The owners at Vine Street Café are the East End’s restaurant do-it-yourselfers
If necessity is the mother of invention, the concept of “do-it-yourself” is the mental fortitude needed to carry the invention out. Relying on that particular method for the not-so-neat, almost never straightforward act of building and opening a restaurant seems not only precarious but downright messy and arguably a really bad idea.
Vine Street Café (41 South Ferry Road, Shelter Island) owners and chefs Terry Harwood and Lisa Murphy Harwood bet on their mutual mental (and physical) fortitude anyway.
Since 2003, the pair has helmed their Shelter Island restaurant, which is beloved by residents and visitors of the East End alike for serving seasonally charged, comforting cuisine in an equally comfortable, cozy environment.
While it’s well-known the dynamic husband-and-wife team both earned their respective culinary stripes at some of the nation’s most esteemed eateries, under the leadership of the most revered names in the epicurean world, the fact that they renovated and decorated their popular spot from the ground up is not just a far lesser-known truth: it’s something that would give even the most seasoned HGTV star pause. The best part? It worked.
Simple yet effective decor, warm, welcoming ambiance, excellent food and efficient use of both indoor and outdoor spaces keeps Vine Street Café as one of the leading restaurants of the East End. (Photos by Doug Young)
For over 20 years, Vine Street has maintained its status as one of the island’s most respected and well-loved eateries. And while Harwood and Murphy-Harwood also went on to open Cove Hollow Tavern in East Hampton, and the much-missed Blue Canoe in Greenport, Vine Street remains a particular triumph on the high-dollar real estate realm that is the East End. Drive past any evening on the weekend, any time of the year, and the front, side and rear parking lots are filled to the brim, so popular and well-loved is the cedar-shingled eatery perched on busy 114 South.
“Everyone assumes we hired architects, builders, interior designers and decorators and stuff, but we did everything ourselves,” says Harwood, who serves as Vine Street’s executive chef.
Tasked with rebuilding and decorating their future restaurant from a dilapidated space that once housed a bakery, Chinese food joint and adjacent dentist office, “So many people said, ‘Oh, you’re nuts, it’ll never work,’” recalls Murphy-Harwood, who is Vine Street’s executive pastry chef.
But it did — resulting in not only one of the most consistently patroned, year-round restaurants on the East End, but one of the most aesthetically timeless, to boot.
From one island to another
Long before they came to call Shelter Island their permanent home, the pair was firmly ingrained in the top tier of the nation’s restaurant world, most notably on another much larger island located about 100 miles west: Manhattan.
“We met at Union Square Café,” Murphy-Harwood, a native New Yorker, says. She was a pastry chef there and her future husband, a transplant from Dayton, Tenn., was a line cook. “And we worked well together.”
So well, in fact, that the two gained the attention of prominent businessman and hotelier André Balazs, who soon hired Harwood as corporate executive chef for his hotel group in the late ‘90s. With Murphy-Harwood as executive pastry chef, the pair traveled to all the cities where Balazs’s hotels were located, effectively developing menus, establishing restaurant concepts and performing administrative and operational tasks at famous spots like the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood and The Standard Hotel on Sunset Boulevard.
Open year-round, Vine Street offers classically prepared comfort dishes, heavily inspired by French cuisine, in a country casual meets chic setting. (Photos by Doug Young)
“We traveled to Miami, Los Angeles and then, eventually, Shelter Island,” Harwood says. “That was our life for about five years. So, at the end of that run, we were like, okay, we’ve done enough of this, you know, putting our lives into everything that we do right up to that point and not having something of our own to show for it.”
That all changed when they arrived at Balazs’s Sunset Beach, a bustling boutique hotel and restaurant perched above Crescent Beach on Shelter Island, where the duo’s impeccably high standards for food and atmosphere were quickly noticed by frequenters of the trendy destination spot.
“We were immediately drawn to the simplistic beauty of this area,” Murphy-Harwood says, “and although we became very hip early on to the seasonality that exists out here, we were in our stride, we had learned from our experiences about what works and what doesn’t, and we thought we could make this work as a year-round business.”
Although friends and restaurant contemporaries recommended they set up shop somewhere in the highly coveted section of Shelter Island Heights, Harwood and Murphy-Harwood’s interests kept pulling them back to the small, landlocked, cottage-like building that was covered with vines along the main drag of the island.
“Everything that was available in the Heights was three times more, but nobody wanted this property,” Harwood says. “Why did we take it? Because it was available.”
Both note that the way they went about it doesn’t really happen anymore, primarily due to stricter building permits and more expensive price tags for both materials and the real estate itself.
