Hamptons Weekend

I took my very first trip to the Hamptons last weekend. One of my friend's family has a 5 bedroom house in Amagansett so a group of six of us (including the adorable dog Baxter) headed off on the BQE and along the Long Island strip on Thursday night to beat the weekender traffic.

I knew exactly what I wouldn’t like about the Hamptons which is essentially a gated paradise for rich people to play together. It is the least multi-cultural and diverse place one can imagine and I had never seen so many men wearing pink pants and polo shirts with an upturned collar before. It was ridiculous.

However, if you stay out of “the scene”, the Hamptons are very beautiful and a lot more laid back than I anticipated. Every morning we would take the short drive to the Amagansett Farmers Market to get a big cup of coffee and one of their fabulous brioche buns with egg and cheese to be leisurely savoured at one of the tables in the shaded garden. We would also get fresh salad ingredients, bread and cheese for our lunch back at the house later and the rest of the day would be spent either in the gorgeous swimming pool or at the beach.

We would get itchy feet at around 5pm and get ready to go out. The first stop of the night was always Cyril’s, a tiny roadside outdoor bar packed full of people wanting to see and be seen. For us however, the main attraction of Cyril’s stemmed from the large, strong and frankly yummy cocktails they create. The B.B.C (Banana Baileys Colada) in particular is worth the trip alone and with a rum floater on top, we would all be tipsy enough to engage in some serious car karaoke after just one on our way to dinner! Luckily for us, the one man in our party was happy to be our designated driver for the entire weekend - yes, he’s a keeper!

My favourite evening was on Friday night, when after our usual pit stop at Cyril’s, we headed to The Lobster Deck in Montauk. There we had what was probably was one of the best lobsters I’ve ever had while watching the sun set slowly over a completely calm sea and the pink, orange and yellow tones of the skies only seemed to accentuate the bright red shell of the lobster.

Spending weekends at the Hamptons is most definitely a New York rite of passage. Many people buy into share houses for the entire summer (at often exorbitant costs) and so it is a little like the entire crowd you would normally find on an average Saturday night in the Meat Packing district magically teletransported themselves there to form a weird but wonderful "Manhattan on Sea" ...