An Interview with Stacy Dermont of Dan’s Papers

We would love to show you a picture she is an absolute knockout but we cant!

A few weeks ago, Stacy Dermont, a self-defined “upstate farm girl” from North Otto, New York, called up Chef Peter Cooke for an interview about the Hampton’s Chef Society – that is, after all, her job. A reviewer with Dan’s Papers, Dermont is often the one behind the pen (or, in our modern times, the blinking cursor), telling Long Island foodies what’s new and exciting. What many don’t know, however, is the person behind the font.

Dermont was born and raised in “cow country” near Buffalo, on a family dairy farm that her mother’s family used to run, so it’s no wonder that Stacy herself grew up to be a foodie. While the dairy farm responsibilities ended with her mother’s generation, Stacy was raised with a kitchen garden as well as some animals raised for slaughter. “We also gathered a lot of wild fruits, asparagus and horseradish,” she recalls.

Today, Stacy has little time to cook. “My husband is, thankfully, a fine cook,” she says. With her schedule – reviewing restaurants twice a week and working late hours – it’s no wonder that she lets him take on a lot of the day-to-day cooking. Stacy herself still cooks every weekend, and during the week, she says she often makes jam. “It’s great therapy to stir down a big pot of hot goo.”

Her job may be stressful, but Stacy seems to love it. After moving to Southampton in 2000, she started reading Dan’s Papers. “I found it remarkably frank at times, and surprisingly imaginative,” she says, though she didn’t think to apply for work there until last year, when she was asked to help find a new Associate Editor. “After (Managing Editor Susan Galardi) described the job, I applied.”

Her writing stints at Dan’s started as seasonal filler spots, and this fall, she started writing restaurant reviews. As of January, Stacy oversees all the food writing. “I love it,” she says. “I devour cook books and other food writing by the ton.”

Speaking about her job, she gushes about the opportunities she’s encountered, like meeting Sarabeth Levine. On her blog for Hampton Epicure, her weekly column with Dan’s, she describes the “crazy stuff she gets into” with the founder of infamous Manhattan prepared foods store, Sarabeth’s Kitchen. She also found her interview with Marcus Samuelsson to be “utterly inspiring.”

And then, of course, there’s the food: she gets to try new restaurants and meet restaurant professionals every day, and she’s discovered quite a few places, like her favorite Long Island restaurant, Luce + Hawkins in Jamesport. “They have it all goin’ on,” she says. “It takes a lot to ‘out foodie’ me – the whole Luce + Hawkins staff are crazy foodies. I love it and the atmosphere of high falutin’ food fun that pervades that lovely old building.”

She still finds time to get back to her roots, though. In Sag Harbor, where she now lives with her family, she has an herb patch and walks to the Sag Harbor Farmers Market every week to pick up local produce. “I also stop at the Serene Green Farmstand on my way home four nights a week.”

This may be the only part of her work life that is routine, however. “Every day is different at Dan’s Papers,” she says. “There’s no telling ‘how different’ until you get here in the morning.” As far as Stacy is concerned, this seems to be one of the key draws of her life and work at Dan’s.

The Hampton Coffee Company

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“It’s usually Fred who does this sort of thing,” Theresa Belkin admits to me as we grab a seat over a warm cup of coffee at Hampton Coffee Company. He’s the entrepreneur behind the coffee roaster and café; she was “thrown into this” when she met him as a student working and traveling for a summer during her studies in Ireland. At that point, Fred had already owned Hampton Coffee Company in Watermill for a year, after working there as an Associate Manager. Now, they’ve been married and running the Hampton Coffee Company together for six years.

 

Apparently, however, the original Hampton Coffee Company “didn’t even do half of what we do here,” Theresa says. Not only do they roast all of their own coffee, but they bake fresh muffins every morning and bring in the best of baked goods and snacks for their clients.

