The Candy Kitchen: A Century of Belonging

Bridgehampton’s 100-Year-Old Luncheonette Isn’t Selling Ice Cream—It’s Selling Proof That Some Things Still Work

The Memory That Never Fades

The screen door slaps shut behind you, and for a moment you’re suspended between two worlds. Outside, a $400,000 car idles at the curb while its driver checks a reservation at some place that didn’t exist three summers ago and won’t exist three summers from now. Inside, however, a ceiling fan clicks overhead in a rhythm that hasn’t changed since Coolidge was president.

You’re seven years old. Or you’re forty-seven. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. The counter remains the same counter it’s always been. The stools spin the same way they did decades ago. Meanwhile, the man behind the register has a face you almost recognize—or maybe it’s his father’s face, or his grandfather’s. The features blend across decades, forming a continuum of service, of presence, of staying.

Your grandmother orders a black and white milkshake without looking at the menu because she’s never needed to look at the menu. The shake arrives in a metal tin with a glass on the side, the overflow a promise rather than a problem. She pushes the extra toward you. This is how love works in families that have been coming here since before the Montauk Highway had a speed limit.

The first sip hits so cold it hurts your teeth. Forty years later, it still will.

The Truth About “Hidden Gems”

Let’s get something straight: the Candy Kitchen is not a “hidden gem.” It’s not “undiscovered.” In fact, every real estate agent in a 30-mile radius has dragged clients here to prove the Hamptons still has “character.” Publications have written it up. Instagram has discovered it. The secret has been out for decades.

And yet it doesn’t matter. Because the Candy Kitchen doesn’t give a damn whether you’ve discovered it or not.

This distinction separates a real place from a “destination.” Destinations need you—they’re calibrated for your arrival, your approval, your review. The Candy Kitchen, by contrast, stood here before you showed up and will stand here after you leave. Your opinion of the grilled cheese remains irrelevant to the grilled cheese. The kitchen will make it tomorrow exactly as they made it today, exactly as they made it when Eisenhower held office.

What Bourdain Understood

Anthony Bourdain used to talk about this difference—the gap between restaurants that exist to be experienced and places that exist to feed people. The former are performances. The latter are facts. The Candy Kitchen operates as a fact. It carries the stripped-down confidence of a place that knows exactly what it is and has no interest in becoming anything else.

There’s no craft cocktail program here. No “seasonal interpretation” of the egg cream exists. Nobody soft-opened, hired influencers, or retained a PR firm. Instead, you’ll find just a counter, a griddle, and a century of muscle memory.

A Century of Survival

The Candy Kitchen opened in the mid-1920s, which means it has now survived Prohibition, the Depression, a World War, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, disco, the savings and loan crisis, 9/11, the 2008 collapse, a pandemic, and the complete transformation of the Hamptons from farming and fishing villages into America’s most expensive summer real estate market.

The building at 2391 Montauk Highway has stood for a century. Furthermore, the counter, the booths, the soda fountain—these aren’t reproductions. This isn’t a theme. No designer decided “nostalgic luncheonette” would make a compelling brand identity. The Candy Kitchen earned its nostalgic status because it opened when nostalgic luncheonettes were just called luncheonettes, and then it simply refused to become anything else.

The Parash Family Legacy

The Parash family remains woven into this story. William Parash opened the original Candy Kitchen in Oyster Bay in 1918. Then, in 1925, he and his wife Nicoletta opened the Bridgehampton location. They raised their sons Jim and Paul in an apartment above the restaurant. Later, the family moved to Mattituck and opened the Paradise Sweet Shop before eventually establishing Sip ‘n Soda in Southampton in 1958.

That lineage matters enormously. The Parash family has run luncheonettes for over a hundred years now. Five generations of one family have committed to one idea: that a neighborhood needs a place where neighbors can sit together, eat simple food, and feel like they belong somewhere.

Consider what it takes to keep a place like this alive. The real estate pressure alone would crush most operators. That corner lot in Bridgehampton? Someone has made an offer. Someone always makes an offer. The economics of a $9 grilled cheese simply don’t compete with the economics of another boutique, another gallery, another “concept.” And yet here it stands.

The Sociology of the Counter

Walk into the Candy Kitchen on a Tuesday morning in October and you’ll witness something that barely exists anymore in the Hamptons: a room where money doesn’t organize the social hierarchy.

The booth by the window holds a man in paint-splattered work pants—a contractor between jobs, reading the Southampton Press and working through a plate of eggs. Two stools down, a woman in quiet cashmere waits for a coffee, her Land Rover visible through the glass, radiating the kind of wealth that doesn’t announce itself because it doesn’t need to. At the far end, a group of teenagers shares a sundae, performing the ancient adolescent ritual of wasting time in public.

What Bourdieu Would Notice

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent his career studying how social groups distinguish themselves from one another—the clothes they wear, the foods they eat, the places they go. He called it “cultural capital,” and he argued that taste is never innocent. Every choice signals belonging.

However, Bourdieu also understood that the highest form of status is the ability to transcend status. The truly secure don’t need to distinguish themselves. They can afford to be ordinary.

The Candy Kitchen offers a master class in this principle. The working-class regular and the billionaire summer resident both order the same grilled cheese. They wait in the same line, receive the same service—efficient and friendly, but not performatively so. Nobody here will remember your name because you’re important. They’ll remember your name because you keep showing up.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s what Bourdain would make us say out loud: this democracy is fragile, it’s partly a performance, and the people who celebrate it most loudly are often the ones most responsible for destroying it.

