There’s a Catch

You’re not in the Hamptons anymore. That was my first thought arriving in Greenport for a few nights, and I mean that in the best possible way. Greenport is an unassuming village on the North Fork of Long Island, all salt-bleached shingles and boat slips, the kind of town where the loudest thing most mornings is gulls fighting over bait scraps. It doesn’t look like a place that could quietly become the center of New York’s food world for a weekend. But for a few days, Friend of Chef and Mastercard turned it into exactly that, assembling one of the more interesting rooms in New York hospitality for a stretch of eating, drinking, and, at least in theory, fishing.

We rolled in ahead of a 5:30 p.m. meal hosted at The Halyard, in The Soundview Greenport, a boutique waterfront hotel with the kind of low-key charm that makes you forget you’re only a couple hours from Manhattan. Introductions happened over long tables, cold rosé, and the particular energy of a group of chefs and operators realizing they’re finally off duty and allowed to just eat.

The guest list read like a chef’s-night-off fantasy draft: Wylie Dufresne, now of Stretch Pizza; Tomer Blechman, shuttling between talk of Theodora and Miss Ada; Raf’s and the Musket Room’s (and soon The Bowery Hotel’s) Nicole Vitagliano, trading notes with Fausto’s Joe Campanale; Annie Shi (King, Lei, Dean’s); Bungalow and GupShup’s Jimmy Rizvi; and original Top Chef champion Harold Dieterle, low-key as ever.

Monday started early and on the water, with a guided fishing excursion in the Long Island Sound. I went out with Caper’s chef-in-residence Ryan Bartlow (also of Ernesto’s and Bartolo), Tomer Blechman, Nicole Vitagliano, Jimmy Rizvi, Annie Shi, Joe Campanale, and Harold Dieterle, on a boat that, on paper, had more combined restaurant experience than actual fishing experience, and it showed. There were a few tangled lines and the specific, good-natured ribbing that happens when a table full of professional cooks and restaurateurs are suddenly amateurs at something else entirely.

We caught fish. Let’s leave it there for now, because the real story of the day belonged to someone else: A 500-pound tuna, hauled in a day earlier by fishermen with considerably steadier hands and more patience than any of us. More on that fish shortly.

By 5:30 p.m., the boat was back at the dock and the group reconvened at John Fraser’s North Fork Table & Inn for a cocktail reception and chef cookout built around the day’s catch, “the day’s catch” being generously defined to include that monster tuna, which anchored the spread. The dinner also pulled in a few faces who’d missed the earlier legs of the trip: Unapologetic Foods’ Roni Mazumdar, Wayan’s Cedric Vongerichten, Friend of Chef’s Keith Durst and Talia Berman, and Ira Haspel, who runs the biodynamic KK’s Farm nearby in Southold.

Whatever modest porgies and sole trigger fish we’d actually wrestled aboard earlier in the day got their moment, grilled simply. Between the tomatoes, the tuna, a large tin of caviar, and the general controlled chaos of a room full of chefs off-duty and well-fed, one thing became obvious: The North Fork, right now, might be the most exciting food scene within a few hours of the city, unpretentious, produce-driven, and clearly still capable of surprising even the people who cook for a living.