 

“We find the best of the different things, and we’re the people who bring them together,” she says, citing their scones and sandwiches as two examples. “We try not to do prepackaged.” They do, however, order some gluten-free and vegan-friendly items to keep customers happy with the variety. For the most part, though, they try to “keep it local,” choosing New York vendors and Long Island merchants when possible.

 

Perhaps the biggest change since Fred took over, however, was the opening of a branch in Westhampton, the very branch where I met Theresa. The Westhampton store has been opened for five years, and in that time, Theresa’s favorite part of the work developed: the community.

 

“The customers are our friends, part of our family,” she muses, though it goes without saying: I’ve already noticed the way she waves and greets everyone by name as they walk in the front door.

 

“There’s more of a community here,” she says. “But that’s possibly because we live here as well. This is more like family – this town – than Watermill. Watermill is more of a transient community. Here, they’re here for a reason… not just passing by, they’re already here.”

 

It’s safe to say that the spot they chose, near the six-corners roundabout, is not the most obvious location in a town where most of the businesses are found along Main Street, but that doesn’t keep regulars from coming in every morning for fresh coffee, and now the parking lot here is always full.

 

Like a family, Theresa and Fred look out for their customers. In a time when the economy is making everything more difficult, they stay involved in local charities. “We prefer to go and man a table and bring free coffee rather than write a check,” Theresa says, citing the contact with the community as one of her favorite aspects of the job.

 

In addition, they keep prices low when they can, even in a time when green coffee is costing more and more, raising their costs. “We’ve raised our prices twice in 10 years,” Theresa says, an impressive statistic when other coffee vendors have marked up prices 11% just this month.

 

It’s clear that they care about this sort of detail: it’s nice to be able to tell a customer, for example, that his cup of coffee came from beans “roasted last Friday out in Watermill,” and even to shake the hand of roast master Dwight Amade.

 

This attention and care has maded them a success: what used to be just an East End staple has become “a bigger deal,” tripling in size since Fred first took over to become the largest independent roaster on Long Island, distributing to restaurants “out here and in Manhattan” and to 32 King Kullens, something that they’re “really proud of.”

 

“It’s still personal, even though we’ve grown so much,” Theresa maintains; it’s hard to disagree. The care shows in everything that they do, and in the fact that people from all walks of life – from the more well-known faces of Long Island society to day laborers and even high school students – find their home in both stores.

 

“The age for coffee drinking has come down in the past ten years,” she says. “Kids are stopping in daily for a yogurt parfait and a latte.”

 

Even local artists like Christine Wexler find their niche here: the photographer displays and sells her work on the walls of the café, adding a surfing flair to the interior with her pictures of Montauk beaches.

 

As for Theresa, her beaming smile and friendly demeanor hides the fact that even after six years, she’s still learning about the business, though she’s come a long way since the beginning, when, she admits, she “didn’t drink coffee.”

 

“I still need a bit of milk,” she says, smiling bashfully. As far as I’m concerned, this down-to-Earth authenticity is what makes her – and the Hampton Coffee Company – so charming.

Buoyone Westhampton’s own summer shack

Sous Chef Kevin and the one and only Chef Dave

I first met Lorraine Girard when she was running the catering for the Swordfish Beach Club, the setting of my childhood summers. We’ve both changed a lot since then: I’m no longer twelve, and Lorraine has moved from the short order locale at the beach club cafeteria to the wood-paneled dining room of Buoy One, a brand new fish restaurant in Westhampton.

She grins as soon as she sees me and offers me a hug and a glass of wine, though she never turns off her front-of-the-house mindset: her comfortable rapport with the staff doesn’t hide the fact that she’s the boss here, and she’s proud of the filling dining room on a midweek, early summer evening.

Apparently, filling the restaurant has never been a problem since they opened, just a few months ago, even though the space is apparently haunted. “Every old man has a different version of the story,” she laughs. According to legend, a woman was murdered in the restaurant, which used to be attached to the old Bailey Motel. “We were really nervous,” she confides, though they had no reason to be.

Lorraine and her husband David tried to open Buoy One slowly, the Thursday after Christmas 2010. “We put the flag out at about 4:30,” she says. “By 7:30, I could hear my husband calling to pull the flag in.”