“We were immediately drawn to the simplistic beauty of this area,” Murphy-Harwood says. “We had learned from our experiences about what works and what doesn’t, and we could make this work as a year-round business.” (Photos by Doug Young)
Attributing their initial success to good timing, a good work ethic and good reputations, Harwood says that after quitting their corporate jobs, being able to buy the building “was key for us to do any of this. And it was at a time when you could actually do that.” A shoe-string budget carried them through the interior decorating process, with Harwood recalling they spent every dollar they had, right up to opening day, on only the purchases they considered necessary.
“I went to a used restaurant equipment store with $2,000 in cash and got as much as I could,” Murphy-Harwood says. “We did the tiles in the kitchen on our hands and knees. We just did it that way because we had to. In today’s world, that doesn’t really happen anymore.”
It takes an island village
Initially laying out the restaurant’s floor plan with blue tape, the pair took great care to create intimate spaces that were functionally and visually appealing. Assisted by family members — Murphy-Harwood’s sisters came out to provide extra hands while Harwood’s brother-in-law, a building inspector in Tennessee, talked him through how to build and install a bar and carve out archways in the walls to separate sections of the restaurant — “remodeled in record time,” Harwood says, noting they began renovations of the property in September and opened in April the following year.
“We knew from years of working in the industry what guests did and didn’t want to see,” Murphy-Harwood says. “When you came in, you certainly didn’t want to see a bathroom, you didn’t want to see an unattractive hallway.” Immediate physical changes to the space’s interior included eliminating the drop-ceiling panels, opting to expose the pitched ceiling and removing the outdated pink and gray Chiclet tile that was covering the interior, swapping it for wide-plank pine hardwood floors and textured walls created from burlap that Murphy-Harwood painted on. Materials for the remodel were purchased mostly from Home Depot and Shelter Island Ace Hardware.
Creating areas within the dining room that felt sweet and intimate was paramount. “We came from these great restaurants in New York City that were kind of on the bigger side, so we knew the importance of feeling cozy,” Murphy-Harwood says, noting they immediately understood that most of their future clientele wouldn’t be looking for a city-style restaurant.
A grab-and-go market has afforded the small but mighty restaurant reach beyond the dining room. (Photos by Doug Young)
“I would look in books and kind of get ideas of what sort of spoke to Terry and me as far as quality, and, you know, not fighting nature,” she continues. “I was always thinking of the film ‘Out of Africa,’ when they would sleep in those canvas tents but have meals with silver and beautiful crystal glass. We kept falling back on our natural surroundings to guide our renovation, keeping it very simple but, at the same time, elegant.”
Drawing inspiration from their natural surroundings, Murphy-Harwood fashioned wall sconces from placemats, bundles of twigs and bamboo that grew outside the restaurant. She glued it all together, removed the existing globe-shaped shade on the light fixtures they purchased from the hardware store for less than three dollars each and voila — a brand-new, locally sourced light fixture that provided both light and style to otherwise bare walls.
“The whole thing was to keep the vibe calm and simple,” she says. “We wanted it to feel like you were having dinner in someone’s home.”
Designing dining details
In 2017, Harwood and Murphy-Harwood opened Cove Hollow Tavern on Montauk Highway in East Hampton, in the space that had housed Café Max for decades.
“We were looking to do something else somewhere else, but we didn’t want it to be Vine Street, Part Two,” Murphy-Harwood says.
Named for an adjacent road, the eatery’s design and overall look draws heavily from styles of historic taverns found across the area from nearly three centuries ago but is clearly done in the similarly simple yet elegant aesthetic of their Shelter Island sister operation.
Plentiful outdoor gardens and alfresco dining make full use of every inch of outdoor space. (Photos by Doug Young)
Setting out to make their style of dining more accessible to their off-island fans, the couple began the renovation process in January of that year and opened Cove Hollow in mid-May. Inspired by the Old-World quality easy to spot both inside and outside the space, Murphy-Harwood recalls, “That too was a building that we felt just needed some love.”
This time around, the pair hired professional builders to do the work but were sure to keep the bones and historic characteristics of the building intact, retaining the old slate flooring, exposing lots of the natural wood and whitewashing the walls, with the ever-handy Harwood building the dining room’s banquette himself.
“We wanted to, again, keep it simple and keep it elegant, like a really old house that felt cozy and welcoming,” Murphy-Harwood says. Admitting it was a gut job, she says they rebuilt the building inside and out, including the dining room and kitchen. “The kitchen actually had a tree growing in it. It was kind of crazy and it wasn’t even fully closed. So, it was a little daunting.”
Consistently putting what they earn back into their restaurants, in 2009 they expanded Vine Street’s kitchen and built a small market to relieve the busy bar of the growing takeout business the restaurant was handling. The market also serves as a hub to purchase homemade sauces, as well as other food-centric specialty goods that are almost exclusively made in-house. During the pandemic, the market proved to be a godsend, keeping the Vine Street vibe alive during lockdown.
“Really, it just goes back to this: you either have to be a billionaire or you got to do it yourself, right?” Murphy-Harwood says. “And we did it ourselves because we’re not billionaires.”
