Cucina

The Restaurant

Cucina opened in 2006 inside a beautifully restored rambling early-twentieth-century farmhouse at 109 Mill Hill Road, on the western end of Woodstock village adjacent to the Sawkill Creek and a five-minute walk from the Village Green. Chef-owner Gianni Scappin - the Veneto-born chef whose résumé includes serious senior positions at Le Madri in Manhattan, San Domenico (now SD26) and a long teaching tenure at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park - opened the room with partner Lois Freedman as a deliberate Hudson Valley translation of the senior northern-Italian dining-room grammar that Scappin had practised in Manhattan across the 1990s. The dining room seats approximately ninety across three linked rooms: a front bar with a polished walnut twelve-seat counter, a warm main back room with deep-stained-wood tables and exposed-beam ceilings, and an enclosed garden patio (open May through October) that has become one of Woodstock's most-considered summer tables.

The kitchen runs a contemporary northern-Italian programme that draws on seasonal Hudson Valley produce while remaining structurally faithful to the senior Veneto and Lombardy regional grammar that Scappin learned during his Italian apprenticeship. The pasta programme is the room's structural anchor - all pastas housemade daily, with rotating signatures including the hand-rolled gnocchi with braised Hudson Valley short rib, the pappardelle with wild mushroom and Catskill Mountain forest ragout, the tagliatelle with house-cured guanciale and Pecorino Romano, and a black-truffle risotto that appears every autumn during the white-truffle season as a deliberate seasonal flagship. The secondi section runs a careful classical progression - the wood-fired branzino with caper-and-lemon brown butter, the slow-braised osso buco with saffron risotto, the grilled pork chop with mostarda and roasted-grape sauce, the vitello tonnato that has been on the menu since opening week and remains one of the most-ordered courses across the dining-room's twenty-year operating run.

The wine programme runs about two hundred and twenty references with deliberate Italian regional depth - Barolo and Barbaresco verticals, a serious super-Tuscan progression, Veneto whites (the chef's home region), Sicilian volcanic-soil reds, and a careful Hudson Valley section that supports the local-producer relationship that Scappin has maintained since opening. The room's twenty-year operating run, the chef's senior Manhattan-and-CIA résumé, the restored-farmhouse setting and the well-tended garden patio combine to produce the structurally inevitable Woodstock choice for a senior birthday, a milestone-anniversary weekend or any visit that wants the village's most-considered Italian-classical setting. The room's regular guests include a long roster of Hudson Valley-resident Manhattan transplants - artists, gallery owners, retired publishing editors, the senior weekend professional class that has anchored Woodstock since the late twentieth century - and the senior service staff register that long-tenured-regulars choreography in a way that newer Catskills rooms cannot yet match.