The popularity of this restaurant is no surprise, given the popularity of their first locale, a classic fish house in Riverhead. Both Lorraine and her husband have fine dining backgrounds, but they both saw a hole in the Hamptons dining scene: the absence of the clam shacks that David grew up with in Massachusetts that they had a “burning desire” to fill. I know exactly what she means; I visited the fish houses they were nostalgic for when I lived in Massachusetts during high school: buckets of clam strips, lobsters selected and cooked to order, plain wooden tables to eat on and plastic tubs of melted butter for dipping.

“It’s simple fish, made to order,” she says, an uncomplicated concept that never seems to fail, even given this particular case’s humble beginnings.

“There were crackheads and prostitutes in the driveway,” she laughs, as she recalls the Riverhead garage that they found, eight years ago, “the year my son was born.” Today, it’s a thriving retail fish market with food, with great reviews from all over, especially Newsday, who includes them in writeups every year.

“We can always tell when Newsday comes out, because we’re super busy on a Tuesday.”

But she and David don’t read the reviews. “Our customers bring them to us,” she says. “It’s really all about our customers. We just do what we do.”

And it seems to be working. At their new outpost in Westhampton, the husband and wife team, along with sous-chef Kevin Leuck, serve about 400 dinners on a Saturday night: lots of families and locals coming for the high quality food that people have come to expect, from daily catch cooked to order to innovative appetizers like fried oysters served with pulled pork in the shell, or seared tuna served on fried wontons. “Everyone loves the specials, we can’t switch them,” Lorraine says.

A large part of their success seems to come from the fun they have working together in this new endeavor. “It’s really fun to do,” Lorraine says, though she’s just as enthusiastic about all her projects, even the short order work she was doing when I first met her; maybe it’s because that work is part of what led her to this dream.

After graduating from CIA in 1989, Lorraine became a private chef in New York City, working for families and catering huge summer parties in Southampton. “I staged these really elaborate dinners,” she says, smiling as she remembers. After she had her daughter, she brought this same creativity to a new challenge at the Swordfish. “It was a different learning curve,” she says. Her bosses had asked her to keep the menu the same as always: simple burgers, fries, pizzas and sandwiches, but Lorraine had different ideas in mind.

“They said not to change it; they said no one would want salad on the plate,” she says, but she started adding simple salads and lighter fare, and the revenue from the small beach club café tripled. Her biggest addition, though were the Friday night dinners she started, dinners that I remember attending when I was younger.

“We started with really simple things,” she says. The first week, five people signed up, and the second there were thirty. The last Friday, 108 people came to the Friday night dinner overlooking the water.

“It was challenging, but fun,” she says, and when she left, it was to Riverhead.

“We’ve been looking for seven years to expand. We outgrew our box.” While they have kept the Riverhead branch opened and still run a large catering business, both Lorraine and David put in a lot of face time at the new Westhampton Buoy One, where David is in the kitchen six nights a week, and Lorraine is the friendly face at the front. It’s a place that seems to be a home for her; the staff, a sort of extended family.

“The staff has a meal off the menu every night,” she says, and they give a lot of feedback on the menu as well. It is in this way that the restaurant continues to evolve and change.

“It’s a mix of people,” she says. “You’ll get an immigrant off his bike next to a guy in a Bentley here to eat the same bucket of mussels. That’s what people like.”

Given the crowds I see every time I drive past the full parking lot, she must be right.

