East End Eats: Lunch At Kipling's

The building on Bridgehampton's Main Street which houses Kipling's should receive the architectural bloopers award. But duck in through a door off the depressing atrium and you find yourself in a cozy hangout reminiscent of a Seventh Avenue Irish bar, but without the smoke.

If you're in the mood for an inexpensive grassroots lunch, welcomed by a cheerful bartender instead of a frosty maitre d'hotel, Kipling's may be for you.

It offers the kind of basic staples that you will find across America, from Duluth to Des Moines - burgers and sandwiches, a touch of Southwest and a smidgen of Italian, food that's filling and fattening and comforting.

The decor is informal - bare wooden tables, paper napkins, and paintings that were probably done by the owner's aunt - and the service is friendly and kinda leisurely.

From among the appetizers, which range in price from $3.75 for onion soup to $7.95 for a jumbo shrimp cocktail, we tried the fried mushrooms, ale-battered onion rings, and chili cheddar nachos. The mushrooms, which were served with a horseradish dip, were breaded and deep-fried and disappeared in seconds.

The onion rings were crisp but proportionately too much batter and too little onion. The nachos are strictly for the hungry and strong-stomached, being made with canned beans and presenting such a weighty mass that the table legs trembled.

On to the entrees, which start at $6.50 for a hamburger and stop at $11.95 for a sirloin steak sandwich.

We gave the steak sandwich a try and recommend it highly - the steak was well-seasoned and of good quality, cooked rare as requested, and came with a good bread that didn't disintegrate as soon as you took a bite.

The crab cakes, at a reasonable $10.95, may not be as classy as some you can get on the East End, but they were crisp and tasty and generally received a thumbs-up.

The fish and chips was your standard breaded flounder and french fries. It was perfectly okay, but although flounder is obviously so easy to cook, cod - surely no more expensive to buy - would have been so much more interesting.

We tried both the grilled chicken breast and the grilled chicken with salad. The former was moist and served with excellent cottage fries, obviously made from scratch. The coleslaw, which came with most dishes, was also very good, being a nice mixture of red and green cabbage with a light mayonnaise dressing.

The chicken which came with the salad, however, was a bit too dry and we had to call for more dressing to spice up the green stuff.

Kipling's serves three types of individual pizzas - cheese, pepperoni, and broccoli, cheese, and garlic. The basic cheese is $5.95 and a very good buy. The generous helping appeared to have at least two different cheeses, wasn't greasy and, most important, came with a crisp, sturdy crust and tasted very good.

The only daily special we tried, and the only real miss of the meal, was a hot pork sandwich on rye bread. It was "special" in that the thinly sliced pork was tasteless and as dry as a bone - imagine eating two pieces of rye bread filled with shredded fax paper and you've got it.

We only tried one dessert - the Mississippi mud pie - and found it quite outstandingly good. The coffee, too, was way above the standard of most cafe coffee.

Kipling's location is certainly one of the more bizarre around, but a careful note should be made of any place here where you can eat in friendly and inexpensive comfort. So what better way to end than by a repetition of a hoary old joke that will keep Kipling's in your mind:

Courteous literary gent to flighty young woman, "Do you like Kipling, my dear?" "I don't know, I've never tried it."