Halifax

The Restaurant

Halifax occupies the entire ground-floor restaurant pavilion of the W Hoboken at 225 River Street, with one wall of floor-to-ceiling windows opening directly onto the Hudson and the Lower Manhattan skyline a half-mile across the water. The dining room was rebuilt under the direction of chef Seadon Shouse, a Halifax-Nova-Scotia native by way of New York's North End Grill and Stamford's L'Escale, who positions the menu as a tribute to the cold-water foodways of the Northeastern seaboard from Maine through Long Island down to the New Jersey shore. The room seats about ninety across leather banquettes, marble two-tops along the river-facing windows, and a raised counter at the back overlooking the open kitchen.

The cooking runs daily catch from Montauk and Point Pleasant, Long Island oysters at the chilled bar, hand-cut tagliatelle with Jersey blue crab, a wood-fired-and-roasted half chicken from a single Lancaster County farm, and the kitchen's signature whole roasted fish — usually black sea bass or red snapper — finished tableside. Vegetables come from a rotating roster of Hudson Valley and South Jersey growers; the bread programme runs hot from a wood-fired oven visible from the bar. Brunch on Sunday is one of the busiest in the metro area, anchored by a lobster benedict and a wood-oven shakshuka.

The wine list runs about two hundred references with particular depth in Loire whites, Burgundy, and small-grower Champagnes — a careful, hotel-restaurant-plus list that punches above the W-brand expectation. Cocktails at the adjoining bar are run by a team that has carried over staff from Manhattan's better hotel-cocktail rooms; the riverwalk patio in summer is the most-photographed table in Hudson County. For a client dinner where the view does half the work and the kitchen quietly handles the rest, Halifax has no Hoboken peer.