With a nod to a bygone era, Silly Lily offers serious seaside eats and fun
In its simplest form, a fishing station is a place designed to facilitate fishing activities, often providing patrons with boats, bait and tackle, bait preparation tables and spaces to clean their catch of the day.
A century ago, Suffolk County boasted at least a dozen of these dedicated fishing stations along both its shores, serving as huge hubs for commerce and recreation. Notable South Shore locations included Fort Pond Bay in Montauk, the Shinnecock Canal and the edge of Moriches Bay — specifically, in East Moriches, where one of the last stations remains.
Perched over Moriches Bay and open the 1930’s, Silly Lily got its name from two fishermen’s wives — Sylvia and Lily — who ran it as one of the most successful fishing stations of the time. (Photos by Doug Young)
Nestled inside Tuthill Cove is Silly Lily (99 Adelaide Ave., East Moriches, 631-878-0247), a charming marina and fishing station that’s been in business since the early 1930s. Owned by Jay Scott and Steve Chiros since 2016, it offers all the amenities associated with a day on the water, including vintage and restored boats available to rent, plus fishing rods and bait for guests.
But Silly Lily does more than provide the equipment and setting for a good day of angling (and eating). The sweet little East Moriches fishing station continues to thrive against the odds, offering top-notch recreational activities of the nautical nature while serving as a celebrated slice of East End history, refreshingly steeped in nostalgia and absent of Hamptons haughtiness.
From a passion to a profession
For Scott, turning his passion for fishing into a business wasn’t quite a fluke. Partners in both business and in life, he and Chiros were longtime loyal visitors to the Hamptons, escaping the urban crush of the city for the allure of the East End.
Originally, Scott, a former advertising creative director, purchased the nearly 1.5-acre boat yard and fishing station business from longtime owners Betty Ann and Gary Grunseich, who sold to the couple under the agreement they would keep it a fishing station. It was an easy ask for Scott, whose lifelong passion for restoring wooden boats started when he was just a kid during family visits to a lake in the Adirondacks.
“[Jay] worked at Saatchi & Saatchi for a long time, but he always restored old wooden boats on the side,” says Chiros. “He’s always been creative and also kind of obsessed with wooden boats.” For one such project, Scott bought an old Chris-Craft and a motor yacht, restoring the former while he lived on the latter at the 79th Street Boat Basin for a couple years.
On the East End with a space to nurture Scott’s passion project, the pair learned, and learned to appreciate, the fanciful folklore behind the boat yard’s namesake.
In the early days, two fishermen’s wives, Sylvia and Lily, ran the East Moriches fishing station “back when women basically didn’t work,” Scott says. “Everybody thought it was very silly, two women running a fishing station, and everybody said it wouldn’t work, and it actually ended up being among the most successful fishing stations.”
Inspired by its storied past and the gumption of its long-ago owners, Chiros and Scott knew their newly acquired spot couldn’t survive solely as a fishing station. They quickly got to work bringing Silly Lily into the 21st century, gutting the main structure of the fishing station, doing an extensive reconstruction on the decades-old exteriors, and freshening up the interior’s charming Wes Anderson-meets-Jaws vibe. “If you could swing a hammer at it, we swung a hammer at it,” Scott says.
“Of course, it was the dead of winter and so cold,” Chiros adds, noting they were “sledgehammering and painting and we didn’t even know if people were going to show up” because the location is technically outside the Hamptons.
Scott’s passion for restoring vintage wooden boats, as well as his and Chiros’s deeply rooted love for all-things nautical, can now be celebrated (and practiced) during the summer months at Silly Lily. (Photos by Doug Young)
“I’ve been driving by this part of Long Island for my whole life on the way out to Sag Harbor, but I’d never actually been [to East Moriches] until we bought the place,” says Chiros. “I kept wondering, ‘Are people going to come? Do people even know what a fishing station is?’”
To the men’s delight, people came —practically by the boatload.
Built for summer
With Chiros and Scott at the helm, Silly Lily has quickly evolved over the past nine years from a passion project to an all-inclusive, quintessential waterfront hub of good, clean summertime fun. Hand-painted signs boasting coordinates and salty slogans abound, as do vintage clam rakes, buoys and other maritime memorabilia, adorning the wood-planked walls inside the canary-hued main building. An old-school pinball machine sits inside, too — an alien relic, in the eyes of young visitors — along with a still-working 1940s refrigerator, plus T-shirts, hats, mugs and other trademarked merchandise for sale.
