When I first moved to Mattituck in the 1990s, my commercial fisherman husband took me to a local place in Laurel for dinner called Cliff’s Elbow Too. The night was cold and dark but the inside of Cliff’s was the opposite, with its old-school wood paneling, paintings of sailing ships on the walls and nautical décor that was probably older than me. A friendly group of barflies was holding court at the bar, and I instantly felt the relief of relaxing into the cozy restaurant.
I ordered the fried bay scallop dinner and a cold beer from a friendly waitress my grandmother’s age (back in the day when Peconic Bay scallops were plentiful and selling for $6 a pound); my husband had a marinated steak. It was a delicious, unpretentious dinner after a long, hard day of work — just what the doctor ordered.
The best part, which I didn’t know at the time, was that the welcoming, vintage atmosphere and satisfying food at Elbow Too would remain pretty much the same 31 years later. The small chain of Elbow Room restaurants on the North Fork — the Elbow Room in Jamesport, Cliff’s Elbow Too in Laurel, Cliff’s Rendezvous in Riverhead, and the late, lamented Elbow East in Southold — continue to provide a friendly, nostalgic experience, whether you actually remember such a place from your past or not. But if you do and you’ve spent time on the North Fork, I bet you have a memory or two of your own from visiting one of them.
With three locations, there’s always room at Elbow Room. (Photo Credit: DOUG YOUNG)
THE MAKING OF A CLASSIC
Cliff Saunders III, current owner of the Elbow Room incarnations, is the third Cliff to helm the local trio of restaurants. The Elbow Too in Laurel was originally called the Laurel Inn. “That was my grandparents’ place,” Saunders says. “My grandfather was an avid fisherman. He would go out and fish and whatever he caught was the fish of the day.” Cliff Sr. and his wife, Helen, bought the place in 1946 and the family’s journey in the restaurant business began.
In 1958, Cliff Sr.’s son, Cliff Jr., and his wife, Joan, opened the Elbow Room on Main Road in Jamesport (Joan named it with her astute observation that “it’s got nothing but elbow room”). “My mother had a really strong work ethic,” says Saunders. “She would get here at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to get her work done before anyone else came in, and she always had a bag of bagels with cream cheese so when everybody showed up they would have something to eat.” Joan Saunders famously made the restaurant’s clam chowders and baked clams each week all the way into her late 80s.
When Saunders was 14, he started working at the restaurant. “My father threw me in the car and said, ‘Come on, you’re going to work.’ And that was it,” Saunders says, adding that he never really considered another career.
“One of my jobs [back then] was adding up the credit card [receipts],” he recalls. “I would mail it in, and they would mail us a check. If we did $1,000 a week that was a lot.”
Even though today’s Elbow Rooms have the obligatory electronic point of service system and the latest tech to accept credit cards, the look of the restaurants has remained pretty much the same throughout the decades.
“We thought for our 50th anniversary in 2008 we would do a little update,” Saunders says of the Jamesport restaurant. “We finished the walls; they used to be shingled and paneled,” he notes on a recent day, pointing to a vintage shingled corner. “That’s the last remnant of it.”
James Marengo, Saunders’s former son-in-law who works as a manager and bartender at the Elbow Too, knows that too much change at any Elbow is unpopular. “We had to update cautiously,” he says, “because if we update too much our customer base gets upset.”
The Saunders family added Cliff’s Rendezvous on East Main Street in Riverhead in 1976 and Elbow East in Southold in the 1980s. The latter was sold to manager Billy Berliner in 1999 and is now the site of seafood restaurant Little Fish (it’s owned by Arden Gardell, who has a similar-themed spot in Montauk called 668 The Gig Shack).
“The Rendezvous was our go-to spot after work; the bar would be three and four deep with Charlie Mercer tending bar,” says Polly Loper-Cummings, who grew up in Mattituck and now lives in North Carolina. “My best memories are at the Elbow Too with Frankie behind the bar and Ellen waitressing … [and] time spent just talking with Helen about everything and nothing.”
Through the years, Saunders has resisted overtures to change business operations, like taking on would-be partners to expand or using delivery services like DoorDash. “We tried doing our own delivery for a while during Covid and found that our food doesn’t travel well,” he says. “If it’s not broken, we don’t fix it.”
