I used to work as a copywriter for USA Today, often on these idiotic special sections of every sort (travel, technology, sports, even business—I was the definitive jack-of-all-trades). For the life of me I don’t know how I kept the job as long as I did. At a daily newspaper, there were all sorts of tedious deadlines.
The most annoying was when we used have to send out a page or an ad over the satellite, and seeing that we were always the least important section in the paper, our 10- to 15-minute satellite-beam window was always on Thursday night at 9 p.m. Annoyingly, our sections always ran in Friday’s paper for the weekend circulation bump. Invariably, we’d finish around 6 or 7 p.m., then the art director and I would go for drinks somewhere. (Methinks she won’t want her name here, but, hello!) And sure enough we’d be laughing away and all of a sudden it was 8:50 and we’d go racing back laughing and scared we were going to lose our jobs.
I admit my self-indulgent incompetence in this arena as a way of explaining why I am reviewing the best Hamptons entertaining secret of the year too late for any of you to benefit from it.It was the Hamptons Nobu “pop-up” setting at the Ross School in East Hampton, which I attended on closing night, and if you have any entertaining to do next year, pray to the gods that they do it again. (Nobu was at Ross for two weekends this summer. The dinners were billed as a fund-raiser for the school, though management hinted that the restaurant was testing the waters for future Nobu events in the area.)
It was sublime—the food was just as good as it is in New York, with the noteworthy absence of rock shrimp, which I assume had something to do with not having a proper fryer, but how can there be a Nobu without rock shrimp?
The school setting turned out to be perfect. The cafeteria was the main dining room, and the classrooms served as private shoji dens. (My friend Susan spotted a shoeless Gwyneth Paltrow in one. It was too dark to tell you anything about her feet.) The price was a flat $250 a head (or $100 a head for the right to hang out in the outdoor lounge for drinks and passed food), which at first seemed steep, but you get as much food as you want (all-you-can-eat Nobu!), and drinks and wine are also included. At the end of a long and slightly sloppy night, we decided it was a bargain.
Nobu special events are run by Anne Yamamoto, a pretty and tireless worker who keeps her head when all around her are losing theirs (including me—she was the point person for me when I worked on Robert De Niro’s wedding, which was produced very quickly, rendering me almost impossible to deal with). She reluctantly gave me a quote: “People are saying they are treated better here than anywhere else in the Hamptons.” I concur.
But wait, didn’t I say “slightly sloppy”? There was one marring factor that can’t be overlooked. We had booked a taxi service to and from Quogue for the night, and Linda, a very colorful, full-figured gal, dropped us off and warned us that if we were going to change our return time, we'd better call it in early. Sho nuff, an hour before our call time came up, we still had not gotten our first course. (We had happily taken our time and a tour; the service was timely, impeccable, and—best of all—still friendly.) So I recused myself to what I thought was a private area, where I conducted a lengthy (and apparently hearable) unsuccessful negotiation to schedule a later pickup.
Suddenly I was approached by a beautiful woman who said the restaurant would be delighted to send me home in one of their Porsches (with a driver, of course—no DeeWees for me, no siree), so I hung up on the dispatcher with no politesse and went back to my table.
After we had eaten and drunk ourselves into gluttony, we heard, “Oh, we don’t go as far as Quogue.” Well, I remain convinced that a bigger V.I.P. had simply needed the car more (maybe taking off her shoes made Gwynnie tipsy). Somehow, Anne managed to sweet-talk the taxi company to resend Linda (we had tipped largely for just the reason), who arrived in her pajamas an hour later. By that time we were overserved and were poured into the car, making a final and new-to-me late-night drive-through pit stop at the Indian Reservation for Nat Shermans and tasty-at-the-time (nonalcoholic) piña coladas.
Guess who wasn’t fresh as a daisy in the morning with coconut breath?
The most annoying was when we used have to send out a page or an ad over the satellite, and seeing that we were always the least important section in the paper, our 10- to 15-minute satellite-beam window was always on Thursday night at 9 p.m. Annoyingly, our sections always ran in Friday’s paper for the weekend circulation bump. Invariably, we’d finish around 6 or 7 p.m., then the art director and I would go for drinks somewhere. (Methinks she won’t want her name here, but, hello!) And sure enough we’d be laughing away and all of a sudden it was 8:50 and we’d go racing back laughing and scared we were going to lose our jobs.
I admit my self-indulgent incompetence in this arena as a way of explaining why I am reviewing the best Hamptons entertaining secret of the year too late for any of you to benefit from it.It was the Hamptons Nobu “pop-up” setting at the Ross School in East Hampton, which I attended on closing night, and if you have any entertaining to do next year, pray to the gods that they do it again. (Nobu was at Ross for two weekends this summer. The dinners were billed as a fund-raiser for the school, though management hinted that the restaurant was testing the waters for future Nobu events in the area.)
It was sublime—the food was just as good as it is in New York, with the noteworthy absence of rock shrimp, which I assume had something to do with not having a proper fryer, but how can there be a Nobu without rock shrimp?
The school setting turned out to be perfect. The cafeteria was the main dining room, and the classrooms served as private shoji dens. (My friend Susan spotted a shoeless Gwyneth Paltrow in one. It was too dark to tell you anything about her feet.) The price was a flat $250 a head (or $100 a head for the right to hang out in the outdoor lounge for drinks and passed food), which at first seemed steep, but you get as much food as you want (all-you-can-eat Nobu!), and drinks and wine are also included. At the end of a long and slightly sloppy night, we decided it was a bargain.
Nobu special events are run by Anne Yamamoto, a pretty and tireless worker who keeps her head when all around her are losing theirs (including me—she was the point person for me when I worked on Robert De Niro’s wedding, which was produced very quickly, rendering me almost impossible to deal with). She reluctantly gave me a quote: “People are saying they are treated better here than anywhere else in the Hamptons.” I concur.
But wait, didn’t I say “slightly sloppy”? There was one marring factor that can’t be overlooked. We had booked a taxi service to and from Quogue for the night, and Linda, a very colorful, full-figured gal, dropped us off and warned us that if we were going to change our return time, we'd better call it in early. Sho nuff, an hour before our call time came up, we still had not gotten our first course. (We had happily taken our time and a tour; the service was timely, impeccable, and—best of all—still friendly.) So I recused myself to what I thought was a private area, where I conducted a lengthy (and apparently hearable) unsuccessful negotiation to schedule a later pickup.
Suddenly I was approached by a beautiful woman who said the restaurant would be delighted to send me home in one of their Porsches (with a driver, of course—no DeeWees for me, no siree), so I hung up on the dispatcher with no politesse and went back to my table.
After we had eaten and drunk ourselves into gluttony, we heard, “Oh, we don’t go as far as Quogue.” Well, I remain convinced that a bigger V.I.P. had simply needed the car more (maybe taking off her shoes made Gwynnie tipsy). Somehow, Anne managed to sweet-talk the taxi company to resend Linda (we had tipped largely for just the reason), who arrived in her pajamas an hour later. By that time we were overserved and were poured into the car, making a final and new-to-me late-night drive-through pit stop at the Indian Reservation for Nat Shermans and tasty-at-the-time (nonalcoholic) piña coladas.
Guess who wasn’t fresh as a daisy in the morning with coconut breath?
