East Magazine

Once upon a time on the East End, grown-ups hosted or attended dinner parties every single week. For the parents of Nina Dohanos — a Sag Harbor food blogger and accomplished home cook, herself — that meant dreaming up more than 100 dinner parties back in the 1970s. Using a family notebook as her guide, she re-created a marvelous meal from the summer of 1973, down to the heirloom checkered tablecloth...

These horses aren’t here anymore. But you might remember them? They used to live at Cove Hollow, gamboling and grazing in the green meadow of the farm on your left as you drive into East Hampton Village, a glimpse of an agricultural past that some of us make a point of quickly turning to glance at — a split-second hit, a micro-respite from the modern day — before we turn back to cursing the crowds and the nagging of the iPhone alerts and the price of gas.

Nina Dohanos, a Sag Harbor food blogger, recreated an heirloom menu as a throwback to the days of dinner parties hosted by her parents, Peter and Marlys Dohanos.

Green Bean and Shallot Salad

Perfect at room temperature or cold from the fridge!

Ingredients:
2 lb. clean, local green beans
2 medium shallots, finely diced

During the war, soldiers and sailors took R&R on China Beach, just north of Da Nang. One of the men who remembers it well is Joseph Giannini of Montauk, who attained the rank of captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. Here, his memories of days of combat and days of waves.

A taste-test of locally produced spicy sauces and South Fork Srirachas.

Jess Damuck of Shelter Island is making waves coast-to-coast as a food and prop stylist, producer, writer, and self-proclaimed “salad freak.”

Rare antique clothing and vintage fabrics require care and clever storage. Colette Gilbert picks up a few tips as she traces a thread between a Revolutionary War–era textile artist named Prudence Punderson and the contemporary couture house of Amy Zerner — revealing an East Hampton tradition of needlework and female artistry.

How do we want to eat this summer? Inspired by "Salad Freak," a cool new cookbook by Jess Damuck, a Shelter Island girl made good, our menu will be fresh, fast, fun (and full of folic acid!).

Away from the bustle, on just under seven acres in a bucolic corner of Springs, is Duck Creek — the surprising little arts center doing big things.

Two beloved East End businesses have come together on a collaboration that is sure to be a very chill hit this summer: a specialty cinnamon-doughnut-spiked coffee ice cream, combining Dreesen’s Famous Donuts with John’s Drive-In’s ice cream.

Amanda Green, daughter of a legendary Broadway family and part-timer in Springs, has a hit of her own right now with "Mr. Saturday Night," starring Billy Crystal.

There’s a room on the lower level of the Suffolk County Historical Society building that holds an artifact that was once revered in local history. On display here is an object made out of cloth, stitched by hand, and preserved, tightly pressed under glass. It measures 41.5 inches by 28.5 inches and consists of 13 white six-pointed stars on a blue canton, with seven bars of red and six white. It’s constructed out of homespun, a worsted wool, with the stars made out of cotton muslin. It is known as the Hulbert flag because it was found stashed in the rafters of a Bridgehampton barn that was owned long ago by a man named John Hulbert.

When you think of vodka’s origins, it’s likely what comes to mind is some hardscrabble Polish steppe or an inhospitable Siberian plain. After all, the word vodka comes from the Russian translation of water: voda. Certainly, an unlikely association of this distilled spirit’s provenance would be the verdant and eye-wateringly expensive village of Sagaponack.

Manoucher Yektai was stubborn about his aspirations.

From an early age he believed he possessed something of significance, something the world needed. He spoke of that belief all his life. It drove him as a youthful poet and inexperienced painter from tradition-bound Iran in the 1940s, and continued to animate him and provide powerful direction as he navigated the art worlds of Paris, New York, and eastern Long Island. His whole life was an endeavor to meet his colossal self-imposed expectations, and he presented no shortage of hubris when it came to his ability to do so.

