East End Eats

Peconic Coast

103 Montauk Highway

East Hampton

324-6772

Open for dinner daily

Peconic Coast, now in its third year, has quietly established itself as one of the East End's most consistent and enjoyable restaurants. In a random quiz of a dozen people I ran into on Monday, all but one named it as being among their top five out here.

It's true that, as the former muses of the Laundry, the proprietors carried a faithful clientele with them when they moved, but they took over a notoriously jinxed spot - with Montauk Highway almost passing through the middle of the dining room, no less.

Would they make it, or would the whisper "Indian bones" soon be heard?

Well-Designed

Well, they're obviously here to stay. It isn't just that the food is reliably good, it's that the staff is particularly welcoming and the almost Zen-like calm of the dining room offers that increasing rarity: a comfortable space where you do not have to raise your voice to carry on a conversation.

You don't notice at first how well-designed the place is. You notice warm brick and stretches of brick-colored paint and little pink spotlights strung on wires across the room. What sinks in after a while is that the room is very large, yet every table seems intimate, no easy task to achieve.

There are different levels, which helps, but perhaps the magic touch is the strategic use of black, which leaves the dining room floating in a space without fixed boundaries.

There's a long snaking bar that does a thriving trade in summer. Less so in winter, maybe, which makes sense - "I don't want to see 'The Sopranos' in front of the fire, dear, I'd rather go out into the cold, have a beer, and watch other people eating."

Dishes that stand out in my mind from previous visits were a ravishing salad of frisee and goat's cheese, perfect bay scallops, and breasts of Muscovy duck in phyllo pastry. But time and again I have chosen the calf's liver, served with black grapes, because nobody does it better.

On this occasion we presented the added challenge of telling the staff we wanted to make an 8:30 movie. They'd have made the deadline, too, but we were having such a good time that we decided not to go.

Range Of Choices

Two of us took advantage of the $25 three-course prix fixe menu. This is highly recommended, not only because it is a very good value but because, unlike many such menus, there is a wide choice of dishes.

On the á la carte menu, appetizers range from $4.50 for soup to $20 for a seafood platter of clams, oysters, shrimp, fresh Maine sea urchin, and lobster salad: Does that sound good, or what?

Entrees cost from $12 for a burger to $32 for a rib eye steak, so your basic meal could cost you $16.50 for soup and a burger or $52 if you just sold Amazon high. Or there are barbecued ribs at $9.50, which are quite enough for an entree. Peconic Coast can be expensive, but there are enough choices that it doesn't have to be.

Salmon And Peas

There's an impressive wine list and wines by the glass from $6.50 to $8. Both the Chilean cabernet sauvignon and the Beringer California merlot were the perfect answer to a cold night and a lingering cold.

The mixed green salad had some very superior green stuff in it, by no means straight from the plastic box marked mesclun, but it paled beside the terra-cotta dish of wood-oven- roasted calamari in a spicy sauce.

Also recommended is the lively salmon cake, which was almost outshone by the sea of little garlic-butter-coated peas that surrounded it.

Layered Scallops

Salmon was also a choice for an entree. It was the daily fish special and I was a little dubious about the idea that, at this time of year, it would be accompanied by a fresh tomato sauce. I don't know what they did to it, it was basically just diced tomato, but it was wonderful. The salmon itself was as good as I anticipated, as was a side dish of very lightly cooked spinach.

Another prix fixe dish, pounded chicken breasts with mushrooms in a marsala sauce, tasted remarkably like veal.

The winning entree was an astonishing vertical dish of sea scallops with seven samurai sauce, the browned scallops interwoven between layers of cellophane noodles and crisply fried squares of wonton wrappers.

Two Mousses

Try the thin, treacly pecan square for dessert, though the two kinds of chocolate mousse were also great. The creme of the fine tasting creme brulee was a little too chilly for my taste, but I'm just nitpicking - we really had no complaints.

They don't take reservations. At a small, busy restaurant, this can be annoying enough to keep you away from the place forever. But Peconic Coast is big enough that this has only once been a problem in the times I have dined there, and that was on a summer Saturday night. Even then, it was a pleasant wait on comfortable sofas, drinks in hand, so we hardly noticed.

So here's a toast - Peconic Coast.