Fresh Menu, Nightlife for Westhampton Beach's Hit Salt & Loft

Popular New American concept Salt & Loft — a cornerstone of Westhampton Beach’s upwardly trending dining scene — has revamped for summer 2023 with a new menu that’s centered on seasonal fare sourced farm-to-table, plus an elevated bar experience and nightlife scene.

Salt & Loft is at the heart of all the interest East Enders are taking in Westhampton Beach as a restaurant and bar destination. Owner Barry Bernstein has seen the pattern develop firsthand: hungry Hamptonites lately venturing west of the Shinnecock Canal to explore all the fresh dining experiences, and locals staying put in Westhampton instead of traveling further east to revel in what had once been far splashier restaurants and nightlife. 

“You go back five years, there was really no nightlife in Westhampton Beach, and people, including me, would be driving out further east to dine, and now it’s kind of flipped a little bit,” Bernstein says, adding, “We do have some great restaurants in Westhampton Beach, people stay here now and they’re not running out east. And people are even coming from out east to see us. We get people on a regular basis who say ‘I’m in Southampton, but I heard about you,’ or ‘I saw it in Dan’s Papers.’”

It’s also a way to align the restaurant’s fare with a booming interest from their core customers in healthful dining and general wellness. 

“We have a whole new menu. I think that the menu really caters to a broad range of tastes of different people,” he continues. “It’s really a big change for us. We wanted to come up with more of a local farm to table menu, so we spent a lot of time figuring out which ingredients would be seasonal and what would be the best ingredients for this time of the year, so our recipes are designed around that concept. When we source from a lot of the local farmers, it costs us more money, but we want to be farm to table and locally sourced.”

As part of the effort to use and support local goods, Bernstein says he and his chef built the new menu specifically around the availability of the freshest, most in-season seafood and produce. Local scallops, for example, will only be available during scallop season. He says his customers largely want to know more about where, when and how products are sourced.

Other new items on the menu include phyllo wrapped salmon, mahi mahi tacos, a soba noodle bowl, as well as Long Island mussels, sweet potato fries, and a warm lobster roll with fresh herbs. 

As for cocktails, one of their hits of the season has been the Salt & Summer — gin muddled with fresh watermelon, lime juice, and simple syrup, finished with a salted rim. Other entries on the cocktail menu span from a maple bacon old-fashioned to a cucumber cosmo. 

Bernstein says his staff have really stepped up the restaurant’s after-hours nightlife, music program, and bar scene, too. 

“We’ve always had entertainment, but we have a whole music program now. We listened to comments from our customers and they’ve pretty often asked us when we’re going to have entertainment on the patio again, it was more of an occasional thing before, and now it will be every week,” he says. “We have two bars within the restaurant and we get pretty packed and it goes pretty late. One of the things we’ve heard and listened to from our customers is that they want that.”

Bernstein says that, these days, by the time people are finished with dinner, the bar can sometimes be three people deep, and that’s when the vibe starts to change from a casual and family-oriented brunch and dining spot to an adults-only nightlife scene.

“We’re very focused on not just serving people food, we’re very focused on creating a dining experience for people, it’s not just going on the patio for dinner, it’s going on the patio and listening to something great and having a great experience. After that, we’re gonna pump up the music and make it fun for everyone.”

Salt & Loft is located at 145 Main Street in Westhampton Beach, visit them at saltandloft.com