When I close my eyes and think of my favorite place in the world, I am on my porch in the mid–Hudson Valley, watching a fat groundhog peering out of his hole, wondering if he can nip on the roots of my Christmas trees before I chase him away. Or I am dipping my bread into the thick, soupy kale sauce of the gnudi di cavolo nero at GioBatta Alimentari, my favorite local restaurant, in nearby Tivoli. Or I am in my car high above the Hudson River, purple mountains ahead, curving riverbanks behind me.
I spent the happiest days of my childhood at a Russian bungalow colony near the town of Ellenville in the Catskills. Surrounded by kids who spoke my language, I found I felt more at home in the country than in the city. I learned to love nature and farm-fresh eggs (which my father would drink raw), and to recognize the mad glint in a hungry groundhog's eye. A dozen years ago I bought my house, not far from where I spent those summers growing up, and since then I have split my time equally between this rural part of the state and New York City. While the deep winters can be gray and a walk to the nearest dry cleaner is impossible, living upstate brings me more joy than the city has in decades. With each year, the amenities, especially the burgeoning selection of food and drink, continue to grow, especially since COVID-19 brought legions of fleeing city dwellers north (along with property prices I can only describe as satirical).
Unlike the eastern tip of Long Island and the tiny sliver of Manhattan, this vast scenic playground still has enough room for artists and writers to form strange colonies of the like-minded, which is how I found myself drawn to the place I now consider home. (My last novel, Our Country Friends, was essentially set at my house. A groundhog and a Russian bungalow colony make cameos.) To my friends, I am now Mr. Upstate. Not a week passes without someone demanding a quick cheat sheet on Hudson or Kingston or Rhinebeck, with allowances for children, dogs, or vegans. And so I write this article partly to move on with my life, and also because as much as I love having friends stay in my guest cabin, a renaissance of new hotels has sprouted on both sides of the Hudson to satisfy the upstate-curious. The best incorporate creativity in both their lodgings and their kitchens. Why pay incredible rents to feed and entertain the Brooklyn cognoscenti in Brooklyn when you can go up the river to cram them full of gnudi and art on the weekends? I have used these hotels as springboards for diving deeper into my favorite parts of the region—though some, like the museum of aesthetics that is Habitas-on-Hudson, near Rhinebeck, are worth a visit on their own.
Hudson was the first town I discovered in the mid–Hudson Valley as an adult. Most people know it for the antique wares of Warren Street, which have helped make it, in the last decade, a prime destination for status-obsessed weekenders. (It was even mentioned on the show Billions, which is about how much some of these antiques cost.) But Hudson also contains swaths of public housing and burgeoning Bangladeshi and Caribbean communities. There are several hotels here, but The Maker is the only one that makes you feel as if you've somehow become a character in Brideshead Revisited. Founders Lev Glazman and Alina Roytberg have turned three historical Warren Street buildings into a fantasia of twin fireplaces, murals made out of burlap, and lamps with nicknames like “The Falcon.” My room, modeled on a Parisian atelier, featured the prow of an early-20th-century boat jutting from one wall.
Hudson, which bills itself as “Upstate's Downtown,” is not short on exceptional food and drink. Swoon Kitchenbar brasserie was the first truly great restaurant to open on Warren Street; I've spent many an evening feasting on its crispy artichokes in black garlic aioli and sipping its grapefruit-flavored Health Margarita. Just across the street, BackBar, a Southeast Asian place with spicy dishes and funky outdoor dining, saved my family's butt during the worst of the pandemic. The newish Feast & Floret on South 3rd Street does pasta right—I love the squid-ink sorprese with spinach and nduja. But the most heralded newcomer is Café Mutton, which is open only four days a week for lunch and Friday nights for dinner. Set in a humble space far off the beaten path, it offers seasonal comfort food that bedevils: How can something as simple as a fried-bologna sandwich taste this good? Who knew that red lettuce with anchovy and stracciatella was the best salad in the world? What are they putting in the addictive rice porridge?
