The Quintessence of Long Island’s Hamptons : Sag Harbor’s American Hotel is an old-fashioned oasis for the fortunate few.

In springtime, New York’s Sag Harbor is alive with bright, fresh light and sharp-edged breezes; the trees sprout leaves in a hundred shades of luminescent green, and sailboats blossom in the sound. When summer comes, the town is suddenly abubble with fair-weather visitors; the streets are jammed with cars, the sidewalks buzz with talk and ring with commerce, and the warm, lazy afternoons seem to last forever.

In autumn, Sag Harbor quiets down again, relaxing in the low-slung afternoon sun; locals gaze wistfully at their fading gardens, and the air is punctuated by the sound of hunters shooting ducks and quail in nearby waterways and woods. In wintertime, the seafood restaurants and ice cream parlors close up tight, ice-fishing and ice-skating become the predominant sports, and the days are etched with a bittersweet chill.

And through it all, in every season, 365 days a year, the American Hotel stays open, welcoming each evening a few lucky overnight guests and a somewhat larger number of equally fortunate diners--”lucky” and “fortunate” because the American Hotel is the most engaging public lodging place in the Hamptons, and quite possibly the best restaurant as well. It is, in fact, the inn you wish you could find at the end of every road.

“The Hamptons”--the term is generally taken to mean the whole southern tine of Long Island’s forked far eastern tip, including such towns as Westhampton, East Hampton, Southampton, Bridgehampton, Amagansett, Montauk and Sag Harbor itself (whose name derives from the local Indian word sagaponack , meaning “place of the large groundnuts”)--are the quintessential New York exurban retreat. They are Manhattan’s politely rural outpost--the closest most New Yorkers ever get to the countryside, complete with real farms, ponds, windmills, backroads, even vineyards.

The area is full of beaches, both on Long Island Sound and its inlets and on the Atlantic Ocean, and is something of a recreational capital, offering endless opportunities for swimming, fishing, boating, bicycling and horseback riding, among other pastimes, as well as for just lounging around doing nothing much at all.

The Hamptons are also the summertime literary and artistic capital of America, home for at least part of the year to luminaries ranging from Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, E.L. Doctorow and Nora Ephron to Paul Simon, Peter Jennings and Lauren Bacall.

For all of the region’s attractions, though, if you don’t have friends in the Hamptons or rented quarters of your own, it can seem somewhat less than welcoming. There are no grand hotels or elaborate resorts in the Hamptons--and most of the by-the-night accommodations that do exist are rather basic and faded, or else self-consciously rustic and, frankly, not all that comfortable. The American Hotel is an exception.

It is not, to begin with, some prissy, fussy, terminally floral bed and breakfast hideaway. It is a small, well-run, genuine hotel, old-fashioned and homey and inviting.

Sag Harbor itself is a beautiful little town, more New England than New York in feeling, full of ell-preserved 19th- and early-20th-Century buildings, and exquisitely situated on a kind of plump promontory defined by Shelter Island Sound and Sag Harbor Cove. The American Hotel, itself possessed of a historical pedigree, stands proudly in the heart of downtown, a few blocks from the water, on Main Street (where its neighbors include two flower shops, two wine shops, a bookshop and the 1914-vintage Paradise Soda Grill: Sag Harbor is that kind of town).

There are only eight guest rooms at the American Hotel. They’re large, light and attractively furnished with antiques--not flea-market odds and ends but the genuine articles, often including whole matching bedroom sets from an earlier era.

There are no telephones, televisions or radios, but there are Persian carpets on the floors, fresh flowers on the bureaus and thick coverlets on the king-size beds. The bathrooms are functional rather than frilly, and are sensibly equipped with full-size bottles of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo and nice big bars of Ivory Soap.

Downstairs, the lobby has a friendly, sociable, almost festive feeling, with its backgammon tables, easy chairs and fireplace. It seems less like a place to sign registers and settle bills than to stretch out with a good book or a cool cocktail. The reception desk, in fact, is almost an extension of the bar--and the bar feeds into the hotel’s well-known restaurant, which occupies several low-key, handsome rooms surrounding the lobby.

The chef here is a young New Yorker named Todd Jacobs, who cooked at the River Cafe in Brooklyn and at Manhattan’s Parker Meridien Hotel before joining the American Hotel four years ago as sous-chef. After two years in that post, he took full charge of the kitchen, which he was obviously ready to do: His food turns out to be a wonderful surprise--not just delicious but consistently so, and also admirably unpretentious.

