East Hampton Restaurants

This new spot for a casual, super satisfying dinner out comes from the couple behind the Vine Street Café on Shelter Island.

Balmy summer nights and dinner plans with a crowd call for the shareable feasts Mexican cuisine does best. Rita Cantina is new to the Springs and sticks to local bounty (where possible) for its menu of wagyu short rib birria tacos, fried scallops, and grilled Mexican street corn. Great food aside, the yellow-and-white patio with its stripey parasols is a sunny, happy place to hang out both day and night. Images courtesy of Eric Striffler.

SíSí is a pan-Mediterranean concept dishing out Levantine, Greek, and Italian classics like Fattoush salad, pasta, and tahini-and-charred-lemon drizzled everything. In other words, all the exploding-with-flavor veggie-forward food that feels so right on hot summer nights. Located within the newly-opened EHP Resort & Marina, the view—especially at sunset—is spectacular. If you happen to be exploring the East End by boat, the marina accommodates anything from twenty-five to one-hundred-and-twenty footers, making docking and dining a total breeze.

Nick & Toni's is a Hamptons institution: the kind of place you go every Friday night for dinner, where you've devoured everything on the menu a million times and still aren't sick of it, where you know the other diners and are on smile-and-wave terms with the chef.

The laid-back, slightly dive-y, kitschy-in-a-fun-way tiny cantina is terrific for a group looking to stay half the night drinking margaritas and getting through basket after basket of chips and addictive salsa plus plates of very tasty—and organic—chicken quesadillas and fresh-off-the-boat shrimp tacos.

The beauty of Sam's is its simplicity (not a word that’s often associated with the Hamptons). It’s an old school pizzeria in the best way, with a pine-paneled dining room and vinyl-covered booths where families cozy up to share classic thin crust pies. We love the Sam’s Special (sausage, onions, garlic, peppers, and mushrooms), though the pastas are worth a look, too, especially the rigatoni broccoli rabe in garlic and olive oil and the linguini with fresh, local clams. It’s right in the center of East Hampton, which means you can walk across the street to Scoop du Jour for ice cream after.

The food is typical of what you’ll find at many high-end restaurants on the East End, which is to say, coastal Italian, but it’s executed almost flawlessly, especially the wood-fired, Neapolitan-style pizzas and Montauk swordfish with Cerignola olives, tomatoes, and capers.

As part of the Maidstone's revamp a few summers back, the hotel brought in Chef David Strandridge (of Cafe Clover) to redo the breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus. Like at Standridge's West Village eatery, the menus are somehow both beautifully simple and very sophisticated. For breakfast, you'll find a balance of old-school comfort (whole grain avocado toast that can be ordered with lobster salad, egg in a hole, and a selection of smoothies) alongside more creative options, like the "nova," a smoked salmon dish with Greek yogurt, and an orange blossom pain perdue that's stewed in blackberries. Dinner, entirely worth booking even for non-hotel guests, is seafood-centric: lump crab cake, a local catch simply grilled, and black linguini with peekytoe crab, all with a side of old bay fries. Photos: Melissa Horn & Fran Parente

Opened by some serious NYC restaurant and nightlife veterans (among them, Jason Hook, Todd English, and Andrew Molen), this new sustainable restaurant is sure to be a hit–for the food and the after hours. The seafood-heavy menu is fresh (note: citrus salmon and Thai mussels) and the décor pops with contrasting black and white. The overall vibe speaks of summer, when long dinners lend way to late-night dancing.

We’re all about summertime casual, which is why we like this cozy, American gastropub, located in the building that once housed Wolfie’s Tavern. It’s the perfect place to grab a (veggie) burger and a beer and watch the game on one of the many TVs. Bonus: There's a good live band lineup for most of the summer.