Neven & Neven Moderne is still my favorite antiques store in Hudson, but then I'm a midcentury-modern kind of guy. On a recent visit, a pea-colored Arne Jacobsen swan chair almost had me reaching for my wallet. The same block of Warren is home to the venerable Carrie Haddad Gallery, which recently showcased the nebulous cloud- and river-scapes of Jane Bloodgood-Abrams. A few blocks down on Warren, Spotty Dog Books & Ale has amazing readings (I've done a few) and plenty of a writer's most important companion: alcohol. If you walk all the way down Warren to Promenade Hill Park, atop the Hudson, you will break free of its most touristy element and find yourself with a river's view of Frederic Church–like proportions. The landscape painter's much-visited estate, Olana, whose “Orientalist” stylings might have Edward Said rolling in his grave, is a short drive away and is filled with works that attest to Church's prominent role in the 19th-century Hudson River School.
In Tivoli, a few towns south, is the restaurant I dream about: GioBatta Alimentari, the latest from storied local chef Francesco Buitoni and his wife, Michele Platt. The man who made the first great kale salad in the Hudson Valley (now every restaurant within 100 miles serves one) is a ubiquitous presence in this neck of the woods, coaching kids soccer and catering the memorials when our dear friends pass away. Down the street, Fortune's serves unforgettable ice cream—the halva honeycomb and anything involving labneh are musts.
Across the river in Kingston is Hutton Brickyards, possibly my favorite of the hotels I've visited in the region, for one reason: its proximity to the Hudson, which laps the bank mere feet from where you sit in your Adirondack chair. Flags emblazoned with the word “thirsty” are provided to guests; hang one outside your room and suddenly a minibar of delicious alcoholic beverages will materialize before you. This, I think, is the very highest point of our civilization. The hotel, per its name, was built among the ruins of the former Hutton Brickyard (which reportedly supplied materials for the Empire State Building and Yankee Stadium). An old crane hovers above the Hudson, lending the retreat an elegiac feel. Most of the rooms are cozy cabins, perfect for a carnal getaway. The restaurant celebrates local ingredients (some of my most heavenly meals have been in late spring, during snap-pea season), simply prepared, and the main on-site activity is a lovely private wood-barrel sauna from which you can watch the Amtrak hurtle like a silver bullet on the other side of the river, delivering country passengers into the city's maw.
Kingston may also be my favorite of the small mid-Hudson cities. Its Stockade District consists of incredible 17th- and 18th-century Dutch Colonial architecture. The area includes the Four Corners, the only intersection in America where all the buildings date from before the Revolutionary War. One of them houses Rough Draft Bar & Books, which opened in 2017 and is already beloved. A block away, the Hotel Kinsley, in addition to being a great place to stay, is home to the best martini in the valley and does incredible things with fish and lobster rolls in season. Close by, Lola pizzeria wows with pies like the Fig & Pear, and the venerable Le Canard Enchaine presents snails, foie gras, and eponymous duck dishes that complement the stylized decor. Midtown Kingston is home to Top Taste, a celebrated low-key Jamaican joint. The chef, Albert “Sammy” Bartley, a James Beard nominee who runs the place with his wife, Malenda, coaxes incredible flavor out of goat and oxtail. I can think of no better way to spend lunch than gobbling up mounds of jerk in a place that feels both casual and urban. Nearby Masa Midtown is a quieter destination, perfect for Turkish tapas and pastries. The diminutive Ozlem Oguzcan-Cranston, better known as Chef Oz, makes a terrific simit, a Turkish relative of the sesame bagel.
