The sun was about to set across Fort Pond in Montauk, and the revelers gathered at the nearby Surf Lodge were just starting to indulge themselves. The music thumped. Champagne flowed. And, across the bar, sun-tanned hands reached into $150 towers of Popeyes chicken tenders.
“You can’t take it with you,” said Stephen Gay, a real estate agent who sells luxury properties in Florida, who had splurged on a $7,500 table that included the fast-food tenders and a flight of dipping sauces.
The Hamptons makes headlines for its luxury estates, helicopter commutes and extreme food options, including a $129.99-a-pound lobster salad, $400 Japanese melons and a set of vending machines that dispense tins of beluga caviar at $225 for two ounces.
But amid these hoity-toity status foods, the humble chicken tender — the fast-food icon, a kids-menu staple — is thriving.
By noon on any given day, the refrigerated cases in gourmet grocery stores — earlier stacked five high with containers of breaded, deep-fried chunks of chicken they call nuggets, fingers, strips or tenders — may well be picked clean. A few restaurants offer “adult chicken nuggets” on their menus. Some private chefs say homemade nuggets are their most requested item.
And you should see how some of these tenders are living out east.
They are often served with Hamptons flair — and, just as importantly, consumed in Hamptons environs. Dolloped with caviar, they are nibbled in gardens bursting with hydrangeas and behind the hedges of dune-lined roads clogged with party-equipment rental trucks.
Last month, Jarhn Blutstein, the founder of East End Mixology, decided to try out a new cocktail on several private chefs when they gathered in her backyard to test out a new Uruguayan caviar. She chopped homemade chicken nuggets and soaked them in Beluga vodka, strained the concoction and put the chicken-infused vodka in the freezer. Later, she removed any fat that had floated to the top, added dry vermouth, a splash of barbecue sauce, shook and double strained it. She filled martini glasses with the drink, garnishing each one with a caviar-topped nugget on a skewer.
She called it The McNuggetini. The group loved it, she said.
“It was literally like eating at McDonald’s,” Ms. Blutstein said. “It was so savory.”
Her nugget cocktail is not currently on any menus, though she plans to serve it at an industry party in September, a possible next step toward a public-facing version of the McNuggetini.
Shippy’s, a Southampton restaurant, delivers its chunky, thumb-sized chicken strips to the food shack at Cooper’s Beach. At least 600 strips a day are sold during the summer, said Andre Bianchi, a manager, at a relatively reasonable $21 an order, which includes fries.
The lightly cornmeal-battered, gluten-free “old-fashioned chicken tenders” have been so popular at the Lobster Roll in Amagansett, the menu now includes them as an entree for what feels like a bargain at $18, as well as an appetizer, for $14.
“You can go to the Palm and have a $300 steak, but sometimes you just feel like a chicken finger,” said Jessica VanCamp, a manager at the Lobster Roll. (The Palm’s priciest steak actually costs half that much.)
The appeal may be rooted in tender nostalgia.
“Any form of chicken nugget brings us all back to being a kid and comfort food and beach picnics,” said Kelli Delaney Kot, the editor of KDHamptons, a “luxury lifestyle diary” of the town, who likes to serve caviar-topped nuggets at her poolside luncheons in Water Mill. “There becomes a little bit of a competition of who can make the best ones.”
Some insist the organic, crispy fingers at the high-end grocery Farm & Forage are best. Others favor the heavily battered tenders topped with flakes of sea salt from Round Swamp Farms. On a recent morning at the farm’s Bridgehampton deli, a woman stood in line with $54 worth of tenders in her shopping basket.
So the tenders are good, then?
“Insane,” she replied.
The Popeyes tenders are actually an upgrade for Montauk’s Surf Lodge. In years past, the restaurant would charge $150 for towers of reheated frozen products from Tyson’s.
Popeyes is paying for the privilege of offering its chicken to an elite clientele in Montauk, where zoning laws have made fast food chains scarce. It’s part of an expansive brand partnership program for the bar that on a recent night included Starbucks, Polymarket, Neutrogena, a makeup brand called Too Faced and Nylon, an “invite-only social club for young tastemakers,” according to its website.
The new tenders are handmade in the bar’s retrofitted kitchen according to Popeyes’s recipe and specifications, said Jayma Cardoso, the Surf Lodge owner.
“We were looking for ways to elevate the experience,” Ms. Cardoso said.
During a recent lunchtime stretch, the chicken tenders at the nearest Popeyes — in Riverhead, about 45 miles away — were going for $15.83 for 11 pieces. The dining room, lit by orange pendant lamps with a view of the parking lot, was empty.
Context matters when it comes to breaded chicken.
“It’s all about how you serve it,” said Kathy Prounis, a commercial designer who offers musings on the Hamptons lifestyle on social media.
And, perhaps, where you serve it. And to whom. Last week, Elena Apostolides, a private chef, stood over the marble countertop at a client’s kitchen in East Hampton and carefully placed her gluten-free homemade nuggets, dredged in a rice flour batter, on a bed of microradish greens. She spooned crème fraîche onto each nugget then topped them with a dab of caviar. She headed to the pool where a group of hungry 20-somethings were taking a dip.
“Wow,” one young man mouthed as she presented them her platter.