segura Mallmann, we fell into a friendship — fast! She is an amazing chef (she is Francis Mallmann’s niece and grew up working with him) and now an organic farmer at her own organic farm in Uruguay. We have opposite farming seasons, so we are blessed to travel to see each other in our off-seasons. On a recent trip, Paula and her partner, Emiliano Cordeiro, took us to an unforgettable lunch at Mallmann’s restaurant, Garzon. Whoa! I scooped up On Fire upon my return to Amagansett. I keep a copy on my kitchen counter as a primary tool for both recipe and aesthetic inspiration.

On Fire, by Francis Mallmann

back to basics, ina garten

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, by Wendell Berry The Third Plate, by Dan Barber

The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber “Let’s get a coffee and talk about grains,” Dan Barber said to me after a delicious meal at his Blue Hill restaurant in the West Village. Well, that’s cool, I thought. Then I read The Third Plate. While the book is a monumental work and must-read, it is the dialogue surrounding wheat that really captivated me. Our own farm’s Amagansett Wheat Project has been focused on the reintroduction of wheat as a staple of the East End food-shed. In a gluten-free, trendy food moment, this is the right time to talk about wheat in a new way — the small-scale farmers who grow it, the modern and heritage varieties, the flavor and terroir, and the crop’s story and future. Dan Barber has reinforced for me that our dream of having a pizza farm is a timely, delicious reality.”

Barber gives a fresh take on how farmers, chefs, and eaters are collaborating to create a more sustainable way of eating and has reinforced for me that our dream of having a pizza farm is a timely, delicious reality.

The Third Plate, by Dan Barber

Amanda Merrow Twelve Recipes Cal Peternell

12 Recipes by Cal Peternell I generally read cookbooks for inspiration, cooking methods, and styling ideas, rather than to specifically find recipes. I love a cookbook I can read in bed, so 12 Recipes is perfect for me (and I did in fact read it in bed). Peternell’s approach in this book is accessible to anyone, since his voice is of a seasoned la huella la huella chef but his audience is his college-bound son, who, while surrounded by exquisite food throughout his childhood, is just learning to cook for himself before leaving home. His narrative flows between his modern-day kitchen and tales of his time at Chez Panisse with Alice Waters. Along the way he passes on invaluable pieces of advice, professional methods, and lovely vignettes. As an extreme lover of toast I also appreciate his focus on this basic (and maybe my favorite) food.

Twelve Recipes Cal Peternell

Small Victories

Small Victories Recipes, Advice & Hundreds of Ideas for Home Cooking Triumphs

by Julia Turshen (release in early September) At the time of this writing, Julia’s book has not yet been released, but I have no doubt it will be exquisite. Julia was one of Katie and my first “food friends” on thethere East End. She wandered over to the farm after shopping at the tomorrow will be apricots, Jessica soffer Amagansett Farmers Market, where she had met Carissa Waechter, tomorrow there will be apricots, Jessica soffer our favorite baker and another lady ally in the food world. At the time Julia was working with Gwyneth Paltrow in Amagansett (thanks to Julia, Gwyneth visited the farm and then decided to shoot much of Twelve Cal Peternell herRecipes first cookbook, It’s All Good, at Amber Waves). Julia is extraordinarily kind, talented, funny, and hardworking, and her first solo cookbook will no doubt be an absolute pleasure and privilege to read.

Small Victories

la huella

La Huella, by Martin Pittaluga, Guzman Artagaveytia, Gustavo Barbero, and Alejandro Morales As a farmer at the height of the summer season I dream of . . . the off season. Not only is the winter a time for farmers to rest, but also when we read, research, plan, and travel. The last two winters I’ve had the opportunity to do all of these Small Victories off-season activities while spending time in Jose Ignacio, a village on the coast of Uruguay, where friends of ours recently started a small organic farm (Cruz del Sur). Jose Ignacio is reminiscent of the East End in its beautiful beaches and extraordinary food. The besttherefood in Jessica town tomorrow will be apricots, soffer is served at a restaurant called La Huella, with beach-side tables and a magical atmosphere. The La Huella cookbook is a celebration of all the things they do well, from openfire cooking, simple rustic decor, and South American style and hospitality. I cannot wait to go back, but this book is a welcome place-holder for now.