Farther south, the tie-dyed college town of New Paltz is a bit far from my usual stomping grounds, but Wildflower Farms, a new Auberge resort in neighboring Gardiner, had me speeding down the interstate. The rocky outcroppings of the Shawangunk Mountains (the “Gunks,” to natives) preside over slick cabins and yellow mustard flower–filled fields. There are strange but fun experiential activities on offer. Care to chop wood at dusk? I lacked the upper-body strength for that, but I did help feed some hens in the morning, then plucked warm eggs right out from under their butts. You can present your bounty to the kitchen, which will cook up a delicious omelet for you. (Speaking of eggs, Clay, the property's restaurant, also serves a perfect farm egg with white button mushrooms, aged cheese, and truffles for dinner.) A flower-pressing pottery class was the last activity on my bingo card. Some newlyweds joined me as I imprinted hydrangeas on a votive-candle holder I had forged with my own two clumsy hands.
Back on my side of the river, Habitas-on-Hudson, in Staatsburg, just outside of Rhinebeck, is part of the worldwide Habitas resorts movement, the brainchild of three dudes who met at Burning Man. Set in a 1700s mansion overlooking the river (alas, a highway runs between it and the property), Habitas may be the coolest of the hotels I've visited. Its goal, according to the young woman who checked me in, is to “bring out the inner child in people,” which for me takes all of a few minutes. Before I've even settled in, Victoria Messinger, the resident food and beverage manager—who, despite her youth, has already mixed coupe-size sips of heaven on both sides of the Hudson—is teaching me how to make a Naked and Famous cocktail. It's equal parts yellow chartreuse, mezcal, Aperol, and lime juice, and did you know that a coupe glass supposedly gets its shape from Marie Antoinette's breast? The house is a maze of nooks and crannies, with good literature scattered about and the constant promise of a stiff drink from the gorgeous wood-paneled bar. Dinner thrills with local blue oyster mushroom lettuce cups and a smashed-cucumber salad zinging with carrot ginger purée and salsa macho.
This part of the valley offers amazing hiking at Mills Mansion; the trails hang above the Hudson and are ridged with rocks like a stegosaurus's back. I've never considered nearby Rhinebeck to be the most exciting of towns—I have no idea what most of its shops, aside from the excellent Oblong Books, are even trying to sell—but the dining-and-imbibing scene has been heating up. In addition to the always-pleasing pastas of Mill Street restaurant, newcomer Café con Leche offers juicy mounds of Puerto Rican pernil. Meanwhile, Pretty to Think So (love the name) is raising the roof on craft cocktails in a space where distinctive patrons like the Vogue contributing editor Lynn Yaeger can be spotted having a ball.
My final hotel destination takes me to the exact area where I spent those summer vacations at the Russian bungalow colony. Inness is a newish retreat in the town of Accord, cradled between the Catskills and the Gunks, with pastoral views of both alongside endless fields flanking farmhouses, pools, a tennis court, and a nine-hole golf course. The restaurant is a dream, with fresh mint-arugula salads, boquerones with spring garlic and salsa verde, and cauliflower brought to life with a combination of vadouvan and tahini. It's strange to think that in the 1980s we paid as much money for the entire summer season as some of the hotels I have stayed in cost per night. (Granted, we did not have a golf course, only a tiny pool.) But nonetheless there is a strong bungalow vibe at Inness, with people relaxing on the porches of the Scandinavian-style cabins and playing with their dogs. Instead of Russian, though, I hear Spanish, Chinese, and Hebrew.
I decide to drive down to Ellenville to see what's left of the bungalow colony. The buildings are barely standing, and the pool has been properly trashed, but I can still hear all those young immigrant voices chattering away in a combination of Russian and English, being chased by their babushkas with plates of kasha. Ellenville itself used to be a gloomy town, but the theater where I saw Octopussy (my first encounter with James Bond) still stands. There are also new tapas bars and the almost two-decade-old Aroma Thyme Café, where I perused a menu that includes $65 strong Belgian ales and ordered a juicy melt-in-the-mouth slow-cooked smoked brisket.
But the past has not been entirely erased. I pass the edifice of a building that purports to be the future home of the Catskill Borscht Belt Museum and realize the circular journey I have taken, having traveled to this vibrant and creative new Eden by way of the old.
Gary Shteyngart is the author of Our Country Friends: A Novel.
This article appeared in the September/October 2023 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
