Every summer needs a proper ending. Mine came at a table on the porch at Galley Beach Nantucket, with the sea air moving through and Nantucket Sound bright and flat beyond the sand. It was a last lunch by the sea before the island exhaled and the season ended.
I have been to Galley Beach many times. What draws me back is not only the food or the view, though both earn their reputation. It is the feeling that you are sitting inside a story that is still being written, and that each generation of one family has added a chapter without erasing the last.
From clam shack to the Riviera
The restaurant dates to the 1920s. Its earliest years are hazy, but the family’s history is well documented from 1958, when Emma Lea and Bob Currie bought the private beach club of which the restaurant was part. It was then called The Galley on Cliffside Beach, and it was a clam shack, hot dog stand and soda fountain serving club members on the sand. Non-members could order from a takeout window along the public way, which Galley Beach still partly owns and has opened to the public ever since.
Emma Lea covered the outdoor dining room with a thatched roof that filtered the sun but let the rain in. With her grade-school friend Mary Huffman, who shared ownership, she dragged a dory that had washed ashore up to the front door and filled it with geraniums. That boat of flowers began a tradition that still greets guests today.
Her daughter, Jane Silva, took over in 1971. A friendship with Lucien van Vyve, chef of Nantucket’s Opera House restaurant, taught her French and Belgian cooking, and lunches grew more elegant. The turning point came in 1978, on the French Riviera. Jane and her partner, Ivan Skender, then maître d’ at The Colony in Palm Beach, sat at a beachside table surrounded by flowers, drinking rosé and eating moules-frites, and began to imagine what Galley Beach could become.
They came home with a plan. A blue-and-white striped awning replaced the thatch. Window boxes of red geraniums ringed the room, the tables wore blue-and-white checks, and French music played. They boarded up the takeout window, painted a seaside mural over it, and opened the restaurant to everyone. The Riviera was an inspiration, never a formula.
The brothers, and a building that remembers
Jane’s sons, David and Geoffrey Silva, took over in 1997 and are now the restaurant’s longest stewards. By then the old beach building was tired. Floorboards sagged, and at one point a refrigerator fell through the floor. After opening LoLa 41 down the street in 2006 with David’s wife, the interior designer Eliza, the brothers turned to the family property.
The 2008 renovation, with Eliza and her father, the architect John Newman, is the reason Galley Beach feels both new and old at once. The original exposed roof assembly was dismantled, catalogued and rebuilt as the ceiling you see on entering. Original walls and windows went back in, and the old cedar shingles now line interior walls. The striped awning, which struggled in big storms, became the covered porch that defines the restaurant: sheltered, but open to the air and the view.
Look closely and the details tell the family story. The red geraniums were retired from the dining room because their falling petals stained guests’ clothes and ran up an impressive dry-cleaning bill. They now live in a dory at the entrance, a nod to both Jane and Emma Lea.
Inside, white and green flowers fill built-in planters. The cocktail and coffee bars, designed by Eliza, were made in Paris by ateliers that specialise in traditional pewter counters, le zinc. Two-toned marble floors are laid in a classic fan pattern over radiant heat, and reclaimed brick from old seafaring towns adds age. Every interior table was made by Eliza’s brother, the Nantucket craftsman Josiah Newman.
Outside, the dining tent is draped in fringed burlap, lit by pendants woven in Chile in a pattern that recalls the Nantucket lightship basket.
The lunch
There is a particular pleasure in lunch at the end of the season. The urgency of August has gone, the tables turn more slowly, and the staff, who have carried the summer on their shoulders, move with the ease of people who know the finish line is near. Lunch at Galley Beach is built for that kind of afternoon: a long, unhurried meal where nobody checks the time and the next glass is always a reasonable idea. Mine was the most New England of farewells, a lobster roll and a glass of rosé, with the Sound just beyond the table.
Below the terrace, white umbrellas dot the sand. They can be reserved for the day, with navy-and-white striped chairs, Galley Beach towels and beach service, so lunch and cocktails can follow you down to the water. Beyond them, the beachfront lounge gathers deep sofas around fire pits under yellow-and-white striped umbrellas, the place to stay on when lunch drifts toward sunset.
The wine list
For a restaurant that began as a soda fountain, Galley Beach now runs one of the most serious wine programs on the island. The list is curated by David Silva and Ieva Aldins, with a team of sommeliers on the floor, and it reads like the work of people who drink Burgundy for pleasure.
The cellar holds more than 5,000 bottles, and Burgundy is the heart of it. The whites run from village wines to the grand crus of the Côte de Beaune, Montrachet, Chevalier-Montrachet and Corton-Charlemagne among them, with a deep showing from Domaine Leflaive. The July 2026 list even offered a vertical of Leflaive’s Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet from 2018 to 2021, the kind of flight you rarely see outside a collector’s dinner. Coche-Dury’s Corton-Charlemagne makes an appearance, and the red Burgundy section climbs as far as Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s La Tâche.
Bordeaux is well covered on both banks, with Pétrus at the top, and California is represented by names from Paul Hobbs to Screaming Eagle. The Champagne section has the prestige cuvées you would hope for: Dom Pérignon, Krug and Salon. There is a strong large-format section, too, with magnums and larger bottles of white, rosé and red, which suits a restaurant built for long tables and celebrations.
And then there is the rosé, which is where the Riviera story comes full circle. Provence leads the pink pages, with Château d’Esclans’s Garrus and Domaines Ott in several formats. It is hard to sit on that porch with a glass of rosé, as I did, and not think of Jane and Ivan on the French coast in 1978.
The list carries one more piece of family history. Its pages feature the whimsical illustrations of Lucien van Vyve, the friend who taught Jane to cook. Lucien is also the namesake of one of David and Eliza’s sons.
What comes next for Galley Beach
Galley Beach has always been a work in progress. Food and beverage across the property remain with the family, including Bob’s Bar at the Cliffside Beach Club, named for Bob Currie. David and Eliza’s sons are the fourth generation. A vintage Citroën HY van from the South of France is being restored to sell Galley Beach pantry goods and merchandise. The burlap dining tent, popular for weddings and parties, is becoming the basis of an event design collection of tents, furnishings and packages.
There is no finished version of Galley Beach, and that is the point. From a thatched roof that let the rain in to a building made to weather Nantucket’s storms, it has been shaped by family, travel and craftsmanship. As I finished my last glass of the summer and watched the light change over the Sound, it was easy to see why people come back, season after season, generation after generation.
Galley Beach, 54 Jefferson Avenue, Nantucket, Massachusetts. Reservations and seasonal hours at galleybeach.net.
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