Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at the chicken nugget craze taking over the Hamptons and what it says about the economy.
To some children, chicken nuggets are the only food in the world.
They want them as snacks, as meals, shaped like a dinosaur or shaped like a star. There’s never a wrong time to eat a nugget, in the view of many 3-year-olds.
In the Hamptons, some adults feel the same way.
The luxurious Long Island area is known for being fancy, with $400 melons and private chefs to go pick them up from gourmet grocery stores. Now, my colleague Dionne Searcey reports, those stores are stacking their frozen food cases five deep with chicken nuggets and tenders — only to find them picked clean by noon. Some private chefs say homemade nuggets are their most requested item.
Because it’s the Hamptons, ketchup and mustard just won’t do. Dionne says nuggets are being dolloped with caviar or soaked in vodka to be turned into martinis. Jarhn Blutstein, the founder of East End Mixology, calls it the McNuggetini.
The appeal of nuggets and tenders may be rooted in 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. She 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.”
Popeyes, the chicken chain founded in New Orleans, is paying for the privilege of offering its chicken to an elite clientele at Surf Lodge in Montauk, where zoning laws have made fast-food chains scarce. It’s part of an expansive brand partnership program for the bar, which makes tenders in a retrofitted kitchen according to Popeyes’s recipe and specifications, said Jayma Cardoso, the Surf Lodge owner. They are served in a $150 tender tower.
But it typically won’t cost that much to get in on the chicken craze: The Lobster Roll in Amagansett includes old-fashioned chicken tenders as an entree for $18. Shippy’s, a Southampton restaurant, delivers its chunky, thumb-size chicken strips to the food shack at Cooper’s Beach. Andre Bianchi, a manager, said at least 600 strips a day are sold during the summer for $21 an order, which includes fries.
Nuggets and caviar could be viewed as a symbol of this economic moment. As much as the Hamptons is known for its wealth, to some it’s a stark example of the income inequality affecting the entire country.
Last month, according to my colleague Ben Casselman, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the surge in energy prices had wiped out a year and a half of wage gains for the average American worker. At the same time, a few people are getting fabulously, unimaginably wealthy through a record-setting stock market run and the artificial intelligence boom.
The share of national income going to workers has been trending down for decades, Ben says, and hit a record low in the first quarter of the year, according to data from the Commerce Department.
Weather
Expect a sunny day with temperatures reaching around 84. At night, temperatures will drop to around 69.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until July 23 (Tisha B’Av).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Everybody has got a front porch.” — Megan Romer, the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, explaining why she likes canvassing in Buffalo.
The latest New York news
-
Tracee Ellis Ross, back on Broadway: Ross appears in “Every Brilliant Thing,” the one-person, interactive show. She succeeded Mariska Hargitay and Daniel Radcliffe and is the final performer to lead the play at the Hudson Theater.
-
Jamie Hector spends a blistering day in Brooklyn: “The Wire” star has devoted much of his life to the arts as one of television’s most compelling, understated figures. He is also a director, producer and children’s book author, currently seen in Apple TV’s “Cape Fear.”
-
Late-night soccer: As a World Cup host city, New York invites people to play soccer under the lights. One soccer field in each of the five boroughs is keeping the lights on overnight for the duration of the tournament.
-
Remembering Jayson Conner and Jeffrey Newman: The couple, who died within days of each other, handed out tens of thousands of backpacks filled with supplies for the homeless. They began their efforts in 2018 with a few armfuls of backpacks. By 2026, along with help from almost 40 volunteers, they had distributed more than 180,000 packs to people living on the streets of Manhattan.
-
“Disaster Mansion”: Aimee Gardner and David Linnard are still restoring an abandoned house eight years after they won it at a Kingston, N.Y., tax auction.
-
Democratic Socialists surge in New York: Younger voters seemed to be the predominant factor in the Democratic Socialists of America’s primary wins in House races in New York City.
-
Nathan Berman’s largest project is in limbo: He has worked exclusively on projects that transform existing structures into high-end residences. Until Tuesday morning, when two columns inside the former Pfizer office building began buckling, hardly anyone outside of New York’s notoriously insular real estate community had ever heard of him.
METROPOLITAN diary
Nearly Grifted
Dear Diary:
It was the normal, pre-Covid summer of 2018. My friends and I were hanging out on the grass at Tompkins Square Park. A schlubby, fake-rich-looking guy approached us.
“Hey guys, you look like you can party,” he said.
None of us knew how to respond.
In less than 90 seconds, he whipped out his American Express “black” card and Rolex and let us know he had a TriBeCa penthouse where we could party.
Most notably, he gloated about being the heir to Dolce & Gabbana. He followed this by telling us how many “hot chicks” he hooked up with. All totally normal things for a 40-year-old to say to a group of 21-year-olds.
Intrigued and confused, we immediately used what he had told us to find him online. Sure enough, he was not who he said he was. We had just crossed paths with the “Bungalow Bungler,” who had served time in prison in the 2000s for credit card fraud. He would infiltrate “cool” clubs, steal people’s credit cards and hit the town.
Since we were broke and not cool, he had lost his touch if he considered us potential targets.
I love “high society” grifters. For some reason, you feel extra bad for them because they so clearly just want to feel accepted. In interviews from 2007, he used the exact same phrases he used with us. It’s inspiring to see someone so committed to a bit.
Nearly eight years after that encounter in Tompkins Square, a video went viral of a man in a heated verbal altercation, saying things like, “I live in TriBeCa. We don’t do that,” and “We’ll go out here and handle it.”
It was him. The internet had labeled him the “TriBeCa Gangster.” I hope he’s doing OK.
— Alex Hartman
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. James Barron returns tomorrow. — S.L.
Andy Chen, Hannah Fidelman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
The post When Chicken Nuggets Aren’t Just Chicken Nuggets appeared first on New York Times.