Despite the presence on the menu of such elegant offerings as Petrossian Ossetra caviar, antelope carpaccio, sauteed foie gras with grilled fennel and roast partridge with truffle cream, Jacobs is confident enough of his abilities (and his raw materials) to also prepare such straightforward and accessible dishes--very much in keeping with the discreetly hospitable spirit of the hotel in general--as excellent local oysters on the half shell, light and crispy fried calamari with red and green aioli, rich and satisfying traditional-style French onion soup, delicious grilled salmon filet with dill, impeccable grilled Black Angus steak and even hearty, homestyle shepherd’s pie. (Dinner is served nightly, and lunch--which includes eggs Benedict, a club sandwich, duck confit salad and whole grilled or steamed Long Island lobster, in addition to the full dinner menu--is available on weekends. Breakfast consists of coffee, fresh juice and an assortment of homemade muffins made, and cheerfully served, in the sunny atrium by Welsh-born Edna Olson, the hotel’s “breakfast lady.”)

As if the food alone weren’t enough, incidentally, the American Hotel also boasts what is certainly one of the largest and most intelligently chosen wine lists in America--a 40-page affair including not only an encyclopedic collection of top Bordeaux, Burgundy and California chardonnay and cabernet, but also some 20 or 25 Long Island wines (which are in general excellent, and certainly well worth sampling while you’re here), a stunning array of Alsatian vintages, about a dozen Chilean cabernets (the new darlings of New York wine writers, and extremely good value), a nice choice of wines from Spain and Australia, some lovely Rhone and Provencal wines and on and on. Wine service is deft and knowledgeable, too--as is the service here in general. (Susan Oi is the hotel manager.)

The American Hotel dates its history from the mid-1700s, when an early Sag Harbor settler, James Howell, built an inn on the spot. During the Revolutionary War, British officers were garrisoned in the place--until a group of Yankee soldiers from the east end of Long Island, led by one Col. Meigs, stormed the place in 1777 and captured them without bloodshed. The inn closed early in the 19th Century, and between 1825 and 1845--when it was destroyed by fire--the building served as cabinetmaker Nathan Tinker’s workshop. Tinker subsequently built a handsome two-family brick house on the site, split down the middle for his own family and his son’s. In 1876, that building was turned into the American Hotel.

“Sag Harbor was the largest town on Long Island in those days,” says the hotel’s present-day proprietor, Ted Conklin, “with a busy commercial harbor and an important railhead, and this place was a classic drummers’ (i.e., traveling salesmen’s) hotel. For a while it really thrived.

“After the son of the original owner took over the establishment around 1912, though, Sag Harbor went through a difficult period. Within a few years, you had the First World War, Prohibition and a general collapse of the economy, and it took a long time for the town to snap out of it.

“Meanwhile, the hotel just sort of faded. Though you could probably still get a room there if you wanted to, in effect it stopped functioning as a place to stay probably in the early 1920s. That same owner’s son kept it all that time, though, and when he died, in his 90s, in ’69 or ‘70, he was living in the dining room.”

Conklin, who grew up in nearby Quogue and Westhampton (and whose family has lived in eastern Long Island, he says, since the 1600s), bought the place in 1972, when he was just out of college. Though he had run a small restaurant briefly, this was his first experience as a hotelier--and he had a lot of work to do.

“Basically,” he says, “I rebuilt the place myself. It was sort of frozen in time when I took it over. The wastebaskets in the guest rooms were lined with newspapers from the 1930s, and the gaslights were still hooked up. My first step was tearing down the remains of the outhouse. Then I had to take out the big troughlike sink in the hall where all the salesmen would come out every morning to shave. There were originally 25 rooms in the hotel, and they were very small. I turned them into eight big rooms, and installed private bathrooms in every one.”

At first, Conklin was also the hotel chef. “The dining room was sort of a family-style restaurant to begin with,” he recalls, “which went along with my concept that the hotel could function as a sort of community center. Then, in 1974, I hired a French chef, and he cooked more serious food, which was a big success. At about the same point, we began to develop the wine list, and also redid the guest rooms a bit, trying to make the place better and better a little at a time. I guess you could say that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.”