Between the forks lies a destination restaurant, Léon 1909, which beautifully showcases its native terroir, on Shelter Island. It’s a clubhouse for some of the most creative residents of the east end of Long Island, with a niche following among artists, actors, and musicians, who gather all year around its 14-foot- long open hearth.
“When you first walk into the restaurant the fire is mesmerizing,” says chef Armond Joseph, a master of live-fire cooking.
Léon 1909 opened quietly four summers ago but only came to my attention recently, after I learned it had earned Wine Spectator magazine’s Award of Excellence, making it one of the country’s premiere wine drinking restaurants. It had a chef with real pedigree, I discovered, a veteran of top New York restaurants Del Posto and Wildair, and owners with very deep pockets, financier-turned-art dealer Robert Mnuchin and his daughter Valerie. So how had the restaurant flown under the radar, generating almost no buzz among the summer hordes from the North and South Fork?
Intrigued, I hopped on the ferry to Shelter Island for dinner one night. The evening began on a high note, in the rustic wood-beamed dining room framed by a Milton Avery seascape from 1945, as warm brioche arrived fresh out of the oven, with a tangy whirl of cultured butter. We started with sweet red shrimp plucked from the waters off Montauk, served raw in a refreshing crudo. And then the delicious procession of flame-licked dishes began. There were plump local scallops, blistered in the hearth, a succulent ribeye, dry-aged in-house, and an enormous show-stopping pork chop with chanterelles.
The restaurant’s wine director, Andrew Izzo, formerly of José Andrés’ Mercado Little Spain in New York, talked us through the impressive wine list, suggesting half bottles to carry us through dinner—a Chablis from Domaine Laroche to begin, followed by an exceptional red Burgundy, a Gevrey-Chambertin from Domaine Georges Lignier. But first there were flutes of grower Champagne from Gaston Chiquet.
I flipped through the list and found it incredibly well-priced. While most restaurants mark their bottles up three times or more, Izzo doesn’t go beyond double. “I want people to be able to try something great at a fair price,” he said. He pointed out a couple of big-ticket Burgundies, often hard to find and prohibitively priced. “We’re selling a Domaine Jacques- Frédéric Mugnier Chambolle Musigny for just $400,” he said.
For serious collectors and connoisseurs, the very high-end of the list has some very good values, including a 2022 Corton Grand Cru from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. “I paid $700 for it and I’m selling it for $1400,” said Izzo.
After dinner, coming off the high of such an exceptional meal, I reached out to Valerie Mnuchin to learn more about the restaurant.
“My father and I spent a lot of time on Shelter Island during Covid,” she said. “One day he said to me, ‘You are going to open a restaurant here.’” And so, with her father’s encouragement, she began to look for a space. For Valerie, who had been for years buying, renovating and selling homes in the Hamptons, it would be her first foray into hospitality.
They decided to name the restaurant after Robert’s father, Léon, a native of Belgium, born in 1909, and to focus on the sort of simple live fire cooking Robert and his father had enjoyed on family vacations visiting restaurants on the French Riviera.
An interest in art, it turns out, has run in the family for generations. After immigrating to the US, Léon became a prominent New York lawyer, but he was also deeply entrenched in the art scene representing artists like Willem de Kooning and collecting their work. Robert picked up the art bug too, transitioning from a big job at Goldman Sachs to a full-time career as an art dealer. In 2019, he set a record for a work by a living artist, at auction placing the $80 million winning bid for a client, for a sculpture by Jeff Koons.
Through the widow of artist John Chamberlain, who spent his last years on Shelter Island, Robert and his daughter got a lead on a restaurant space, a former bank, enlisting New York architect Robert Kane to replace it with a beautiful Mediterranean-style restaurant.
Today, Valerie is a constant presence at Léon 1909. Her father, still running his Manhattan gallery, C&M Arts, at 92, pops in for dinner every few weeks. The restaurant attracts many art world luminaries, among them artist couple Eric Fischl and April Gornik. “We get actors, musicians and many muckety-mucks from my father’s generation,” Valerie says. She is most flattered that top New York chefs like Cédric Vongerichten (son of Jean-Georges) and Eric Ripert (who celebrates his birthday there every year) have become regulars.
At the end of my dinner at Léon 1909, sipping Sauternes in the packed restaurant on a balmy summer Friday, I wondered aloud about the crowd there. “Eighty percent come over by ferry from the Hamptons,” said Chris Clark, the restaurant’s amiable manager. “They find it so peaceful here, an oasis on Shelter Island, which is an oasis itself.”