Donohue’s East Is a Manhattan Icon’s Newer Hamptons Sibling

Illustration: Javi Aznarez

Sun is not the first thing you expect walking into Donohue’s. Maybe the last. But the light-dappled dining room, with its large windows and adjoining porch, is the new Donohue’s, the beach-house Donohue’s, a country cousin to the city elder. Even Maureen Donohue-Peters, Donohue’s third-generation owner, looks a little different out here in a pink psychedelic-print Pucci-style blouse. Last summer, she opened Donohue’s East in Westhampton Beach. Had she gone a little Hamptons herself?

I am soon corrected. She is off duty; the white button-down and black trousers she wore behind the bar and waiting tables on Lexington Avenue these past 47 years are what she wears here. The business uniform remains unchanged. The look of the place is a far cry from the close quarters and blood-red tablecloths of the original, but it remains a place — quite possibly the Hamptons’s only place — to get chopped steak and a Maryland turkey dinner, a Thanksgiving plate served year round. The community, she says, welcomed Donohue’s, its city fame preceding it. “You know,” the neighbors told her, “we need an Irish place.”

Westhampton Beach represents a homecoming for Donohue-Peters, who grew up in nearby Hampton Bays before Hamptons development expanded this far along the NY-27 corridor. (Longtime Hamptonites will sneer that the East End doesn’t even begin until Southampton; Donohue-Peters sneers back that she’d never go past Bridgehampton.) But change is coming for Westhampton Beach — a PopUp Bagels and a Citarella both arrived in town this summer — so when a Donohue’s customer from the city approached Donohue-Peters five years ago to consider opening here, she listened cautiously. “I’m willing to look,” she told him. “Just bring a pencil with an eraser.”

The plan at first had been to run both establishments, but more recently, in a surprise to many fans of the original, Donohue-Peters decided to give up her lease and close it. She says crime was a factor (“The way the city is right now — I don’t find safety”), even though, according to NYPD data, crime in the 19th Precinct, where Donohue’s was located, has dropped 15 percent in the past year.

Whatever the reason, the new one couldn’t possibly replicate the city-room history or nicotine patina of the original. In a city of institutions, Donohue’s was an institution. Its leather booths and a mid-century menu that’s hardly been updated over its decades in business sated and sozzled generations. Mayors and commishes, newsmen when they still came stained with ink, ghosts of a city that barely exists anymore. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary executive editor of the New York Times, had his own table. So did the crew from the Times’ upstart heel-nipper, the New York Observer. Gay Talese. Nick Pileggi and sometimes his wife, Nora Ephron. Sondheim and Stritch. Bill Bratton then; Jessica Tisch later. History hasn’t smiled on all of its patrons — Bernie Madoff was a regular, as was Matt Lauer — but the Donohue family served everyone the same. “I’ve never had the time of day for people throwing their weight around,” Donohue-Peters says. The loyalty was mutual: When a devoted regular, the “King of Ming” art dealer Robert Ellsworth, died in 2014, Maureen and her niece, also Maureen, a waitress at the restaurant, were surprised to learn that he’d tipped them $50,000 each in his will.

Donohue’s operated the old-fashioned way. Its 212 phone number was printed on the menu page and every place mat, reservations were taken by phone with pad and pen, only longtime regulars could get any food delivered, checks were written out by hand, and the menu was largely the same one that Donohue-Peters’s father, Michael, developed in the late ’50s. (It was the rare place that could put a run on calf’s liver when it was the day’s special.) “It’s worked so long for me. Why change?” Donohue-Peters says. She joined the family concern in 1979 — “No one in the family wanted to work for him, except for me,” she says, laughing — and after Michael’s death in 2000, she ran the show with a succession of nieces and other relatives. Most evenings, she’d be behind the bar, mixing up martinis (175 a night, she estimates) that came with sidecars — not in the polite, mixologist-approved bud-vase-size glassware but in beer pints.

There are more tables and a larger kitchen in Westhampton Beach, but the same red tablecloths, same pint-glass sidecars, and many of the same Donohue’s classics are here. This is not the Moby’s Hamptons. Generation Zepbound won’t find much here to suit its needs any more than it would at the original. “We have a ton of salads because everyone’s so weight conscious out here,” Donohue-Peters says skeptically, but there’s baked meatloaf on offer and the specials board still features various steaks. The most popular salad is the bacon-and-bleu-cheese wedge, and the new additions to the menu include loaded potato skins. Donohue’s has never brooked food trends. “We’re starting breakfast here, and we’ll do smoked salmon and cream cheese, but that’s as far as we will go,” says Mary Barrie, Donohue-Peters’s niece and partner.

Though the pair estimate that 30 to 40 percent of their clientele in the city spend some time on Long Island, Donohue’s East hasn’t gotten too much attention amid the lamentations surrounding the original’s end. (Its final night of service was June 19.) On a Saturday night early in the season, as “Sweet Caroline” perfumed the dining room, a few tables of older families dined early and the place was largely quiet by 10 p.m., though a pair of Sutton Place residents were surprised to run into their co-op board president at the bar. Meanwhile, in the city, would-be successors have swarmed. Several restaurateurs and restaurant groups expressed interest — Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson’s Frenchette Group said to be among them — and while the final decision rests with Donohue-Peters’s landlord, a third-generation member of a real-estate family, she has been offering her opinions, and she’ll decide what from the original restaurant, if anything, stays in Manhattan.

She will entertain offers on some of the original’s fixtures and furnishings, like the five-piece mahogany bar her father built, though the old Donohue’s telephone, the shillelagh behind the bar, and the ship painting her father loved are coming with her. As, most important, is her name. This summer, there is only one Donohue’s, which is how things will remain for the foreseeable future. “We’ve been offered big money for different licensing agreements,” Donohue-Peters says, but she is not interested in selling. “They’re not allowed to use my name — I will sue immediately. My father worked hard for it. I worked hard for it.”