The Surf Lodge celebrates 15 years: An oral history

When staff frantically chew their fingernails as they begin the eight-week preparation for the season that kicks off on Memorial Day weekend at Montauk’s Surf Lodge, owner Jayma Cardoso bursts into full-throated, genuine laughter. 

“I’m like, ‘Guys, it’ll be fine. We closed the deal on the property six weeks before opening,’” the Brazilian native says. “Cars were pulling up and we were still finishing cleaning the bathrooms for guests to check in. It was a challenge, but we did it.”

Fifteen years later, Cardoso is still doing it — with the same laissez-faire enthusiasm. And the same row of cars clamoring to secure a room, or a table, or at least a shoulder-rub on the dance floor with an up-and-coming artist (or a famous one) at the East End’s ultimate cool-kid mecca.

But if we’re being real, this immigrant club kid had no business thinking she could open a hotel during a global financial crisis on the farthest tip of the Hamptons, so distant from the action it had long been dubbed “The End.”

A regular visitor to Montauk, Cardoso had successfully worked her way up from a coat-check girl to co-owner of Chelsea’s Cain and Nolita’s white-hot GoldBar. She was ambitious, to say the least. 

In 2008, Cardoso told a real estate agent that she wanted to open a hotel in New York City. “And [he] was like, ‘You may be looking for a hotel, but so are the André Balazses of the world,’” Cardoso recalls.

He gently told her she’d never be able to raise the $60 million-plus required, that maybe she should look out East. A few months later, interior designer Robert McKinley, one of Cardoso’s GoldBar partners, called her to ask if she wanted to take a drive to Montauk to see a beachfront motel that was for sale.

 “Our vision was for it to be an anti-clubhouse at the beach, a place for everyone to come together,” recounts Cardoso. McKinley, who was creative director and DJ at The Surf Lodge until he sold his stake to Cardoso in 2014, crafted a beautiful deck and the pair, along with partner (and now hotel developer) Jamie Mulholland, assembled a motley crew of silent partners and investors. “We had a rule that you couldn’t come on property for more than 15 minutes unless you were going to help. It was such a personal undertaking for all of us: Jayma was with the housekeepers scrubbing the floors, my dad was putting furniture together, my mom helped paint.” 

They knew the nightclub business, but they still weren’t sure the party pack would trek this far from the high-end bottle-service haunts of East Hampton.

“I remember at the end of the first night, there were cars two miles in each direction, there were bottles everywhere. You hear stories about these instant successes, but that never really happens. Except it did,” says McKinley, who still frequents the joint. “And it continues to happen. Jayma brought it to the next level.”

 Peter Davis, editor-in-chief of society magazine Avenue, hosted one of the first parties at The Surf Lodge, back in 2008. “It was a seated dinner for my sister Minnie Mortimer’s fashion label,” Davis recalls. “We lured everyone to Montauk, which was considered a huge haul.” Lauren Santo Domingo, Amanda Hearst, Nina Garcia, Mickey Boardman, the whole social set had arrived — when buckets of rain began to fall from the sky during dessert. 

“Everyone was soaking but kept partying inside. It felt like a chic summer camp, with literal dancing on the tables.” 

Cardoso was always the ultimate hostess, perhaps because to her, “entertaining” encompasses four pillars that uphold the 20-room Surf Lodge today: art, cuisine, wellness, music. 

“This community is known for artists, with Andy Warhol and Peter Beard owning homes here,” Cardoso explains. “We wanted to do that across different expressions of entertaining — so chefs doing their version of what a beach supper looks like, artists in residence, wellness that’s not just a yoga class, but maybe a talk about how to live a little longer. And, of course, music was super important to me from Day 1.” 

Cardoso sought the best local musicians, and even convinced Montauk-based Nancy Atlas to perform on Wednesdays … Wednesdays! 

“It was really hard to make the midweek work, and Nancy was like, ‘Maybe we should do this once a month,’” recalls Cardoso with her signature laugh. “I was like, ‘No! Wednesday is my favorite night.’ For those of us in the nightlife industry, that was our weekend.”

Since then, during The Surf Lodge’s iconic summer series, Willie Nelson has taken the stage, with Jimmy Buffett jumping up to join him.

The Marleys performed. Davis remembers a night when Icona Pop played, then stripped down to their skivvies and jumped into the pond. Brandon Boyd of Incubus, Halsey, John Legend, Courtney Love, Leon Bridges and Gary Clark Jr. (before he won four Grammys) all brought down the house. Jessie J serenaded the bar during an epic Memorial Day Weekend rainstorm (as Jon Bon Jovi and Christie Brinkley toasted nearby).

 “Jayma found a way to fuse together music, surf culture and the culinary world with such grace and ease,” says Athena Calderone (the interior designer, author and founder of lifestyle platform EyeSwoon), who recalls nights where chef-restaurateur Gabriela Cámara, of Contramar in Mexico City, made supper, another when Dan Kluger (of ABC Kitchen fame) took the helm and yet another when Neal Harden of ABCV cooked over an open fire and served dishes on plates designed by Ai Weiwei. “Somehow Jayma is able to keep her fingers on the pulse of so many genres, so no two summers are ever the same.”

Cardoso doesn’t deny that things have changed out East — she’s the first to admit that charging $38 for a lobster roll is outrageous, that she’s just keeping up with the Kardashians (who have also hung out here, incidentally) — but that The Surf Lodge remains nothing fancy, just a beachy hangout where you might run into Claire Danes or Taylor Swift, or dance barefoot in a coverup as Mark Ronson or James Murphy spin sounds. 

“Towns evolve. Things change. But you stay true to your principles and it works out,” insists Cardoso, who frequents her retreat nearly every day during the summer, when she’s decamped to her nearby Hamptons home with her 8-year-old son. “We clean it up and paint it every year, but that’s really all. I still call it a motel, because that’s what it is. It’s truly the program and the people that give the Surf Lodge its energy.”

Photographer Ben Watts agrees. “You know what they say in Montauk: It’s not hard to make it; it’s easy to fail,” recants The Surf Lodge regular. “Jayma has made it. It’s a seasonal operation, you know. We’ve seen ’em come and we’ve seen ’em go, but she’s stuck around.” For 15 years and counting.