The Social Distancing Memo Finally Reaches the Hamptons. Now What?
If there’s one place you can always count on to run into people you don’t only know but like in the village of Bellport, it’s a little restaurant called quite simply The Bellport. Even before I bought a house in this close-knit Long Island community known as the UnHampton, I felt a part of things when eating there.
Monday was the last night restaurants like it anywhere in New York State could be open for who knows how long—they were closed by order of Governor Andrew Cuomo to slow down the spread of Coronavirus. When I walked in with a few friends an hour before the 8 p.m. closing deadline, the place was filled with just enough people to be festive without feeling crowded. We decided not to join three friends at the next table (one a party planner in a good mood because she had just found a private yoga teacher in the area) to keep a proper distance.
“Welcome to the last supper,” our waitress said. We introduced her to a visitor and she stuck her hand out to shake his as if it were still late February. “I’m handling money and drinks and plates all night, do you really think anything makes a difference?” she said before taking our order.
She had a point, even if the rest of us have been bumping elbows, hips and everything else for the last week and a half. What does make a difference now? Is total isolation the norm for the foreseeable future, or are there allowances to be made for close groups of friends?
A Scene Straight Out of Poe
“Stay home,” said Lois Freedman, who managers Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurants, throwing in an expletive for good measure. She told me that their restaurants had been closed for days, well in advance of the state-wide shutdown. Eric Ripert also closed his restaurant, Le Bernardin, and told Bon Appetit it was a moral issue that he, Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud all came to agree about.
If high-end restaurants had been slowing down for a couple weeks in Manhattan, the memo didn’t reach the East End of Long Island until the very end of last week, when the first reported case of Coronavirus had suddenly squashed a strangely giddy dining scene enlivened by people who had fled the city and were planning on sticking around for a while. Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton remained busy and open late, offering for those who don’t drink its CosNOpolitan.
“I had people waiting for dinner seats at the bar,” Zach Erdem, the owner of 75 Main told the New York Post about the days before the end. “And that never happens this time of year.”
It reminded me of the quip last week by a city friend who asked, “Why is it that even though the governor has declared a health emergency I can’t get a table at a good restaurant?”
Now all that is ancient history. Even Candace Bushnell, self-quarantined after a recent trip to see elephants and freaked-out mask wearing passengers in airports and flights, is in for the duration. “We are all laying low,” she wrote from Sag Harbor. “I don’t know anyone having friends over or seeing them except to go for a walk and keep six feet apart.”
And it seems like another lifetime, too, when I attended the Armory Fair and not one but three shows in theaters the first weekend in March. At one of them a young usher in Broadway’s smallest house told me that she wasn’t worried about getting sick.
“You can’t be in a bubble,” she said. “You have to enjoy your life.” Of course, that was before an usher at Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? became Broadway’s patient zero, but for better or worse that’s what I did this past weekend in Bellport.
I joined for late night drinks at the home of a lively designer who was so close I could feel his breath on my face but I didn’t know how to ask him to back off in his own home. I attended a dinner party even though a good friend who works in retail told me he wasn’t going because he was social distancing. I thought that sounded uptight until the party filled up with enough people to make me think about “The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allen Poe’s story about a prince and his noble crowd who flee the city during a plague.
They give a costume ball in an abbey that doesn’t end well. I thought about Albert Camus and his novel, “The Plague,” too. “Stupidity has a way of getting its way,” he wrote.
"No Touching Please"
My Sunday morning greeted me with a scratchy throat that could have been allergies or something far worse and a dose of throbbing regret more painful than any hangover. And yet, there was too much fresh fish and seafood in my refrigerator on Sunday not to cook dinner for friends. We were only five in total, an unusually small group, including one, a French banker who jumped back and held up both arms when I foolishly tried to air kiss her hello.
“No touching please,” she said without so much as a smile.
By then I was in no position to be surprised let alone offended. The irony of all this is that according to Dr. Jonathan Kanter of the University of Washington, we are all biologically hard-wired to seek each other out during times of stress. In Monday’s Times he told a reporter he worries about the long-term impact of social isolation on both the sick and the healthy.
I’m lucky that will never be a real problem.
@thebellportrestaurant in town #feelslikefall #bellport #bellportvillage
A post shared by Bellport Village (@bellport_village) on Oct 26, 2019 at 4:57am PDT
The extra camaraderie and bonhomie at The Bellport on Monday night did provide me with joy. Ernest Hemingway or even Charles Bukowski would have been at home with the cluster of friends at the bar having a long, loving last round of drinks and slapping each other’s backs like teammates or schoolmates at a reunion. (A McSweeney's parody made the rounds on social media this week precisely because it imagined this sort of literary fantasy.)
“Don’t do that, it’s not allowed,” our waitress said from behind the bar.
Taylor Alonso, the owner (and a great guitar player, whose Thursday night jams at the restaurant are now on hiatus), seemed buoyant even though he wasn’t sure what was next for him.
“Bad things don’t bother me,” he said with a shrug. What he meant, I think, is that he could handle anything after living through the long, hard death of his beloved wife, the chic and charismatic Patricia Trainor, who died a few years ago and was Bellport’s unofficial mayor and matriarch.
“Worse things than this can happen and we’ll just have to see how it goes,” he said.
As for me and my little escape town, I’m going to make an effort from now on to make dates with friends for walks or bike rides, an ideal social activity as the weather warms. If I do entertain, it will be for a small and familiar “quarantine circle” of friends I’ve already been seeing, which isn’t totally sensible but makes life bearable after too many time-out days.
I’ll serve Manhattans with artisanal cherries and call them Quaran-tinis and I’ll be appreciative of my privilege and in good company with my friend Toni Ross, of Nick & Toni’s, who wrote me that beach walks and wooded hikes are a saving grace for her.
And if someone raises a hand and wags a finger at me for continuing to enjoy friends from an allowable distance, I’ll do the only reasonable thing and ask if that hand had been washed with soap and water.
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