Eastport is the sort of place most of Long Island drives past. It sits at the seam where Brookhaven ends and Southampton Town begins, on the last stretch of Montauk Highway before the road commits to the Hamptons, and there is not much reason to stop unless you know what is down South Bay Avenue.

What is down South Bay Avenue is a restaurant on the water at 58 South Bay Avenue, with a pier, a small boardwalk, and a dining room whose windows face Moriches Bay and Seatuck Cove. Trumpets on the Bay has been the answer to "where do we go for the anniversary" for families across the South Shore for years, and it is still open, which on this stretch of coast is not a given.

The setting is the whole argument

There are perhaps a dozen restaurants on Long Island where you can watch the sun go down over open water from your table without paying a Hamptons markup for the privilege, and this is one of them. The room faces west across the bay. Indoor and outdoor seating both operate year round, which is worth noting because the winter version of this view, with the bay flat and empty, is arguably better than the July one.

The kitchen describes itself as American-Continental, built on ingredients from the East End. That is a category that has fallen out of fashion, and it tells you what to expect: a menu that has not been rewritten to chase whatever the food press liked this year, cooked for people celebrating something.

Go for the occasion, not the drop-in

This is a special-occasion room and it is honest about it. The restaurant markets itself for bridal showers, engagement parties, rehearsal dinners, anniversaries, corporate dinners, holiday gatherings and receptions, and the private event business is a real part of what it does rather than an afterthought bolted onto a dining room.

What that means practically: if you are planning something for twenty people with a water view on the South Shore, this is a phone call worth making early, particularly for any date between May and October, when the entire East End's event calendar competes for the same weekends.

Getting there

The restaurant publishes three routes, which tells you how many people get lost.

From the Long Island Expressway, take Exit 68 to William Floyd Parkway south, pick up Route 27 east, and come off at Exit 61. From Sunrise Highway heading east, that same Exit 61 puts you onto Eastport-Manor Road, then Montauk Highway (27A), then South Bay Avenue. Coming from the east on Sunrise, take Exit 63 and follow Montauk Highway west instead.

The common error is treating this as a Hamptons drive and staying on Route 27 too long. Eastport comes up before the traffic does.

Booking

Reservations run through OpenTable, linked from the restaurant's own site at trumpetsonthebay.com. Hours shift with the season here as they do at every waterfront restaurant on the island, and the restaurant does not publish a fixed weekly schedule, so confirm the day you want when you book rather than assuming a Tuesday in February works the way a Saturday in August does.

The cove has a better story than the road does

The water outside the windows is Seatuck Cove, and the name is a leftover from a hamlet that no longer exists under that spelling. Eastport was two places until 1860: Waterville to the east and Seatuck to the west. When they merged, Seatuck was dropped as a name because it was too easily confused with Setauket, thirty miles north. The cove kept it.

What Eastport was known for afterward was ducks. From the 1880s this was the center of Long Island's duck industry, and by the middle of the twentieth century 29 farms here were producing about 6.5 million ducks a year. The business was serious enough that Cornell opened a Duck Disease Research Laboratory in Eastport in 1949. The Long Island duckling that appeared on menus across America for decades came from these few square miles.

Almost all of it is gone now, taken by development pressure and by the nitrogen rules that eventually caught up with an industry discharging into a shallow bay. The hamlet's population at the 2020 census was 2,219. Knowing that history changes the drive down South Bay Avenue: this is not a quiet corner that never amounted to anything, it is a quiet corner that used to be the loudest thing in American poultry.

The wider point about Moriches Bay

The bay itself is the reason to make an evening of it. Moriches Bay sits behind the barrier island, shallow and protected, and the light over it in the hour before sunset is the specific thing people drive out for. If you are coming from western Suffolk or Nassau, the drive is roughly an hour and change, and it makes more sense as an evening than as a meal squeezed between other plans.

Smith Point County Park and the Fire Island breach are twenty-five minutes south if you want to build a day around it, and the Eastport-South Manor stretch has enough farm stands in season to justify the trip home taking longer than the trip out.