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If summer food is all about simplicity, summer beach food is a step further: a meal usually consists of one dish, probably requiring lots of napkins, that comes together in less than 20 minutes. As this slideshow on NYMag.com shows, chefs' favorite foods to eat after a day at the shore also do not involve an oven and are best eaten with your hands. Based on the foods mentioned in the article, here's my short list of Beach Food Rules:

1. Eat what makes you happy.
Barbara Lynch may run the kitchen at the Boston fine dining restaurant Menton, but when she's in a wet bathing suit, she wants a tuna fish sandwich on white bread with tons of mayo, a jar of Vlasic pickle spears, a Diet Coke and Utz potato chips.

2. You get extra points for drawn butter.
Dipping steamed or grilled shellfish--whether steamed clams (which are Annisa chef Anita Lo's choice) or lobster (Marc Murphy of Ditch Plains' pick)--into melted butter is messy, fun...and probably not something you do at home on a typical February evening.




3. Use the grill...but not for burgers, ribs or dogs.
We all know how delicious meat can be when it's cooked over the coals, but seaside, it makes sense to grill whatever fish or shellfish you can get your hands on. Wrap it up in tortillas and make tacos, like Sam Talbot does; or throw a mess of spot prawns and crabs on the grates and squirt everything with the juice of some Meyer lemons, a la Joshua Skenes at Saison in San Francisco.

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