East End Eats: Shagwong

Let's just cut through the verbiage and get to what matters - the Shagwong Restaurant in Montauk serves what is surely the best rack of lamb on the East End.

Cooked in a grain mustard crust with a Bordelaise sauce, the tender meat is carefully separated from the bone, leaving a span of eight tiny ribs to cut up and eat with your fingers.

It's worth every penny of $21, salad or appetizer included, and you'll find the hallucinatory trip across Napeague with headlights in your eyes has been worth it.

The menu mentions that Shagwong serves Zebrowski's Bridgehampton potatoes, and the mashed potatoes that accompanied the lamb were outstandingly good. Is praise owing to the chef for this, or does Hank Zebrowski creep out at midnight and sprinkle his spud plants with some secret soul-of-potato elixir?

The Shagwong is known as a bar (I am told there is an excellent, inexpensive bar menu) as well as a restaurant, but the two are well separated.

Even on Super Bowl Sunday, the bar impinged only insofar as some diners kept wandering off to cheer for the Broncos instead of concentrating on their reviewing duties.

As this is East Hampton Town's 350th anniversary year, it's worth mentioning that the restaurant's walls are decorated with a wonderful collection of old photographs - dirigibles, early Montauk pictures, giant fish catches, turn-of-the-century portraits. . . .

The evening got off to a good start with hummus and warm bread whose crust managed to have a bell-like crispness yet didn't shred your gums when you bit into it. The house red, a merlot/cabernet sauvignon mix, was good, and reasonable.

All entrees come with a salad or choice of a number of appetizers, or a choice can be made among a la carte appetizers such as clams and oysters on the half shell, steamed mussels, shrimp cocktail, or cornmeal-fried calamari.

Full Of Pep

The potato leek soup was very good; the New England clam chowder was rather disappointing, short on both clams and flavor.

Maybe the Montauk mollusks preferred to be in the clams casino, which were light, tasty, and full of pep.

High marks go to the salad of field greens with blue cheese and walnut vinaigrette - a lively, refreshing wake-up call to the palate.

Fussy Lambert

One of our regular diners is one of those fussy eaters who can drive a busy waiter to teeth-grinding. Lambert always wants his dressing on the side and his fish done just so, and always wants to substitute one thing for another.

On this occasion he wanted his walnut dressing without the blue cheese, and he wanted olive oil, with plenty of chopped garlic in it, instead of butter.

Lambert's requests were met promptly, and with a smile.

"So very helpful," he said, cauterizing his taste buds with raw garlic.

The Price Is Right

Entrees at the Shagwong range from $12 for a vegetable platter to $22 for a 20-ounce T-bone steak, but most are $20 or under.

There is a daily low-fat dish and a prix-fixe special, on this occasion Tandoori chicken with an appetizer and dessert for $14.95.

As you can tell, the prices are very reasonable.

The seafood provencale was a beautiful eyeful of a dish with monkfish, scallops, olives, and shrimp served over linguine and studded with baby mussels in their shells.

Skip The Shrimp

The fact that it wasn't quite as good as it looked was because the shrimp were tasteless.

Now, we know shrimp come out of the ocean (remember that disgusting song "Shrimp Boats Are A'Comin' "?), but do you think they are intermarrying them with polystyrene chips these days?

Because that's what they taste like.

The baked stuffed jumbo shrimp dish, on the other hand, was delicious.

Why? Because they were seasoned, stuffed, wrapped in bacon, and served with scampi sauce, that's why.

The chicken saltimbocca is a rich platter of dipped sauteed chicken breast served with prosciutto, capers, and mozzarella cheese over pasta. It's a meal for a hearty appetite and none the worse for that.

Festive Presentation

Two enormous pork chops came in a tasty crust of mustard and Parmesan but were, it has to be said, a little tough.

All the entrees were beautifully presented, with plates decorated with little squiggles of sauce and a scattered confetti of chopped herbs. It probably takes only a few seconds, but it does make such a difference - each plate is a little fiesta for the diner.

By the time dessert arrived, half our team had defected to the bar for the final exciting minutes of the game - which was okay with the rest of us because the chocolate mousse cake was phenomenal and the raspberry and almond torte was pretty darn good, too.

The Shagwong was a surprise, I'll admit it. From the good bread to the pretty presentation to the excellent desserts, not to mention that rack of lamb, it wasn't what we were expecting.

And it's excellent value to boot.