Nick & Toni’s, the Hamptons’ most famous restaurant, which for seventeen years has served as a second kitchen to moguls like Martha Stewart, Steven Spielberg, and Ron Perelman, is on the verge of losing its Manhattan outpost. For the past eleven years, it’s had a branch on West 67th Street, popular with locals like Kathleen Turner, Alan Alda, Regis Philbin, and Howard Stern. But the restaurant’s lease has run out, and it is now renting on a month-to-month basis. To make matters worse, a bank, as part of what seems to be a larger real-estate conspiracy bent on turning every storefront in the city into a bank, is vying to take over the space. “The landlord apparently has some other plans,” admits Nick & Toni’s owner Mark Smith, who spends most of his time in the Hamptons anyway. “That would affect us, but he needs clearance to go ahead with those plans, and so far he doesn’t have it.”

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Beth Landman
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