Hamptons Season Opens With $150 Grape Juice and a Bribery Scandal

East Hampton's summer complaint catalogue runs from four-figure restaurant tabs to a sitting official accused of taking cash, and the moneyed class has opinions about all of it.

A non-alcoholic grape beverage at a Hamptons restaurant is reportedly running $150 a pour this season.
An East Hampton official is at the center of a bribery scandal that has become the dominant dinner-party topic in the village.
Seasonal residents report the usual litany of overcrowding, service rage, and parking grievances, amplified this year by visible scandal.
The Hamptons property market continues to attract buyers willing to absorb the social friction as a line item.
Curbed documented the full ledger of complaints from seasonal and year-round residents in a piece published this summer.

East Hampton is having a summer. The dominant topic at dinner parties along Further Lane and around the Maidstone Club is not the weather or the market — it is a bribery scandal involving a local official, the details of which are, per Curbed's recent accounting, already being workshopped into anecdote form by people who spend $14 on a bottle of water without remarking on it.

The scandal sits alongside the season's more quotidian grievances. A single pour of non-alcoholic grape juice at one unnamed Hamptons establishment has reached $150. Traffic on Route 27 eastbound on a Friday afternoon remains, by all accounts, exactly what it has always been. Reservations at the restaurants worth having require the kind of social capital that is, apparently, not included in the price of a $4.2 million shingled cottage in Sagaponack.

The bribery matter involves an East Hampton official, according to Curbed's reporting, and has produced the reliable summer sub-genre: the person at the party who knows someone who knows something and is being appropriately vague about it.

The $150 grape juice has, notably, not caused anyone to leave.