Plenty of Manhattan restaurants open pop-ups in the Hamptons over the summer. Success is not guaranteed. Scott Sartiano brought his Soho-based Sartiano’s to East Hampton and faced the wrath of angry neighbors. The acclaimed Red Hook Tavern recently spun off a run as Sag Harbor Tavern; il Buco al Mare, the out East spawn of il Buco, was booking reservations this summer. Such endeavors typically function at best as summertime side projects, flings to be forgotten after Labor Day.

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On Thursday night, however, a perfect facsimile of the Polo Bar, the celeb-stuffed comfort food spot that exists as a restaurant version of Ralph Lauren’s world-building, opened on a 19-acre horse ranch in Bridgehampton. This Polo Bar à la the East End came complete with paintings of horses, saddle paraphernalia, and propped-up polo mallets that also pepper the original location on 55th Street. There were cheese popovers at every seat, and burgers at most of them too. Those who stepped outside, though, heard crickets in place of midtown honks.

And unlike most sequels, this new Polo Bar seemed just as starry as the subterranean one in Manhattan. Walking in, there was Jude Law joshing with Tom Hiddleston at the bar, next to the billionaires Jonathan and Lizzie Tisch, who’d just procured martinis to clink with Justin Theroux, also martini in hand. Some young stars too: Joey King, Diana Silvers, and Cole Sprouse were quaffing drinks, snacking on herby cocktail peanuts. Things were starting to get surreal. What was this fantasy Hamptons-based Polo Bar where Laura Dern walked in with Twin Peaks costar Naomi Watts? Usher drinking some kind of orange cocktail? What’s Kacey Musgraves doing here? Colman Domingo, that you? A guy who looked like a fashion bro, but was also seven feet tall—oh, that was just art-collecting Miami Heat power forward Kevin Love. The bartender who said “my pleasure, brother,” when someone ordered a cocktail: I’m pretty sure he was a model, not like a part-time model but a famous model. Come to think of it, there seemed to be models…everywhere? And there was a lot of secret service—like, more than that one time last year when Ivanka Trump sat next to me at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and, hey, was that…

Yes, the first lady Dr. Jill Biden was eating at the pop-up Polo Bar in the Hamptons, sitting next to the visionary who dreamed up the space—Ralph Lauren. OK, so, the full story: This was not actually a permanent Hamptons-based Polo Bar—sorry to those who read all that and started banging the line of Polo Bar–gatekeeper Cheutine Fong to get a corner four-top at seven this Saturday. If you went to Khalily Stables today, you’d find actual horses rather than paintings of horses, actual pigs instead of pigs in a blanket. Lauren decided to kick off New York Fashion Week by unveiling his Spring 2025 collection in the East End of Long Island and to host everyone for dinner at a full-scale version of the Polo Bar, which would exist for a single night only.

At least one New York restauranteur was impressed. “I’ve done pop-ups of Ray’s upstate, but never anything this fancy,” said Theroux, who’s the part-owner and full-time avatar for the Lower East Side pseudo-dive of which he spoke.

Most of the show’s attendees had to be shuttled in from the city, taking them away from art fairs and gallery openings and other fashion shows and the US Open semifinals. Those who ferried in via helicopter and seaplane arrived in time to see a series of R.L.-clad jockeys taking horses dressage as waiters wheeled around seafood bites. Rolling greens surround the dozens of stables, a compound where some of our most acclaimed equestrian nepo babies—Jennifer Gates, Jessica Springsteen, Eve Jobs—honed their skills. (It was sold three years ago, and it’s back on the market again for a cool $15.8 million.) Many of those who took Sprinter vans and black cars were ensnared in some gnarly traffic, arriving just in time for a fashion show that had been mercifully pushed back 45 minutes. A truly Hamptons experience!

Once everyone took their seats for the show, any thought of bumper-to-bumper was swept away the second that the lights went down on the runway, and the first model walked out to the immortal strains of Christopher Cross’s “Sailing,” a blast of pure yacht rock: a soft rock song about yachts. A few of the horses chilled at the end of the platform. Horses at a fashion show: I mean, you don’t see that very often at, say, Milk Studios.

One by one the models, including Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington Burns, helped build the Ralph Lauren version of the American Dream, filtered through the lens of the historic Hamptons hamlet. This being a Ralph Lauren show, the designer’s own history with the storied bit of geography is worth noting. Lauren started renting homes in the erstwhile bohemian enclaves of Southampton and East Hampton, just before the Hamptons exploded as a playground for the powerful in the 1980s and 1990s. He now owns a compound in Montauk and several stores out East, and connects the looks of today with the bygone Hamptons history—of de Kooning, of Pollock, of early Impressionist shows at Guild Hall—that was still somewhat present when he arrived.

“The Hamptons is more than a place,” Lauren said in a statement. “It’s a natural world of endless blue skies, the ocean, green fields, and white fences, rusticity and elegance with a quality of light that drew artists here decades ago. It has been home, my refuge, and always an inspiration.”

The first lady’s presence helped further the evening’s already high only-in-America quotient. Biden arrived at Khalily Stables along with the president’s granddaughter Finnegan, and the two of them started mingling with guests, saying hello to Hiddleston. (The first lady also seemed to have a nice chat with Vogue global editorial director and Condé Nast chief content officer Anna Wintour.) We should note that Dr. Biden has a long history with the brand and wore Ralph Lauren last month when she introduced her husband, President Joe Biden, at the Democratic National Convention.

Lauren had also designed the opening and closing ceremony outfits for Team America at the Summer Olympics, and several of the attendees walked around the cocktail hour with medals hanging from their necks including volleyball player Chiaka Ogbogu and swimmer Bobby Finke. As if to hammer it home, when the show ended, Lauren walked out in a red, white, and blue motocross jacket with “USA” emblazoned across the front to the music of Frank Sinatra—another kid from the outer reaches of the New York area who bent America to his will, who made the country’s iconography in his image.

Then, it was Polo Bar time. The room was a sea of dry martinis, punctuated by the faces of the editors in chief of a dozen fashion magazines, and even the models were at least picking at the gruyere-stuffed popovers on saddle-leather banquettes. (Several also snuck around the back of the restaurant to puff on cigarettes, just like back in Manhattan.) The first lady sat with the designer, his wife Ricky, and their son David, who is married to someone else who is well-acquainted with the White House: Lauren Bush Lauren, granddaughter of H.W. and niece of W. Dern came by to gab for a few minutes and say hello to Biden, before confabbing with Musgraves and exchanging numbers. Turlington Burns sat at the table next to them with her son and daughter, both of whom walked in the show. Theroux asked Antoni Porowski if he wanted to split the famous Polo Bar cheeseburger. He did.

Dinner wound down surprisingly quickly, with desserts coming out just after nine. Several modes of transportation awaited, with the ground option clocking in at a sprightly traffic-less hour and 40 minutes. At one of the last tables, Rufus Wainwright sat locked into a conversation with Dern and her daughter Jaya Harper, before abruptly standing up to go.

“I’m taking one of those choppers back to New York, right to my door!” Wainwright said.