For a Hanukkah sweet, we propose a homemade donut that touches on two traditions: beloved jelly-stuffed sufganiyot and the homespun crullers fried up in East Hampton kitchens since colonial days. Here, a recipe — and advice for fearful friers — adapted from an ORIGINAL column by Florence Fabricant published in The Star in 1975.

Times have changed, as has terminology. What was once called a spritzer or a mocktail is sometimes now called a “soft cocktail” by the internet blogeratti. Call it whatever makes you and your guests happy. What really matters is that there’s something for everyone.

Last year, Robert Longo, like so many of his New York City peers, was a full-time resident in his weekend house here, improvising studio space in a basement, which he called “a storm of chaos,” while he waited to move into another house in Northwest.

In the midst of the pandemic, he was organizing “All for the Hall,” a benefit exhibition for Guild Hall, recruiting his friends to donate work and finding an eager artistic community ready to give back when it was so urgently needed.

Search #womenofweed on Instagram and an image pops up that could, at first glance, be mistaken for teatime at grandma’s. Captioned “High Tea,” the photo is an explosion of pink: floral wall paper, delicate bone china, and blooming peonies scattered about. Look closely though and you’ll see there are other buds — dried and green — on the table, as well as a feminine hand holding a spliff.

Tempers flare and face-slapping breaks out when East Enders’ conversation turns to egg sandwiches. We are committing a social crime tantamount to treason by suggesting what we’re about to suggest, but here we go.

Sorry, egg sandwich. You heard it here: the Morning Taco from Carissa's Bakery beats all.

“What a hell of a man a man could become,” John Steinbeck wrote in The Winter of Our Discontent, the novel that cemented the Nobel Prize committee’s decision to award him the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature. Read between the lines and New Baytown, the book’s fictitious setting, starts to look a lot like Sag Harbor, where he lived while writing it.

The East End is chockablock with yoga classes, some led by legends you may recognize from the cover of Yoga Journal. We all have our favorites, and out of loyalty to the many don’t often choose to throw the spotlight on just one specific teacher or class. But we’re making an exception for YOGA + SOUNDS + ART, because it is less a yoga class than a happening. Yogini Ashley McGee runs the scene every Sunday morning at 10:45, through October. 

Yoga class as a garden of delights — art and sitar, ocean air and CBD.

Unlike fiberglass, unchanging and inert, wood flexes and moves, it must be cared for, and it is temporal, decaying ever so slowly with anything less than the best of care. Trent Preszler’s exceedingly limited-edition canoes deserve that sort of care. Each is built to order in his North Fork woodshop and takes about a year to complete, give or take. 

Seaweed farming is the fastest growing aquaculture sector, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and shellfish farmers, conservationists, East Hampton Town, and New York State are taking action. Companion bills in the State Senate and Assembly would permit kelp cultivation in underwater lands at Gardiner’s and Peconic Bays, and allow Suffolk County to lease underwater lands for that purpose.

Brenda Simmons became a curator while working at Southampton Village Hall — commissioning school kids to create art for Black History Month. Now, she's the director of a new African American cultural museum.

From EAST magazine: An Excerpt From Amanda M. Fairbanks’s "The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown and the Four Men Who Vanished at Sea and the Survivors They Left Behind."

Cat burglars stole $375K in jewels from the tenor’s house in 1920.

Editor’s Note: To protect the identity and privacy of individuals the author knew when he was involved in the group in question, members’ names have been changed. East reached out to Sharon Gans and the School, but they declined to comment.

Michael Combs was going to be a plumber, or perhaps work on a New York City tugboat, like his dad. He was learning plumbing in high school in the 1980s in Greenport, and a skill in the trades promised job security and income. He’d grown up among baymen, market gunners, and hunting guides — hunters, foragers, and fishermen, many of whom were also, by need and nature, artists: decoy-carvers, lure-makers, self-sufficient men and women who could fix or build most anything. Young Combs watched and learned.

An action list for every household on the East End. Because, duh!, it’s time to take personal responsibility for the climate emergency