It’s the opening that North Forkers have been griping about for three summers. The one they hated in advance, with its city chef and its renovation of a motel that had been owned by the same Greenport family since 1957—no matter that the brown-shag-carpeted rooms had become so sordid that numerous film and photo shoots took place here.

Surely, they speculated over cocktails on porches, boats, and beaches, the new Silver Sands would be what finally tipped the North Fork of Long Island into becoming the next Montauk, as each restaurant and hotel opening for the last decade has portended.