Hospitality: Sand, surf and a bite to eat

What best says summer to you?

Maybe Montauk. A sunset. A small restaurant emphasizing seafood and local produce. All that said summer to Frank Davis, his wife, KristinaDavis, and Franklin Ferguson and his fiancee, Leyla Marchetto.

"People talk about doing this all the time," Frank Davis said. "This" is Navy Beach, the small restaurant he and the three others opened May 1 off Fort Pond Bay. "We did it."

Frank and Kristina Davis, Wainscott residents who have lived on the East End for years, spotted an old place called Sunset Saloon one night about two years ago.

"We sat there, and my wife said, 'I could do a lot with this place,' " Davis said. Davis is a graduate of the Cornell School of Hotel and Restaurant Administration; his wife is a designer. Their friend Ferguson operated restaurants across the country, and his fiancee is a public relations guru.

They got their hands dirty. "We spent all winter there," Frank Davis said. "We did a lot of it [the refurbishing] ourselves. We bought tools and hired local folks to do the more complicated work."

They hired as their executive chef Paul LaBue, who had been chef at Nick & Toni's in East Hampton and elsewhere on the East End.

Navy Beach is a summer place, Frank Davis said, and noted that so far business has been good. "It's been somewhat of a dream to get behind a project like this," he said.