When we arrived at the North Fork Table and Inn, quite ready for a glass of wine after a day of shopping at the outlets (we did very well), the bar was already crowded with folks drinking cocktails—there’s one perfect for summer made from prosecco and strawberry sorbet ($10)—and swapping plates of butter poached shelled lobster ($36) and bowls of silky potato leek soup hiked up with hickory smoked bacon and black pepper sour cream ($10). We had a few glasses of the Lieb blanc de blanc sparkling wine ($16.50, YIKES!, but fabulous) and moved to the dining room, to tables set with white tablecloths, tall stemware, and wide Frette linen napkins. Frette in the North Fork? Alert the media!

The dining room is simply and warmly done, with a dropped ceiling, and the original (slightly slanted) floors finished a dark walnut brown, a nice contrast to cream-colored walls lit with double sconces. The cozy bar area also has dark wood floors but it’s got these amazing wood-beamed ceilings that date back to the 18th century that were uncovered in the renovation.

Dinner was exceptional, which makes sense because Hayden is cooking all of it—every single dish—with the help of one guy, his old sous-chef Jose Lavirega. Gerry’s still got it. Local fluke is sheared into shimmering slices and draped over bright puckery grapefruit supremes. It is sprinkled with Hawaiian sea salt that woke everything up with a happy shout. There’s nothing else to it, and it’s perfect. A bowl of asparagus risotto was just pure edible spring—and was cooked so it was creamy but still maintained the integrity of the grains of rice. It was finished with lemon essence (more please) and Parmegiano Reggiano ($14). The roasted beets, gathered from local farmstands, were quite possibly the most gorgeous expression of that humble root I have ever experienced. They beets are sweet and earthy and come in all different colors—blood red, sunny yellow, blushing pink. They are sliced into coins, into wedges and slivers, and tossed with tangy bits of crumbled local Catapano Farm’s goat cheese, salty toasted pistachios and a nice sherry wine vinaigrette.

Entrees were uniformly wonderful. Weakfish (also known as ocean trout) is served with a crispy skin capping moist and flaky white flesh ($25). It sits in a great puddle of tomato-fennel broth that reminded me of bouillabaisse, and that was bobbing with firm sweet peas, tiny pasta, and tender slices of fennel. A small dollop of parsley pesto crowned the fish’s skin, a final touch that gave the dish an extra hit of zip. I loved it. The Berkshire pork ($26) comes two ways—a loin wrapped in smoked bacon and a nice big hunk of cumin-braised fresh bacon.—with a mess of sweet smoky honey-glazed onions, a hill of soft white polenta, and a mound of wilted spinach. It was homey and smoky and addictively good, like a dish from a North Carolina barbecue that had moved up north by mistake; like something that required a Gingham napkin, not one made from Italian linen. The Colorado rack of lamb ($37) is served with a few dense sheep’s milk ricotta gnocchi and a generous smattering of chanterelles in a glossy lamb jus. While this dish was quite pricey, it was also quite terrific. Three chops were pink and juicy and so tender I could have eaten them with a baby’s spoon. I used a knife and fork, but I picked up the bone with my fingers when I couldn’t get at the last bits and nibbled (read: gnawed) them off before passing the plate over to Jamie so she could have one too.

Desserts—need I even say this?—were quite awesome. Some of them, like the coconut tapioca and the buttermilk panna cotta, will ring familiar bells from Claudia’s days at Gramercy Tavern and her cookbook, The Last Course. Claudia’s peach cobbler is served upside down: buttery caramelized slices of rosy-pink edged peaches resting on little feet of buttery cobbler pastry with cream cheese (oh my) ice cream ($9). Her rustic apricot-cherry tart is so light it tastes almost spa-like, topped with chopped hazelnuts with a tart yogurt sorbet ($8). But there was nothing spa-like about the chocolate caramel tart, with caramel ice cream ($9), what Jamie brilliantly coined an adult Milky Way. It is an oversized shallow circular tart, the size of a small Frisbee, with a glossy layer of dark chocolate concealing warm salty caramel in the center that oozes out onto your fork as you slice into it. Caramel ice cream is just a crazy bit of excess that makes it ridiculous fun, what a dessert should be.

It was still raining when we left the North Fork Table and Inn. And as I write this, at my kitchen table in Greenport on a gray Sunday morning, with Jamie and Michelle in the living room reading the New York Times, the rain is still coming down, and I am thinking back to the first time I came to Greenport. It was about seven years ago now (a fact I cannot seem to believe), and my boyfriend at the time and I were visiting friends of ours in Sag Harbor and we ended up on their boat, heading to Sunset Beach for brunch. We jumped out of the boat to swim to shore and as we walked up to the restaurant I noticed a trail of blood on the sand. “Honey, I don’t mean to alarm you but it seems your leg is bleeding.” He looked down at the blood dripping down his shin, and shook it off, “Oh, hmm, well it’s just an ankle lac (he was trying to be cool about it), probably hit it on the prop of the boat.” But soon, after I tried to stop the bleeding with a Sunset Beach dinner napkin (I was trying to be very Florence Nightingale), we realized it was not just a surface cut, this one was deep. Reluctantly, he agreed that we should call an ambulance to get it sewn up. We waited on the beach together, laughing at the situation—my hand pressing hard against the cut to keep it from gushing too much—and soon an ambulance pulled up and took us not to a hospital on Shelter Island (they don’t have one), but by ferry to a place I had never heard of; a place called Greenport.

We spent the afternoon in the Eastern Long Island Hospital ER, in our soggy suits waiting for someone to stitch up his leg. It was not the afternoon we had planned. But we made the best of it, keeping warm with body heat (we were in the crazy about you stage, a stage we stayed in for quite a nice run) and making a lovely lunch of ER vending machine snacks—M&Ms, pretzels, and potato chips. A few hours later, while they were stitching him up, I took a walk outside and wondered about this little village on the bay, with wide streets lined in Cape Codders, old Victorians, and Colonials. How sweet, I thought. About a half an hour later he was all fixed up and we asked them to call a cab for us to get back to Sag Harbor. “Cab?” they laughed. “No, you can’t take a cab to Sag Harbor from here, it will cost you a hundred dollars! You have to take the ferry back across.” “Huh?” I had no idea what they were talking about, no sense of where in the world we were. We called our friends and they said, yes, that we had to come back across the water, that it would take too long to drive around to the South Fork from the North Fork. We took a cab into the town of Greenport where our friends picked us up in their boat at the dock at Claudio’s. We made it back to Sag Harbor for a hot shower and a great Sunday dinner with enough wine to dull the pain in his leg. All said and done it was a great weekend.

Who knew that a few years later, he and I would heartbreakingly go our separate ways, and that a few years after that I would be spending summers in a house in that quaint little town, just a few blocks from that hospital and that just a mile down the road from that house, a fabulous new restaurant would be opened by two of the city’s great chefs. Funny where life takes you.

The North Fork Table and Inn is located at 57225 Main Road, Southold, 631-765-0177.

Andrea Strong