Motorized 16-foot boats are available to rent from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., while dories are available for full- or half-day rentals. Three- and five-hour fishing tours are available for charter, as are sunset cruises on a classic trawler. Silly Lily also offers sailboats, stand-up paddleboards and double and single kayaks for piddling around the bay, and canopied Day Lily skiffs are fully stocked with beachgoing supplies for those simply looking to have a relaxing day soaking up the sun. The marina also provides 46 slips for boats up to 26 feet long, as well as moorings.
Back on land, there are typically games of cornhole, bocce and other summertime staple pastimes taking place around the grounds.
For Scott and Chiros, the beachy bliss is in the simplicity. “This is not a crazy, high-tech experience,” Scott says. “We find such joy in watching children come here, just like we did when we were on the water as kids.”
Not your average snack shack
Naturally, a food and beverage component was needed to supplement the popular seaside spot. The effort was made infinitely easier with the help of husband-and-wife duo Christian Mir and Elaine DiGiacomo, owners of East Quogue’s esteemed Stone Creek Inn, located about 15 miles east.
“When we first bought the place, we knew about boats and fishing and stuff like that, but we didn’t know a lot about how to incorporate food,” Chiros says. “We always had something here foodwise, but it wasn’t until we partnered with Elaine and Christian a few years ago and they brought in their expertise to evolve the menu into what it is today.”
With help from East Quogue’s Stone Creek Inn owners Christian Mir and Elaine DiGiacomo, Lily’s Seaside, the food truck at Silly Lily, offers classic, thoughtful and elevated dishes that brings sophistication to seafood shack fare. (Photos by Doug Young)
Scott and Chiros’s pairing with Stone Creek’s owners came about via an introduction by Early Girl Farm’s Patty Gentry, who previously held her farmer’s market at the fishing station and with whom Mir has a longstanding friendship. Dubbed Lily’s Seaside for the past three years, the on-site eatery serves upscale snack bar fare for leisurely seafarers and beachgoers in a casual outdoor environment.
Armed with a refurbished 1950s bread truck that adjoins a building containing the cold line and bar, Lily’s Seaside is a savvy blend of vintage surf shack and elevated restaurant dining. While not technically a restaurant, Stone Creek acts as a commissary kitchen, preparing all the food at its East Quogue location and then transporting it to East Moriches, where it is then reheated and/or assembled for service.
Not your run-of-the-mill snack bar, staples include a charred street corn Caesar salad with lobster, French fries smothered in warm lump crabmeat and aioli, and a Thai-style lobster stew. Other offerings include crowd-pleasing tacos kicked up with gochujang or spicy soy barbecue sauce, pickled veggie bahn mi sandwiches, sliced prime rib and gruyere on ciabatta bread, quality hot dogs and, of course, lobster rolls.
“We wanted to kind of take that Stone Creek influence and come up with our unique, higher-end type of items but make it feel casual,” says Lily’s Seaside general manager Cass Dotzel. “We’re really trying to lean into that vintage Americana sort of energy.”
Everything is served in eco-friendly to-go containers at a pick-up window. A half-dozen picnic tables are arranged outdoors and service is on a first-come, first-served basis. Lily’s Seaside is also host to live music performances and bingo nights, and it provides sunset cruisers with charcuterie and mezze platters and drinks. “We’re almost implementing a sort of Mediterranean experience, but on the East End,” Dotzel says.
In addition to fishing tour charters and sunset cruises, motorized 16-foot boats, dories and kayaks are available for rent, as are paddleboards and canopied Day Lily skiffs stocked with beach gong supplies. (Photos by Doug Young)
For DiGiacomo, the magic within Silly Lily lies in the fact that it represents everything the East End used to be — and she would know. A frequent visitor during her childhood, Silly Lily resonated with her in a way that has never left her mind.
“That’s what everything looked like back then. Obviously, I have a fine-dining restaurant, and I love everything that the Hamptons is about, but I would love to see more of these kinds of casual places make it,” she says. “It’s just very reminiscent of what used to be out here. And it speaks to the access to the water we should all be able to enjoy.”
As long as Scott and Chiros are around, they’ll see to that.
“Back in the day, the fishing stations were these little shacks on the water and they would have a small dock with anywhere from 15 to 50 little wooden skiffs that people would rent for the day and go fishing for flounder,” says Scott. “We’re really one of the only ones still around.”
