Greenport’s Summer Table Is Set: ZErdem Opens for the Season

A Summer Table on Greenport’s Main Street

ZErdem, the Mediterranean restaurant from the team behind ZEY Hotel, has reopened for the season, bringing seafood, kebabs and long shareable lunches to one of the North Fork’s most walkable port towns.

The ferries start moving early in Greenport, and by mid-morning Main Street has settled into the particular rhythm of an East End summer: bicycles leaning against clapboard storefronts, coffee carried down toward the water, the day still deciding what it wants to be. At number 314, the doors are already open. ZErdem serves breakfast from eight, which makes it one of the few places in the village where the day can begin properly before anyone has committed to a plan.

The Mediterranean restaurant from the team behind ZEY Hotel is back for the summer season, and its timing is exact. This is the stretch when the North Fork fills with weekenders, when ferry-hopping itineraries connect Shelter Island to the Hamptons and back, and when evenings by the water stretch out with no particular urgency. ZErdem has positioned itself squarely in that current.

Greenport rewards this kind of restaurant. The village has become one of the East End’s most appealing escapes precisely because it resists the polish of its South Fork neighbors: a working maritime character, a Main Street built for walking, wineries a short drive inland, and ferry connections that make it a hub rather than an endpoint. A restaurant here has to serve several audiences at once. ZErdem draws hotel guests, day-trippers arriving from the South Fork and North Fork regulars looking for somewhere new to spend a Thursday night, and it manages the combination by pairing the ease of boutique hospitality with the energy of a village dining room.

The menu begins where Mediterranean tables usually do, with things meant to be passed around. Spreads arrive in quantity: hummus, muhammara, tzatziki, the house Pink Sultan, carrot tarator, and eggplant in tomato sauce. Appetizers carry the coastal theme forward through beef carpaccio, salmon ceviche, grilled Spanish octopus, fried calamari, and zucchini and eggplant chips. Salads lean summer-light, from the ZErdem chopped and the Mediterranean to a traditional Greek, a summer salad and a classic romaine Caesar. It is a structure built for lingering, equally suited to a leisurely lunch, a bite before the ferry or a dinner that unfolds over several hours.

Main courses give the kitchen more room to work. The kebab selection runs from swordfish to beef fillet shish, chicken shish, beef shashlik and Turkish lamb chops. From the water come pistachio-crusted Pacific halibut, grilled branzino, grilled salmon finished with a honey and pomegranate glaze, and a spicy shrimp scampi linguine. Alongside these sit dishes with broader appeal: Stanley Tucci’s spaghetti alla Nerano, steak, short ribs, rigatoni alla vodka and the ZErdem prime burger. The balance is deliberate. A table of six with divergent appetites can order across the entire menu without anyone settling.

What distinguishes the operation is that the daytime hours are treated with the same seriousness as dinner. Breakfast and lunch run Thursday through Sunday from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., a window that covers the morning before a beach day, the pause between wineries and the late-afternoon meal that ends up replacing dinner entirely. For a village where much of the pleasure lies in wandering, having a good table available all day is not a small thing.

For the team behind ZEY Hotel, the restaurant was never conceived as an amenity attached to a lobby. It functions as part of a broader Greenport hospitality experience, one that assumes guests want the ease of a boutique stay, the character of an East End port town and a meal that feels transporting without ever seeming out of place. The Mediterranean framing works here for reasons that go beyond menu logic. Greenport is a port town, and the food of ports has always been about what comes off the boats and how quickly it can be put on a table.

By late summer, when the light holds past eight and the last ferry runs later than anyone expects, that logic will feel obvious. A seasonal restaurant is a gamble on timing, and this one has read the calendar correctly.