Buoy one is located at

62 Montauk Hwy
Westhampton, NY 11977

(631) 998-3808

www.buoyone.com

An International Cook’s Biopic

I was very nearly born on Long Island. It would have been the perfect story – I’ve long considered the small town of Quiogue, a little blip on the map of the North Fork between Westhampton and Quogue – to be my home and though it would have been the perfect beginning to a life-long love affair, this is not fiction, and I prefer the truth.
I was born in Manhattan and very soon after wrapped up in blankets and brought back out to the beach, at the beginning of summer, June 7^th, when the flowers have all opened and everything smells like fresh cut grass and new tomatoes, when corn silk dances across lawns, and bare feet covered in sand and dew are the norm. I grew up appreciating these days, counting down, not to my birthday, necessarily, but to summertime: to the day when my parents would pack me, my sisters and my brothers into the car and drive the hour and a half from Manhattan to Quiogue, the four of us leaping out of the car barefoot to allow the chunks of gravel to start toughening the soles of our feet for nighttime games of flashlight tag we knew were soon to come.
Those summers were highlighted by meals: my mother was a stickler for everyone eating together, even during the school year, but evenings when it was dark by 6 pm were nothing compared to the plethora of options we had once summertime arrived. My grandmother would pick up steaks from the butcher and baked clams from Bennet’s in Westhampton Beach, and we would select piles of ears of yellow-and-white corn from Dean’s farm stand to shuck in our bare feet over brown paper bags, the pale corn silk getting caught in my great-grandfather’s rose bushes. Other nights, we simply grabbed a bag of Chester’s Chicken from the shop behind the Fruit King and ate it on the beach, stopping intermittently to leap through small waves and climb the sand dunes, though we weren’t supposed to. Most nights, my mother just bought fresh catch from Bennet’s or Cor-J’s, and we sat down to baked salmon with herbed breadcrumbs, lemon sole or grilled swordfish.
It is no wonder, I suppose, that I quickly developed a love for cooking: the best memories of my childhood come with tastes and smells that I couldn’t help but try to recreate once I was living on my own. Through a series of strange circumstances, beginning at the age of fourteen, I bounced around the world: northern France to northern Massachusetts, snowy Toronto to sunny Cannes, the beaches of Mallorca and San Sebastian to the city streets of Paris. Everywhere I went, I had a taste for the local specialty, for outdoor markets, for accepting a bright orange slice of cantaloupe from a fruit vendor or delving into a dish of haggis while visiting a friend in Scotland. Slowly, these tastes of different worlds and different people’s realities came together, and I began to cultivate my own kitchen, my own specialties, my own regular dinners that became the method to the madness of my constant roaming: a salad made of nothing more than huge chunks of tomatoes, handfuls of shredded basil leaves, green extra virgin olive oil and sea salt graces my table every summer day; bubbling Indian curries perfume the halls of my Parisian apartment in winter.
Yes, I live in Paris now: the dream for anyone whose heart sings for the culinary. My kitchen windows overlook the perfection of a cobbled street and gray, Parisian rooftops; my trips to the outdoor market on Saturdays and Wednesdays are accompanied by the melody of French vendors calling out their prices as though they were folk tunes. Over the course of the past four years, I’ve become one of them: the cocktail hours my mother hosted in my youth have been replaced with apéro that lasts for hours; dinner parties that started at 7:00 in Westhampton don’t begin before 8:00 in Paris. I love my new life here, the fact that I conduct my daily comings and goings in French, the way that everyone, no matter who you are, knows about quality so that the “farm-grown” “organic” conversations that I’m constantly overhearing in New York are virtually nonexistent here.
And yet there’s nothing that speaks to me more than coming up the familiar driveway every summer and hearing the stones crunch beneath the tires; my baby brother’s driving now, and taller than I am. The pizza oven is heating – my father and my brother built it several years ago – and my brother is a Pizzaiolo now, manipulating the peels like an expert. Inside, there is still a dozen ears of corn dipped into boiling water for just a few moments and then salted just enough, a bowl of local raspberries that we dip into for fistfuls and gobble like candy. The summers of my youth may be over, but the memories of the food that they offer linger.  Uniting around a table at the end of a perfect or not-so-perfect day… well, that is the reason I still grin at the smell of the season’s first basil.  Picking out the perfect ripe melon, bringing people together over my table, whether it is at the shores of Quantuck Bay or by the Quais of the Seine, that is why I smile.

http://www.tomatokumato.com/