Because let’s be honest. The contractor in the paint-splattered pants probably can’t afford to live in Bridgehampton anymore. He’s likely commuting from somewhere further west, somewhere the money hasn’t fully colonized yet. Similarly, the teenagers sharing the sundae might have parents who rent, holding on by their fingernails to a toehold in a community that developers are pricing into oblivion.

The Candy Kitchen survives not because the Hamptons values places like it, but almost despite the Hamptons. It survives because one family decided to keep saying no—no to the developers, no to the offers, no to the easy money. It survives because stubbornness is sometimes a form of love.

And the woman in cashmere with the Land Rover? She might genuinely love this place. Alternatively, she might love the idea of this place—the authenticity it confers on her, the way it allows her to feel like she’s not part of the problem. The Candy Kitchen as absolution. The grilled cheese as penance for the $40 million teardown she bought last spring.

Bourdieu would call this “symbolic violence”—the way dominant groups appropriate the culture of the places they’re displacing, wearing it like a costume while pushing out the original inhabitants.

Bourdain would just call it what it is: complicated. Everything worth caring about is complicated.

The Unwritten Code

Every place has unwritten rules. Here are the Candy Kitchen’s:

First, you sit where there’s space. The counter operates first-come, first-served, and if there’s only one stool open and you’re with a group, you split up or you wait. This rule is non-negotiable.

Second, you don’t linger over the menu. The menu hasn’t changed meaningfully since the Ford administration. If you need more than ninety seconds to decide, you’re not indecisive—you’re performing indecision for an audience that isn’t watching.

Third, you pay at the register, not at the table. You bus your own tray if you’re at the counter. You say thank you and you mean it.

Fourth, you don’t take photos of your food. This is not content. This is breakfast.

Finally, you don’t complain. Not because the food sits above criticism—it’s a luncheonette, not Per Se—but because complaining here misses the point entirely. You didn’t come for the best grilled cheese of your life. You came to sit at a counter that’s stood here for a hundred years and eat a grilled cheese that’s exactly good enough, prepared by people who’ve made the same grilled cheese the same way since before you existed. If that’s not enough for you, the problem isn’t the grilled cheese.

What to Order

The ice cream is the thing. The kitchen makes it on premises in flavors that rotate seasonally but always include the classics: vanilla, chocolate, mint chip, butter pecan. Get it in a cone, get it in a cup, get it in a milkshake that arrives with the overflow in a separate tin. This isn’t artisanal. This isn’t small-batch. This is ice cream made by people who’ve made ice cream so long they don’t need to call it anything special.

The grilled cheese delivers exactly what a grilled cheese should: white bread, American cheese, griddled until the outside crisps and the inside goes molten. No fontina, or gruyère, or sourdough. If you want that, fourteen places within a five-mile radius will happily charge you $24 for the privilege. This is not that.

The egg cream is mandatory at least once. Chocolate syrup, milk, seltzer—simple in concept, easy to screw up, and the Candy Kitchen doesn’t screw it up.

Breakfast runs all day. Pancakes at 2pm represent a human right that the Hamptons has largely abandoned in favor of “brunch” with $18 mimosas. The Candy Kitchen remembers what the rest of us have forgotten.

What It Costs

Almost nothing. That’s part of the point, and also part of the tragedy.

You can walk in with a twenty-dollar bill, eat a full breakfast, leave a decent tip, and walk out with change. Try that anywhere else within ten miles. The Candy Kitchen’s prices function as an artifact, a living fossil, a reminder of what the Hamptons used to be before it became a theme park for hedge fund money.

This approach isn’t sustainable. Everyone knows it isn’t sustainable. The family that owns this place leaves money on the table every single day—money they could extract from tourists, money they could take from summer people who wouldn’t blink at $15 for a milkshake. They don’t take it. The prices stay where they are. The menu stays what it is.

The Real Product

Don Draper understood something essential about selling: you’re never selling the thing. You’re selling the feeling the thing provides. The Kodak Carousel wasn’t a slide projector—it was a time machine. It was the ache of memory, the sweetness of loss, the desperate human need to hold onto something that’s already gone.

The Candy Kitchen isn’t selling ice cream.

Instead, it’s selling continuity. It’s selling the increasingly rare experience of walking into a place and finding it exactly as you remembered, exactly as your parents remembered, exactly as their parents remembered.

The Beautiful Lie We Need

But here’s the part Draper wouldn’t say out loud: nostalgia is also a lie. It’s a beautiful lie, a useful lie, maybe even a necessary lie—but a lie nonetheless. The Hamptons your grandmother remembers also excluded people in ways we don’t celebrate anymore. The “simpler time” wasn’t simpler for everyone. The past we ache for never existed, not really, not the way we remember it.

Bourdain would tell you that the best food is never about the food. It’s about the people, the place, the moment. It’s about sitting at a counter next to someone you’d never meet otherwise—and both of you knowing, without saying it, that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.

The Candy Kitchen has provided that for a century. So sit down. Order the usual. Belong—even if belonging is always more complicated than it looks.

Some inheritances can’t be taxed. Some forms of wealth don’t show up on a balance sheet.

The screen door slaps shut. The ceiling fan clicks. The stool spins beneath you.

For a moment, nothing has changed. For a moment, nothing needs to.

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Candy Kitchen 2391 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton (631) 537-9885 Open daily, 7am–4pm Cash and cards accepted No reservations. No substitutions. No complaints.