Editor's Note: A new Hamptons.com column will be devoted to the enjoyment and experience of cigars. In each installment our cigar columnists, Jack Harrington and Patrick Kabat, will bring you to a new haunt in hopes of creating a field guide to those remaining places in which cigars can fully be experienced and along the way describe, rate and feature new treasures and stalwart classic sticks that may be unfamiliar to our cigar smoking readers.

New York City - Through the ingenuity of a Midtown tobacconist, a cigar shop was recently transformed at twilight into a cozy restaurant. Guests enjoyed a leisurely dinner amidst the pipes and humidors on display at De La Concha Tobacconist, enjoying cigars and conversation with cigar magnate Rakesh "Rocky" Patel.

The dinner was the brainchild of Ron Melendi, General Manager of De La Concha Tobacconist on Sixth Avenue. Melendi is a fourth-generation cigar man whose grandfather traveled from Cuba to New York in 1924 to enter the city's fledgling cigar trade. Melendi's father, Lionel, managed and later purchased the store before passing the torch to his son.

De La Concha has been an oasis for New York cigar lovers since 1964. The store was renovated and expanded during the cigar boom of the mid-1990s, and although it entered the Davidoff family of retailers in 2007, the characteristic atmosphere cultivated by the Melendi family remains.

These days you can buy a lot of cigars online, but in his family's storied little shop, Melendi cultivates the sense of community unique to cigar smokers. You'll see this every afternoon at De La Concha, as the regulars cluster around the high-tops overlooking Sixth Avenue. Earlier that day one of Melendi's regulars sat down across from a foreign oil executive worth hundreds of millions. "Those guys never would have spoken to each other if it wasn't for the leaf," said Melendi. "They sat and talked for hours. That's what cigar smoking is." Or, as one of Melendi's guests put it, "You can't bull.... in a cigar bar." However, as a general rule, you can't have dinner and drinks either, that is until Melendi launched a series of catered cigar dinners in De La Concha.

A box of Rocky Patel's signature Decades. (Steve Zak)

We had a few moments before a small army of waiters from Rue 57 swarmed the cozy tobacco shop, armed with white tablecloths and settings. We wanted to hear from Patel, the Hollywood lawyer turned cigar magnate behind the three cigars on the evening's menu.

"Let me use my factory punch," Patel offered as we stood there, uncut cigars in hand. Instead of a cigar cutter, he popped the cap from a Rocky Patel Renaissance with his thumb, a practiced maneuver which betrayed years of hands-on experience at his tobacco plantations in Nicaragua, Honduras, and places undisclosed.

That's right, places undisclosed. Though cigar tobacco is grown almost exclusively in Latin America - save, we hasten to add, for the proud tradition of light, buttery Connecticut Shade wrappers - he is "always looking for different tobaccos from different regions that offer different taste profiles." Patel's most recent discovery occurred during a drive through Amish country, where he developed a wrapper from Lancaster, Pennsylvania tobacco for his Patel Bros. line. He tells us that he is considering experimenting with Indian tobacco, perhaps a nod to his heritage and success in a field dominated by those of Latin extraction. The big mystery, however, lies within his best-known cigar, the Decade, which features a blend of unknown provenance. Despite our entreaties, Patel kept mum.


He had much more to say about creating his cigars. "Cigars are an art form," says Patel, "similar to wine making." Blending tobaccos for cigars is both art and science, requiring the palate and geographic acumen of a oenophile, because a host of factors peculiar to a tobacco's region, particularly the mineral content of the soil and any prevailing cloud conditions, are critical in determining the taste of the resulting cigar.

Like a good vinter, Patel insists on having complete control over his blends.

