Dan's Papers - August 29, 2008

We are just so lucky to be on the East End of Long Island. You can easily become jaded about having free access to so many things that so few people may ever experience, or may experience only once or twice in a lifetime.

One of those luxuries is waterfront dining. I love a picnic on the beach, listening to the crash of the waves, smelling the salt air, feeling the warm or cool breeze. But I so much prefer sitting in a lovely setting and being waited on and served nice food on plates, without sand (not to mention, without any of the prep or clean up work).

Fortunately, here on the East End, we have a good deal of waterfront dining options. One of them is the Saltwater Grill, nestled right on Dune Road in Westhampton Beach in the Dune Deck Beach Resort. With the bay on one side and the ocean on the other - enough said.

The Saltwater Grill is set up with individual white cabanas on a boardwalk, right on the dune. Within those cabanas are casual picnic tables - but with white table linens and navy/white striped bench pads. It feels oh so civilized.

And the view is lovely over the dune grass. When the sun set last Thursday, the bay side sky was awash in baby blue and pink.

Saltwater has a small but good wine list of basic standards, and a kids menu with three choices. Despite its elegant setting, the restaurant is very causal and chid friendly.

The menu is seafood heavy - as it should be - with a few standard non-fish items like chicken, skirt steak and a 14-ounce sirloin on the wood grill (the latter is the priciest menu item, at $30.00). Beyond that, the main courses come down to a good selection of grilled fish - sword, tuna, halibut, salmon. The night we went, I ordered the $24.99 Thursday special: 1 1/4 lb. lobster dinner, served with veggie rice (rice with diced vegetables like carrots, zucchini) corn, a couple steamers and a nice little pile of mussels, both cooked in a spicy, peppery broth - a nice departure from your typical garlic/wine/parsley combo. Like so many lobster bakes/boils, the focus here is on the big crustacean, rightfully so, and the lobster was cooked perfectly. I love the fixin's for a lobster dinner, but the corn and rice were just too overcooked for my taste.

Another side dish option is garlic mashed potatoes - a better choice that my dining companion tried with her grilled swordfish, which was fresh, delicate, and delicious. The grilled items at Saltwater come with a sauce of your choice: chimichurri, Cajun, garlic/herb. We went with a mild red pepper/mango salsa that was nice and fresh, and didn't overpower the fish.

We tried two salads, one of which was a stroke of genius. In the "Grilled" Caesar, a half a head of romaine is actually slapped, cut side down, on the wood grill. It added a really unusual, and delicious, dimension to this staple. It was topped with a layer of skinny parmesan sticks. Really good. We also tried the summer greens salad, which felt more like a fall salad with spinach, beet and a few other greens, plus poached pears, walnuts, gorgonzola, dried cranberries. Whatever the season, this is a great salad.

We tried one appetizer: tempura green beans with mustard sauce. Whole green beans fried in a tempura batter were juicy and crispy, and made you feel a little less guilty than if you'd ordered mozzarella sticks.

Of the desserts, we tried Snowball in Hell. A rich vanilla ice cream coated with toasted coconut, in a puddle of melted fudge. Good? Let's just say that anything in that bowl would have a snowball's chance in hell of remaining there.