From the Annals of Run, Don't Walk...

...which is a close affiliate of Dear Lord I Could Die Happy Right Now, comes The North Fork Table & Inn, whose restaurant, with lick-the-plate adroitness, covers all three Market Report categories: good, seasonal, and — on a recent Monday night — what was for dinner.

Other than saying Go now! This instant! GET IN THE CAR AND DRIVE FAST! I hardly know where how to begin this friendly recommendation, as the moment I try to compose my feelings about that night, all my thoughts run off to R.'s raw fluke appetizer.

The menu called it: "Block Island Fluke Crudo, served raw with fresh morning melon, poached ginger, sunflower seeds and micro-cilantro." But what was set down before him that night were bite-size, opaque-pink, Japanese-lantern-looking creations, each housing a glowing orb of melon. The zip of the ginger and the crunch of the sunflower seeds came as small waves of sensation, following the initial, radical experience of the peach-sweet melon juice bursting through those delicate, pink-to-white slices of fluke.

I've thought about that dish every day since I tasted it.

Following the fluke, my thoughts run to my chilled pea soup appetizer, which arrived with plump, poached local shrimp piled in the center of a white soup bowl surrounded by a sprinkling of blanched, fresh peas, which a second waitress, with a white ceramic pitcher and some ceremony, encircled in a gorgeously green puree of summer peas.

Then they're off to R.'s dessert of rosé-poached strawberry-rhubarb shortcake. Or his butter-poached lobster entree. Or my fig tart with honey ice-cream.

Everything we put into our mouths that evening — including the ciabatta, sweet butter, and complimentary mallomars (pictured above, though not to scale, as they shared the stature of plump cherries) — was outrageously, haven't-shut-up-about-it-in-three-days delicious.

All this rapture was the work, in large part, of Claudia Fleming, the former dessert chef at Gramercy Tavern (who you may also know from The Last Course, her paean to all things dessert, written with The New York Times' Melissa Clark) and her husband, the chef Gerry Hayden, who worked his magic at Aureole and Amuse, before ditching it all for the greener bits of Long Island.

Also performing starring roles were biodynamic and organic local produce, seafood from the Peconic Bay and Long Island Sound, North Fork artisanal cheeses, and New York wines — though the wine list was the one part of the meal that wound its way around the globe.

Outside the Doric-column-fronted home-turned-restaurant was a very large, very classic black-0n-white wooden sign, and hanging from that was a smaller, colorfully painted still-life labeled: SUMMER. Which, allay all doubts, is what they are serving inside.
















*Coming soon, a visit to the Shinn Estate Vineyard, which practices sustainable, environmentally responsible farming (to delicious effects).