Rocky Patel prefers to pair his cigars, like the 1961, with Italian wines rather than whiskies or cognacs. (Jack Harrington)

Traditionally, the tobacco plant is divided into three parts when harvested: ligero (the top third of the leaf), viso (middle third), and seco (bottom third). The strength of the tobacco descends as you move down the plant. This tripartite classification wasn't fine enough for Patel, who sought more control over his blending process and consistency in the flavor of his cigars. Patel invented an eight-part classification system called "primings." Beginning at the bottom of the tobacco plant with the first priming, Patel can request leaves from a more specific part of tobacco plants in a given region and then create a more precise flavor profile for his blends. Therefore, when he asks for leaves from the "second" and "seventh" primings of a particular field in Nicaragua, Patel's factory receives something more nuanced than if he had ordered bails of ligero and seco leaves from the same the field.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his palate and predilections, Patel prefers to pair his cigars with red wines. He rejects the conventional brown liquor pairings. According to Patel, the alcohol content in single-malts and cognacs "is so high that it overpowers the palate," so he prefers Super Tuscans, Montepulcianos, and Amarones. "Italian wines, like cigars, have a lot more character and diversity."

As much as we enjoyed hearing Patel talk about his craft, we were ready to sample his cigars when the doors opened on the metamorphosed cigar shop. Patel manned his post at the front of the shop where he greeted every guest and presented the first cigar on the menu, the Decade torpedo. As they made their way to the impromptu bar for cocktails, the mysterious provenance of the Decade's blend was on everyone's tongue. The cigar, with a Sumatran wrapper and binder and filler tobaccos from an undisclosed country, gained immediate notoriety when it received an extremely prestigious 95 rating from Cigar Aficionado magazine in 2008.

Rakesh "Rocky" Patel was the man of the hour at De La Concha's most recent cigar dinner. (Jack Harrington)

As we reached the nub of the Decade, we took our seats for dinner and the next round of the tasting. The second cigar, the Rocky Patel 1961 (the year Patel was born) features an Ecuadorian wrapper, a Honduran binder, and a Nicaraguan filler. Patel stopped at every table to distribute and describe the 1961. Although the Decade receives well-deserved accolades from the cigar intelligentsia, we were most impressed by the 1961. The medium to full-bodied stick was extremely well constructed with just enough spice not to overpower the subtle notes of caramel and citrus that kicks in a third of the way through the cigar. The third cigar, Patel Bros., employs binder and filler tobacco from Nicaragua and that unusual wrapper tobacco from Amish country.

A stark backdrop to the evening's festivities was the beleaguered state of the cigar realm. Cigars always arouse lively conversation among strangers, and we enjoyed meeting fathers and sons, coworkers and friends to talk about everything from the cigars (the guests were more or less evenly divided between the Decade and the impressive newcomer, the 1961) to U2's recent tour, but an omnipresent topic in the evening's conversations was the increasing rarity of places to enjoy cigars.

After dinner, both Melendi and Patel railed about the regulatory misconceptions about cigars, giving impassioned speeches about the recent government proposals that would impact cigar smokers. Melendi, Patel, and company are doing more than just talking however, as Patel sits on the board of a national organization, Cigar Rights of America (CRA), which has been active in distinguishing cigars from the flavored cigarettes and tobacco products targeted at minors, which have drawn the bulk of regulatory attention. "It is a matter of educating legislators that cigars are an art form, similar to winemaking," says Patel. The legislators are "really after cigarettes and unfortunately we get lumped in and we are trying to separate out, much like wine did against liquor."

CRA's efforts have been augmented by the nascent New York Tobacco Retailers Association, founded in January by Melendi and other New York tobacconists, who find themselves fighting a rearward battle to clean up unintended effects of local ordinances, such as the recent proposal to ban the sale of flavored tobaccos in New York City. According to the Association, the proposal would target not only the flavored products which allegedly entrap minors, but the traditional pipe tobaccos that generations of Melendis have sold to discerning customers.

These sobering reminders, however, failed to cast a pall on the evening. As Patel succinctly put it, "When you have a cigar you make an automatic friend."

De La Concha Tobacconist is located at 1390 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan, 212-757-3167 or go to www.delaconcha.com.