Swoon KitchenBar

The Restaurant

Swoon KitchenBar opened in 2004 inside a restored early-19th-century brick storefront at 340 Warren Street, three blocks west of the Amtrak station and at the geographic centre of Hudson's antique district. Chef-owner Jeffrey Gimmel and his partner Nina Bachinsky Gimmel - both Culinary Institute of America graduates who spent their early careers cooking in Manhattan kitchens and on Nantucket - chose Hudson as a deliberately small market to build a serious farm-to-table programme without the volume pressures of a city restaurant. The dining room seats roughly sixty across a long single room: original tin-pressed ceiling, exposed brick walls, dark walnut bistro tables with linen napery on weekends, a polished mahogany bar that runs along the front window, and a half-open pass kitchen that gives the back tables visual access to the line. The room has the lived-in feel of a restaurant that has worked the same address for more than twenty years - which it has - and the front-of-house staff includes captains who have cooked or served the room since the original opening.

The kitchen project is contemporary American farm-to-table at a level that has earned Gimmel multi-year James Beard Best Chef Northeast nominations since the late 2000s. The menu changes every two to three weeks with the Columbia and Greene County growing seasons, and is built almost entirely from a network of single-farm relationships within twenty miles of the dining room: heritage pork from Sir William Farm in Craryville, eggs and poultry from Berkshire Berries, cheeses from Old Chatham Sheepherding, foraged ramps and mushrooms in spring, Hudson Valley duck through autumn, and a serious vegetable programme that runs from late-spring asparagus through October root crops. Signature plates have included a seared scallop with celeriac and brown butter, a slow-braised pork shoulder over polenta with apple-brandy reduction, hand-cut tagliatelle with rabbit ragu, and a dry-aged duck breast with cherry-gastrique. The pastry programme is run by Nina Gimmel and supplies a small but serious progression of seasonal desserts - the apple tarte tatin in autumn has been a Hudson Valley reservation in its own right for fifteen years.

The wine programme runs about one hundred and eighty references with deliberate depth in Finger Lakes Riesling and dry whites, small-production Hudson Valley reds, natural producers from Burgundy and the Loire, and a tightly edited Champagne section for celebration evenings. The corkage policy is sensible - a thirty-five dollar fee with no quantity cap - which has made the room a quiet favourite of New York City restaurateurs and sommeliers who bring up bottles from their own cellars on weekend trips. For a Hudson dinner that needs to register as nationally serious without performing the role, Swoon has been the answer for twenty-one years and remains the city's most considered first call.