The name, the address, the layout, the menu format — everything about Fēniks, Douglas Gulija’s month-old venture, is different from The Plaza Cafe , the Southampton restaurant that he and his wife, Andi, opened in 1997. For the chef, though, the most significant change is that, for the first time in a long time, he’s got a team behind him.

After Andi died in 2010, The Plaza Cafe became, essentially, a solo venture. "A lot of the time, it was just me, another cook and a dishwasher," Gulija said.

The restaurant closed in June, but he'd spent the prior year readying the new space, a few blocks away in the narrow building that used to house village standby Le Chef. It was Gulija’s cousin Skip Norsic who purchased the building after selling his waste-collection company in 2022. And it was t

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