Fēniks opens in Southampton

The name, the address, the layout, the menu format — everything about Fēniks, Douglas Gulija’s month-old venture, is different from The Plaza Cafe, the Southampton restaurant that he and his wife, Andi, opened in 1997. For the chef, though, the most significant change is that, for the first time in a long time, he’s got a team behind him.

After Andi died in 2010, The Plaza Cafe became, essentially, a solo venture. "A lot of the time, it was just me, another cook and a dishwasher," Gulija said.

The restaurant closed in June, but he'd spent the prior year readying the new space, a few blocks away in the narrow building that used to house village standby Le Chef. It was Gulija’s cousin Skip Norsic who purchased the building after selling his waste-collection company in 2022. And it was this new partner who told him "you are great at cooking. Now, find people who are better at doing the other things."

That meant bringing in a general manager, Andrew Kloch, with decades of hospitality experience, most notably as CEO of Il Buco, the Manhattan-based collection of Italian restaurants and markets. It meant engaging a professional designer, Karen Dallago, to give the two-story space a hushed elegance, a beverage director, a floor manager and a pastry chef (at Plaza Cafe, the chef’s mother made the desserts) and, most of all, it meant hiring more cooks.

The focus of Fēniks is the chef’s tasting menu, served at a six-seat counter and prepared by Gulija himself. But there’s also an a la carte menu for the 20-seat dining room adjacent to the counter and a roster of elevated bar snacks served upstairs at "Skip’s Lounge." Even a lone culinary wolf like Gulija realized he couldn’t do this on his own. "I was stunned when I saw my first payroll," he said. "In one week I paid out what I used to pay in six months at Plaza!"

Since it opened 28 years ago, The Plaza Cafe has reigned as one of Long Island’s finest fish restaurants. At Fēniks, more of the proteins climb up onto land and into the air. The tasting menu, $285 for eight courses, changes constantly but might feature Wagyu tartare with potato pavé; a tower of local tuna and lump crabmeat atop avocado-wasabi mash with yuzu "air"; duck breast with Asian slaw, peach-hoisin sauce and duck-fat fingerling potatoes; prime rib-eye cap roulade with Okinawan sweet potato, snap peas and soy Bordelaise sauce.

The a la carte menu includes some old Plaza Cafe favorites — "I wanted to make a clean break with the past," Gulija said, "but I also couldn’t come up with 20 brand new dishes." So, for now, at least, you’ll still find his plancha-seared local calamari on hummus and day-boat scallops on sweet-corn polenta. Starters range from $25 to $40, mains from $35 to $125 (for a Snake River Farms American Wagyu strip steak).

Gulija realizes that his prices are steep, but he is mindful of some advice he once got from celebrated chef Thomas Keller: "Value does not relate to price — it’s what you get for the price." Fēniks' prices are in line with other Hamptons establishments where, he noted, "you have no idea who the chef is — it might be a new one every year — and the owners are just trying to extract as much money as they can during the season."

Of course it’s still the Southampton "season" and Gulija expects things to quiet down once the weather turns colder. This winter he might run specials and host events geared toward more budget-conscious diners. 

Both partners share Croatian ancestry (look for a number of terrific Croatian bottles on the wine list) and Fēniks, pronounced "phoenix," is the Croatian spelling of the mythical bird that is reborn from its own ashes. For Norsic, embarking on a postretirement career as a restaurant owner and for Gulija, presiding over the no-holes-barred venue of his dreams, Fēniks is indeed a rebirth.

Fēniks, 75 Jobs Lane, Southampton, 631-283-9323, feniks.com. Open Wednesday to Monday 5 to 10 p.m., closed Tuesday.