Greenport thumbs nose at recession

1. Go to a bar and order a Fine and Dandy.

2. Watch the ultimate screwball comedy, “It Happened One Night.”

3. Read some Dorothy Parker.

Those are the top three Internet suggestions I just found for shaking off The Great Recession. The writer said they should work because they helped people shake off The Great Depression, too.

But there’s another way, which involves gestures of confidence in the future. Maybe not gestures as grand as Warren Buffett’s $34 billion bet on a railroad and, by extension, American commerce, but still acts that are so buoyantly heedless of danger that they appear somewhat zany. Sort of like creating a Nello in Greenport.

Nello is a Manhattan restaurant launched in 1992 by Nello Balan. It was followed in 2005 by Nello Summertimes in Southampton. And now, in a few months, a Nello tentatively dubbed “Seaweed” should be cooking in Greenport.

To some that seems a bit strange. Greenport isn’t a backwater but it’s not exactly Hamptonic (yet). Nello, on the other hand, is all that and then some. “The setting is beautiful, the food is very good and the prices are obscene,” said the lede of Joanne Starkey’s 2005 New York Times review of Nello Summertime, “Long Island’s most expensive restaurant.” She reported choking over the $17 price tag on a dish of mixed berries. On viewing the wine list, one in her party said a cardiologist should be on the staff. And many online commenters note that while the food tends to be excellent, Nello is really about being somebody, being glam and being seen.
So, again: Greenport?

The restaurant is actually part of a two-building project envisioned and bankrolled by Manhattan real estate player Khedouri Ezair and art gallerist Marijana Bego. Adding to the degree of difficulty is the fact that the two buildings are separated by Greenport’s Main Street.

To the east is the restaurant, in the white clapboard building that formerly housed the crêperie Ile de Beauté. To the west is a long-vacant building that’s being gutted to become a nine-room hotel, an art gallery and a Japanese-style cafe also to be run by Balan.

Ambitious? That it is, said Greenport Village Administrator Dave Abatelli. “The hotel they’re virtually rebuilding stick by stick.” Over the two-year planning process, parking issues nearly derailed the whole thing, but now all is go. “They could make it by Memorial Day,” Abatelli ventured.

Ezair went one better. “I assume April or so,” he said.

Ezair is Nello’s landlord in Manhattan, Southampton and now in Greenport. And like the other two locations, Greenport will also host a gallery headed up by Bego. In fact, Ezair credits Bego as the catalyst behind the Greenport venture. She’s excited about it? “Very much so,” he said. “Basically it was her idea. She saw the buildings sitting there empty and said, why not do something?”

It’s all part of a new orientation for the couple.

“I’m a city kid,” Ezair said, having grown up in Queens. And so, he didn’t really know much about the North Fork even after they opened the Southampton location and established a residence there. Now, smitten by the North, the couple has bought the 90-acre former Whitmore Tree Farm in Orient and set up a beachhead there too. “It’s a beautiful place,” Ezair said.
But still hangs the question of restaurant impresario Nello Balan, who’s comfortable offering pasta at $100 a plate, fitting in on the less glitzy North Fork stage. “I don’t think he’ll do what he does in New York and Southampton,” Ezair guessed. “I think he’ll tone it down a little bit.”

On the other hand, noting the rise of upmarket restaurants like Greenport’s Frisky Oyster and Southold’s North Fork Table & Inn, he thinks the North Fork and especially Greenport are becoming serious destinations.

The project’s architect, Peter Wilson of Bridgehampton, agrees. “I think Greenport could eclipse Sag Harbor,” he told me. But still, is it ready for Nello, who is perhaps New York’s most eccentric restaurateur and describes himself as a descendant of Vlad the Impaler?

“Being totally outrageous is part of the cachet,” Wilson said.

Maybe, gulp, we could use a helping of that.

Long Island Business News / November 17, 2009