Nick & Toni's Gets a Facelift

Thu, 23 May 2013 17:00:00 -0400

It is one minute after six and already guests are eddying around the hostess stand at Nick & Toni’s. From the far end of the bar, it’s easy to see that this is not the usual check in–and–go. The arrivals linger; they offer handshakes, arm clasps, and greetings. Mark Smith, an owner and managing partner, receives the congratulatory smiles usually given to the father of the bride, as Bonnie Munshin, the longtime dining-room directress, quietly works to untie the knot of admirers and get the reception started. (The founder, Toni Ross, is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations.)

To the guests, this is not a usual Saturday night, but a reception. Nick & Toni’s, East Hampton’s longest-running show (it turns 25 on August 3) and its Fort Knox of celebrity anecdotes—Mick Jagger once came in through the kitchen to be low-key, Chevy Chase once posed as the reservationist—has just reopened after a lightning, six-week renovation.

Since late February, the celebrity crowd (and the old faithfuls) have been treading water, a sleeper cell of Hamptons habitués waiting for the homing beacon to be turned on. “A lot of our customers are creatures of habit,” Munshin says, and it’s clear that these early arrivals are just that—happy to have their clubhouse back and eager to like what Smith has done with the place. Which is not much—more brow-lift than face-lift.

A Look Around the New Nick & Toni's
The dining room looks freshly pressed, the bar has been turned into a space for dining à deux at high-top pub tables, and you can see at once that the lighting is softer, more flattering, a bit theatrical. What’s clear is that Nick & Toni’s has not had a midlife crisis. There’s no décor-groveling for a younger, hipper audience—the place is still cottage-simple—no identity change à la Le Cirque when it went from the Mayfair Hotel to the Palace. No one’s going to write the clichéd epitaph, “They ruined it.”

That was precisely the idea.

“It was worn out, for sure,” adds Cass Calder Smith (no relation to Mark), the designer who performed the operation. “But the DNA is classic, timeless, and we stayed with that kind of restraint.”

Mark Smith says that whenever you have a place for 25 years, “you don’t want the change to be radical. None of the room dimensions changed, so the flow is still the same.” (The front dining room still has the coveted tables in the same arrangement.)

But the visual flow is a different story. The artwork, which had a pleasingly haphazard placement, has been rehung to create exclamation points on the otherwise plain walls, and the new solid walnut tables are bare, allowing the dark surface to provide a visual bass note. The pair of cement dogs that flanked the entrance to a rear dining room now sits on a dais of their own near the oven, and both back rooms look streamlined, courtesy of the new banquettes.

Changes You Can Taste
Some changes can’t be seen, but rather heard (a new stereo system), felt (the air conditioning can now handle the 700-degree heat of the wood-burning oven and a Hamptons July), and certainly savored. The drinks card has been pumped up to go with the new emphasis on the bar, and there’s a slate of new menu items, among them a delectable spring fava bean and morel ragu (a vegetarian option), bucatini with bottarga made in-house, a silky roasted cod with fennel, and wood-roasted whole striped bass. But the free-range chicken and the penne, two of the most requested dishes, are still here, and you can tell that chef Joseph Realmuto is still at home on the range, with cooking that’s surehanded and straightforward.

What’s always struck me about the place, though, is how it doesn’t come with a side of velvet rope. It actually fulfills that old saw about treating celebs like ordinary people. However, the famous do get their own security detail in Bonnie, who runs interference when a commoner tries to approach a boldfacer, although she once cajoled Jack Nicholson into signing an autograph for a 12-year-old.

Mark Smith characterizes the atmosphere as “convivial,” a nice old-fashioned word and apt. The back rooms still have tables that seat six and up, and on the Saturday night I dined here, there was a lot of table hopping going on, with one woman working her way down the length of the banquettes, then making the turn. When I looked over at Harold and Toby, acquaintances seated across the room, they had become best friends with the adjacent table, just as I became chums of a Harold and Sylvia next to me.

What surely won’t change is Nick & Toni’s being synonymous for the type of celebrity clientele “who get nominated for Oscars, paint canvases that hang in museums, commute in helicopters, and own office towers,” as The New York Times once wrote. Jack Nicholson, Sting, Paul Simon, Tom Hanks, Isaac Mizrahi, Billy Joel, Alec Baldwin, Eric Fischl—the list is as long as Main Beach. The late Nora Ephron famously said she didn’t have time to get romantically involved with another restaurant because she was married to Nick & Toni’s. Despite the new trimmings, that restaurant very much endures. Says Bonnie Munshin, “It’s still Nick & Toni’s.” 136 N. Main St., East Hampton, 324-3550

Hamptons Magazine

Nick & Toni's Gets a Facelift