East End Eats: The Farmhouse

The Farmhouse

341 Montauk Highway

East Hampton

324-8585

Open for dinner and

Sunday brunch

The Farmhouse on Pantigo Road in East Hampton was looking particularly pretty the other night. The owners really seem to have solved the problem of what to do with this big, meandering space which sank so many restaurants before. It now exudes an ambiance of old-fashioned country comfort, with open fires and relaxation.

Everyone is competing with prixfixe menus at this time of year, but the Farmhouse has a hook: The three-course menu is $21, but if two of you take it you get a bottle of wine thrown in for only $4 more apiece.

One of the surprises at the Farmhouse is that it has a rather grand wine list, grander than the restaurant would seem to warrant, but surely a delight for local oenophiles.

There is a big selection of wines by the glass too and, though they are fairly expensive, each of the four different wines we tried was very good.

On the a la carte menu, appetizers range in price from soup at $6, through Caesar salad at $9, to mussels or crab cake at $11. As for entrees, you can get a vegetable plate for $16, but otherwise they start at $21 for roast chicken and rise to $30 for a Black Angus steak.

Other entrees include lamb shank ($23), one of the Farmhouse's signature dishes, roast duck, and sea scallops. Two vegetable pastas are $22 and $23.

Prix Fixe Choices

With the prix fixe you get a choice of entrees, which vary from day to day, a soup or salad to start your meal, and dessert. The mixed green salad was fine (one of these nights I will wake up and have an epiphany: an exciting way to describe a mixed green salad, but it hasn't happened yet).

The bean soup was rather bland, but after a good dash of salt and pepper it passed muster. The other a la carte starters were a bit more adventurous. A little winter casserole of snails had a powerful sauce of wild mushrooms and Ricard.

This pungent sauce, whose richness was cut by the aromatic Ricard, is just the thing for cold nights, if somewhat filling as a starter.

Good Vegetables

A lighter offering was the salmon tartare, served with a sprinkle of salmon roe and a cool, crisp cucumber salad.

That cucumber salad reminds me to mention that the Farmhouse is good with vegetables. Each entree is accompanied by something different and a lot of thought obviously goes into the combinations.

The horseradish-crusted salmon was excellent, but even more exciting was the lovely wine-red beet risotto that accompanied it.

Venison, served in a rich wine sauce, is an appropriate dish for this festive season, and the caramelized carrots served with it were outstanding. It was also served with mashed parsnips, whose flavor was delicious even if over-beating had turned them somewhat gluey.

Old-fashioned comfort food arrived in the form of roast chicken, which was suffused with rosemary flavor and accompanied by good mashed potatoes and a garlicky gravy.

Not so exciting was the striped bass, and this was the only dish whose accompaniments didn't excel - the saffron Israeli couscous was pallid and had that slight shudder component of tapioca.

We finished our meal - and lingered, because we could hear each other's conversations - with chocolate pudding and a selection of delicate homemade sorbets.

The prix fixe, as mentioned before, is a good value, the decor and atmosphere are warm and charming, they seem to have fixed the noise problem that once existed, and the service was delightful. Otherwise, however, the prices at the Farmhouse are a little on the high side for food that is generally good, but not exceptional.