The Inn Spot on the Bay in Hampton Bays, Suffolk County, United States | Restaurant

Welcome to the Inn Spot on the Bay, Hampton Bays, United States. The Inn Spot on the Bay in location and New England in spirit, is a comfortable, cosy Restaurant that rapidly juggles traditional and contemporary cooking. Mostly, it works.

This Inn Spot Restaurant is the ambitious scion of The Inn Spot in Quogue, a popular breakfast/lunch eatery also owned by executive chef Colette Connor and pastry chef Pamela Wolfert. The chef de cuisine at The Inn Spot on the Bay is George Torres, whose local experience includes stints at the departed Duke's in East Hampton and Bistro 26 in Hampton Bays.

The main house dates to 1902. But the kitchen moves to the present. The Inn Spot on the Bay serves brittle tapioca crisps as bread. The menu advises: "At your request we will bake a French baguette; this however will take some time and is subject to an additional charge."

Before you think a major bakery has opened in the back, know that you'll receive a pale, bland piece suitable only for an under-seasoned bean sprout hero. And, as Woody Allen would add, there's so little of it.

Smuggle in your own oyster crackers for the light, Manhattan-style Shinnecock Bay fish chowder. The Inn's "creamy lobster bisque" has smooth texture, but no great depth of flavour. There is, however, a cute pastry lobster to identify it aswim on the surface.

Things improve with the plump, steamed mussels, in a lively white wine-Thai Chile sauce. The "crisped calamari" are crunchy enough and good, as are the house's fried oysters.

But the shrimp-and-crayfish rolls, billed as coming with a "Vietnamese dipping sauce," are pretty dull. Instead, pick the straightforward shrimp cocktail.

Salads are respectable alternatives. The house salad tosses pine nuts, currants and local goat cheese amid the mesclun; the Caesar gets a boost from pecorino Romano; and the snappy seaweed salad is juiced up with sweet rice wine and toasted sesame seeds.

Steamed lobster "in the rough" is a logical main course, and it arrives moist and unadorned. The lobster potpie also is recommended, with sweet meat, peas and carrots in a modest bechamel-style sauce, under a tasty pastry crust.

Seafood Newburg, shellfish in a sherry-shot cream sauce, is mellow and fairly light compared with the rich and buttery textbook version. Crab cakes, with Israeli couscous, dried cranberries and scallions, compete favorably, too.