East Hampton

In the Hamptons, lunch is a verb, and nowhere embodies this more than Babette's. Located on bustling Newtown Lane in Easthampton, the menu is a clean one, filled with all-organic meats; wild, local fish; and lots of gluten- and grain-free options.

Since 2017, Journey has been the warm, welcoming blanket of serenity we run away to when it all becomes too much. The interior is a love letter to mid-century modern while the exterior is that dreamy, cedar-shingle-style Hamptons house you’ve long dreamed of visiting—surrounded by manicured gardens and a pool deck full of striped parasols and loungers.

Carissa Waechter is a familiar face on this skinny stretch of Long Island. Her cookies, cakes, and pickled sourdough rye bread (the starter has been going since 1999) have been gracing the tables of year-round residents and New York blow-ins for years.

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.

This Union Square Japanese sushi spot (unofficially dubbed “Shuko Beach”) pops up in East Hampton’s Highway Restaurant & Bar again this summer.

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.

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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