• september 2016

81

fiction

> After Jimmy

By Patricia Marx

C

ongratulate me. I did it! I broke up with Jimmy. . . .

Serena is playing Navarro Saturday night. Case closed.” Shit, what if my mother’s right? . . . No, not about my father. Am I an idiot Last night after the Bartoshucks’ dinner party. . . . They to dump Jimmy? Not that I didn’t give it my best shot. Went to a served risotto. But did you hear me? I said I broke up couples counselor, can you stand it? . . . Are you crazy? You think with Jimmy. Promise you won’t say anything to him. He I’d go to couples counseling with Jimmy? The only way I can talk thinks we’re still good. . . . No. No, I could never tell him. You know how I hate confrontation. It’s so cruel. Couldn’t I just be mean to about him is behind his back. . . . I got the therapist’s name from the Bartoshucks. Same one they used. She was actually very smart, him till he gets the message? . . . I agree. Should be a side dish, not considering what a lousy marriage the Bartoshucks have. She said an entrée, since isn’t it basically just Rice-a-Roni. As far as breaking that when I’m part of a couple, I share too much of myself. Meanup with Jimmy, it was definitely mutual, even if he doesn’t realize ing, I guess, that it’s insane to tell Jimmy about our breakup, which, it yet. . . . Right now? Out somewhere. He told me where when he if you think about it, is none of his business. Also, if he knew we’d left, but I forgot to listen. Thing is, Jimmy could never cope with broken up, it would rule out any chance of reconciliation. . . . Oh, being alone. Without me, he would hang out with friends and go God. Mother again. . . . She’s against hyphenated names. . . . The to parties and think he was having a great time, never understandBartoshucks? Oh, you know — ing how lonely he was. It would the usual problems. They don’t kill him, at least subconsciously, pay attention to each other, which is why I want to wait at they don’t share, they don’t least until the doctor tells him communicate. Plus, Mindy Barwhether he absolutely needs toshuck’s taking bridge lessons. surgery on his leg. Face it — Must mean she’s having a thing nobody wants to lose me and a with somebody. . . . Me? I am 100 limb at the same time. Hold on. percent not with anybody else!

I have another call. . . . That was In fact — and I can only confess Jimmy. The anniversary of the this to you — how can a girl not first time we went out to eat and be fond of Jimmy, sort of? Obdidn’t split the check is tomorviously, he’s not my type, but I row night and he made reservadon’t like my type. Last night, tions at the new Inuit raw place we were doing it and — no, after in Chelsea I’m dying to try. It’s the Bartoshucks’s dinner party. sad. He doesn’t have a clue we’re Anyway, I was just lying there finished. Men! . . . Why in the and I felt so close to him that world would I have Mindy BarI almost told him we’d broken toshuck’s risotto recipe? For all I up. He was asleep, though. He know, it wasn’t even risotto. The kind of had his arm around me important question is should I and I have to say, for a second, wear my new jeans with rivets I actually wished we were still tomorrow night or the green together. . . . What are you talkleather skirt with the lace hem? .

Untitled, from the Early Flowers series, Peter Dayton, 1991 ing about? Don’t be ridiculous. . . I said Jimmy and I’d gone our Lots of people don’t know about his foot. . . . His other foot. . . . separate ways, I didn’t say I don’t want him to desire me. Hold Of course, you shouldn’t feel left out. You and Bob are two of our on. Probably Mr. Needy again. . . . Was my mother. She says there best friends. Speaking of which, have to admit I am really afraid are four reasons I depress her. #1. No job. #2. No chin. #3. No that now that Jimmy and I are no longer an item, he and I won’t be guest room. She can’t remember the fourth one. Hold on. Mother friends and I won’t still have health insurance, but knock on wood. again. . . . . She remembered. It depresses her that everyone’s mar. . . Sure. You can tell me anything. What? . . .You’re kidding? You ried except me. She said, “I’ve been thinking about it all day and must be kidding. You’re taking cooking classes? With Jimmy? . . .

I think you should get married this weekend. Before Jimmy drops My Jimmy? What exactly is it you’re cooking together? . . . Is there you. I have a dress that would work and I can cancel my Saturday something I should know about? If there is, don’t tell me. night plans. Daddy’s worried, too.” You know what I said? “Mom, 82

• september 2016

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