Red Bar

While the Hamptons may lag behind NYC in sheer quantity of restaurants, there's plenty of really good food to be found out here. I've already raved about Le Chef, but Red Bar is sneaking into second place in my list of overly-indulgent restaurants.

Just before Mom arrived on her visit, I had a great accomplishment at work that really required celebrating, so I wanted something special for our first dinner in town. I had heard good things about this Red Bar place (and I just really liked the name) so off we went. From the time we looked at the drink menu, I was pretty sure that we'd made a good choice. First, they serve Chimay ale, which I love. They also had a very nice collection of Long Island wine, including several favorites from my friends over at Channing Daughters.

And then we heard about the specials. They were doing really astonishing things with Nantucket scallops that evening, and we had a wonderful scallop ceviche along with a salad loaded with pears, candied nuts, and Stilton cheese. After that, there was another scallop entree (can you really have too many scallops in one meal?) and a whole roasted red snapper.

Now, the snapper was a little intimidating. When the food came out, my mother was presented with this rather large whole roasted fish, bones and head and all. The women in my family won't let much come between us and our seafood, but we really were both stumped as to how to proceed. Cut the head off? Pick off the good bits, like a lobster? Are you supposed to eat the fins??? What are we supposed to do now??!? Mom was looking like she thought she'd been cheated and was eyeing my scallops in a most distressing manner.

Just when I started to think I was going to have to defend my entree with little more than a butter knife, help arrived in the shape of a Brazillian waiter who traded a few snippets of Portuguese with Mom as he quite deftly turned the Plate O' Monster Fish into dinner and whisked away all the icky bits. He warned us to watch out for more bones, and we did have to be careful. Totally worth it.