Illustration: Javi Aznarez
Solar isn’t the very first thing you anticipate strolling into Donohue’s. Possibly the final. However the light-dappled eating room, with its giant home windows and adjoining porch, is the brand new Donohue’s, the beach-house Donohue’s, a rustic cousin to town elder. Even Maureen Donohue-Peters, Donohue’s third-generation proprietor, seems to be slightly completely different out right here in a pink psychedelic-print Pucci-style shirt. Final summer season, she opened Donohue’s East in Westhampton Seaside. Had she gone slightly Hamptons herself?
I’m quickly corrected. She is off obligation; the white button-down and black trousers she wore behind the bar and ready tables on Lexington Avenue these previous 47 years are what she wears right here. The enterprise uniform stays unchanged. The look of the place is a far cry from the shut quarters and blood-red tablecloths of the unique, but it surely stays a spot — fairly probably the Hamptons’s solely place — to get chopped steak and a Maryland turkey dinner, a Thanksgiving plate served yr spherical. The neighborhood, she says, welcomed Donohue’s, its metropolis fame previous it. “,” the neighbors advised her, “we want an Irish place.”
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Westhampton Seaside represents a homecoming for Donohue-Peters, who grew up in close by Hampton Bays earlier than Hamptons improvement expanded this far alongside the NY-27 hall. (Longtime Hamptonites will sneer that the East Finish doesn’t even start till Southampton; Donohue-Peters sneers again that she’d by no means go previous Bridgehampton.) However change is coming for Westhampton Seaside — a PopUp Bagels and a Citarella each arrived on the town this summer season — so when a Donohue’s buyer from town approached Donohue-Peters 5 years in the past to contemplate opening right here, she listened cautiously. “I’m prepared to look,” she advised him. “Simply carry a pencil with an eraser.”
The plan at first had been to run each institutions, however extra just lately, in a shock to many followers of the unique, Donohue-Peters determined to surrender her lease and shut it. She says crime was an element (“The way in which town is correct now — I don’t discover security”), though, in keeping with NYPD knowledge, crime within the nineteenth Precinct, the place Donohue’s was situated, has dropped 15 % up to now yr.
Regardless of the motive, the brand new one couldn’t probably replicate the city-room historical past or nicotine patina of the unique. In a metropolis of establishments, Donohue’s was an establishment. Its leather-based cubicles and a mid-century menu that’s hardly been up to date over its many years in enterprise sated and sozzled generations. Mayors and commishes, newsmen after they nonetheless got here stained with ink, ghosts of a metropolis that hardly exists anymore. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary government editor of the New York Occasions, had his personal desk. So did the crew from the Occasions’ upstart heel-nipper, the New York Observer. Homosexual Talese. Nick Pileggi and generally his spouse, Nora Ephron. Sondheim and Stritch. Invoice Bratton then; Jessica Tisch later. Historical past hasn’t smiled on all of its patrons — Bernie Madoff was a daily, as was Matt Lauer — however the Donohue household served everybody the identical. “I’ve by no means had the time of day for folks throwing their weight round,” Donohue-Peters says. The loyalty was mutual: When a loyal common, the “King of Ming” artwork vendor Robert Ellsworth, died in 2014, Maureen and her niece, additionally Maureen, a waitress on the restaurant, have been shocked to study that he’d tipped them $50,000 every in his will.
Donohue’s operated the old school manner. Its 212 telephone quantity was printed on the menu web page and each place mat, reservations have been taken by telephone with pad and pen, solely longtime regulars might get any meals delivered, checks have been written out by hand, and the menu was largely the identical one which Donohue-Peters’s father, Michael, developed within the late ’50s. (It was the uncommon place that would put a run on calf’s liver when it was the day’s particular.) “It’s labored so lengthy for me. Why change?” Donohue-Peters says. She joined the household concern in 1979 — “Nobody within the household needed to work for him, apart from me,” she says, laughing — and after Michael’s loss of life in 2000, she ran the present with a succession of nieces and different family. Most evenings, she’d be behind the bar, mixing up martinis (175 an evening, she estimates) that got here with sidecars — not within the well mannered, mixologist-approved bud-vase-size glassware however in beer pints.
There are extra tables and a bigger kitchen in Westhampton Seaside, however the identical crimson tablecloths, similar pint-glass sidecars, and most of the similar Donohue’s classics are right here. This isn’t the Moby’s Hamptons. Technology Zepbound received’t discover a lot right here to go well with its wants any greater than it might on the unique. “We’ve a ton of salads as a result of everybody’s so weight aware out right here,” Donohue-Peters says skeptically, however there’s baked meatloaf on supply and the specials board nonetheless options numerous steaks. The most well-liked salad is the bacon-and-bleu-cheese wedge, and the brand new additions to the menu embrace loaded potato skins. Donohue’s has by no means brooked meals developments. “We’re beginning breakfast right here, and we’ll do smoked salmon and cream cheese, however that’s so far as we are going to go,” says Mary Barrie, Donohue-Peters’s niece and accomplice.
Although the pair estimate that 30 to 40 % of their clientele within the metropolis spend a while on Lengthy Island, Donohue’s East hasn’t gotten an excessive amount of consideration amid the lamentations surrounding the unique’s finish. (Its last night time of service was June 19.) On a Saturday night time early within the season, as “Candy Caroline” perfumed the eating room, a couple of tables of older households dined early and the place was largely quiet by 10 p.m., although a pair of Sutton Place residents have been shocked to run into their co-op board president on the bar. In the meantime, within the metropolis, would-be successors have swarmed. A number of restaurateurs and restaurant teams expressed curiosity — Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson’s Frenchette Group stated to be amongst them — and whereas the ultimate resolution rests with Donohue-Peters’s landlord, a third-generation member of a real-estate household, she has been providing her opinions, and he or she’ll determine what from the unique restaurant, if something, stays in Manhattan.
She is going to entertain provides on among the unique’s fixtures and furnishings, just like the five-piece mahogany bar her father constructed, although the previous Donohue’s phone, the shillelagh behind the bar, and the ship portray her father liked are coming together with her. As, most vital, is her identify. This summer season, there is just one Donohue’s, which is how issues will stay for the foreseeable future. “We’ve been supplied massive cash for various licensing agreements,” Donohue-Peters says, however she isn’t thinking about promoting. “They’re not allowed to make use of my identify — I’ll sue instantly. My father labored onerous for it. I labored onerous for it.”
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When you desire to learn in print, you too can discover this text within the June 22, 2026, difficulty of
New York Journal.
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When you desire to learn in print, you too can discover this text within the June 22, 2026, difficulty of
New York Journal.