A NEW GENERATION
The local chain continues to be a family affair, with Saunders’s daughter Angel Chituk working at Cliff’s Rendezvous in Riverhead. “I’ve been coming here for as long as I can remember,” she says. “I worked here all throughout high school on the weekends; I would host or bus tables. When I went away to college, I would come home every single weekend from Rhode Island, and I had a double shift on Saturdays at the Rendezvous … I just loved to do it.”
Chituk eventually took a job as a surgical tech but kept her weekend shift at the restaurant. After her son, Quinn, was born in 2021 she gave up her medical career for the restaurant job, where she was able to bring her son to work. Nowadays, her 2-year-old daughter, Ellie, goes to work with her. “All the customers know my kids,” says Chituk. “They love it; they think it’s the coolest place on Earth.”
While Cliff Saunders’s wife, Christina, worked for the family business for a time, Chituk ended up taking over her tasks. Saunders’s grandson, Donovan Marengo, now works at the Elbow Too, becoming the fifth generation of the family to work at the restaurant. “We all get along, genuinely, like a big family,” says Chituk.
Five generations of the Saunders family have worked at the Elbow Room restaurants on the North Fork over the years. (Photo Credit: Doug Young)
And several employees have become just like family, too, working at the Elbow Room restaurants for decades — and one for over half a century. Waitress Carol Keller retired in 2025 after serving customers for 55 years, and Bobby Cormier has spent 35 years and counting as the manager at the Rendezvous, while Jacquie Buttafuoco has put in 28 years as manager of the Jamesport location. Two or three other employees have worked for over 20 years at the restaurants and five or six have been working there at least a decade.
What’s their secret to keeping such loyal staff? “It’s very low pressure, in a sense,” says Chituk. “We have great customers; everybody enjoys serving. I love waitressing. I waitress every Friday night and I fill in whenever I need to.”
ELBOW FARE
The Jamesport restaurant has a framed 1958 menu on the wall that features shrimp cocktail for 75 cents, broiled stuffed lobster for $3.95 and porterhouse steak, plain or marinated, for $3.75.
“My family went to Cliff’s since the ‘60s,” says Lorraine Angela, a former North Forker who now lives out of state. “Steaks were four bucks … the stuffed clams and marinated steaks were and are the best … love the times we had eating there; [it] was a special treat for all of us.”
Prices have changed, but not a lot else. It doesn’t have to.
Left, old menus and awards line the walls at the Jamesport location; center, Felipe Munoz, longtime chef of the Jamesport location; right, the restaurant’s famous marinated steak. (Photo Credit: Doug Young)
Everyone knows the Elbow Room is the place for steaks, marinated and served black on the outside and pink and tender inside. The soy sauce-based marinade recipe is top secret; it can be found on the internet but the staff disagrees with its accuracy. “At this point it’s become mythical,” says Saunders.
Felipe Munoz, the Jamesport location’s chef, cuts the restaurant’s steaks by hand and grinds the meat fresh for burgers (there’s a wallet-friendly $9 burger special every Sunday at the Elbow Too in Laurel). Munoz was taught personally by Joan Saunders how to make her famous clam chowder and baked clams and “he makes it exactly the way she told him,” Saunders says.
Susan Ellis, whose family summered in Mattituck beginning in the 1960s, recalls that “the Rendezvous in Riverhead was a fav[e] on a Saturday night. Always the same meal: wedge salad with blue cheese dressing, baked clams, and a marinated steak with fries. Good times!”
Besides those famous steaks, you can get oysters or clams on the half shell, pierogi with sautéed onions, steak and other types of sandwiches, surf and turf, seafood and pasta dishes, roast duck and that great wedge salad.
It’s no surprise that running a restaurant these days is a challenge, with the price of meat and other goods up significantly (the Elbow Room’s meat costs more than doubled after the pandemic). “Payroll went up, the credit card fees went up,” says Saunders. “It’s not easy.” Permits and licenses must be kept current; food safety trainings and health inspectors must be dealt with.
Yet after eight decades, the Elbow Room restaurants have endured. In a region that has seen dramatic change, the Saunders family still emphasizes good food, familiar faces and a place where generations of North Fork families can make memories together.
Some places are worth preserving exactly as they are.
Cliff’s Elbow Room, 1549 Main Road, Jamesport, 631-722-3292; Cliff’s Elbow Too, 1085 Franklinville Road, Laurel, 631-298-3262; Cliff’s Rendezvous, 313 E. Main St., Riverhead, 631-727-6880; cliffselbowroom.com.
