Top Chef’s Sam Talbot is now the Surf Lodge’s Sam Talbot, after his restaurant fed a Don Julio summer kickoff party at the Montauk hotel this weekend. In the kitchen he was banging out appetizers like roasted figs and pulled pork piled on cucumber slices and pretzel toast, but Talbot considers the crab seviche and the scallops to be the menu’s hits. “I was never a Hamptons guy until now,” said the North Carolina transplant, who lives at the hotel and plans to start surfing. “I love it. I see the water and cook all day.” But it’s hard to shake that Top Chef shadow — or is it? “I’ve had a woman come up to me and say, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry about last week,’” he said, recalling a recent night at Pastis. “And I said, ‘I don’t know you.’ And the woman said, ‘I know, we probably shouldn’t have made out last week.’ And I was like, ‘Ma’am, I don’t know who you are.’ And then she said, ‘No, no. Now you’re playing hard to get.’ And then all of a sudden she realized, ‘I don’t know who you are.’” Grub Street readers won’t be fooled so easily. —Maridel Reyes
