Editor's note: As of January 2021, this room, which had recently been folded in as part of a newly renovated two-bedroom apartment above the restaurant, is no longer available to book; the proprietor is selling the building, including the restaurant. But she still has two other nearby listings that are available to book: the one-bedroom Earth House, which has a wood-burning stove and views of apple and peach trees, and the two-bedroom Studio on the Hill, which features west- and north-facing floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the surrounding hills.
Mike, my partner of 11 years, dislikes many things. Parties where so-called “cool kids” mill around; calling people on the phone; anything (like, say, a short, quasi-romantic weekend trip) that jeopardizes his precious few hours of video game time: they all rank high on his personal shit list.
But if there’s one thing he does love, it’s good grub. And on our first morning in the western Catskills this past February, as he lobbed into his first bite of Table on Ten’s expertly executed skillet eggs, layered in a tomato sauce so sweet and silky it might've been express-shipped from Naples, I knew that I’d won. And that was before he tried the crusty, buttered baguette.
“Wow,” he said, chewing and nodding in rhythm.
We almost didn’t make it to Table on Ten, a restaurant and inn up in Bloomville, New York, for one of the aforementioned reasons: it impinged on lazy, don't-leave-the-apartment leisure time. But I needed a change of scenery, so I’d booked a Friday and Saturday night in one of the three rooms in the building, an 1860s relic with chipped white siding, on Airbnb after doing a quick search of the area on Traveler’s website. We’d written about Table on Ten a few years ago, as one of the evangelists of the so-called "Hickster" food scene. After a solid three hours of in-car protests, Mike relented. And now, as I tucked into my own parmesan-flecked brunch, eggs baked with mushrooms, I could taste it: the sweet victory of a successful gamble.
To be fair, it’s kind of weird to go somewhere colder when it’s already frigid outside, but I went to summer camp in the Catskills and I can’t get enough of it. I even love the winters—chilled February days, like the ones we spent there—when it's almost monastically quiet, and the morning light is pale and weak.
That light found its way to me that first Saturday morning, through the two large windows in our navy blue room. When I woke up, swaddled in a stupidly comfortable denim-looking Muji comforter, I looked around the space. It was nearly straight out of a Kinfolk spread, with wooden floors painted two shades of gray and partially obscured by a blood-red oriental rug. Wooden bookshelves lined the wall across from the bed, stocked with titles like The European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzche and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. They were details that had been lost on me when we arrived around midnight the night before.
I felt a weird kind of peace settle over me as I made my way down the rickety stairs and into the ground-floor restaurant, all strung up with fairy lights and filled with scratched-up tables that looked like they’d been plucked from MoMA PS1's M. Wells Dinette. I sat by a window and sipped freshly ground espresso while I read magazines I never had time for back home.
That night, we skipped Table on Ten’s famous pizza in favor of a similarly lauded nearby spot, Brushland Eating House. (The food there was insane, too. Get the carrots.) But when we returned, around 10:00 p.m., the party at Table on Ten was still going. It's a local destination, and people come from near and far for a bite of tangy crust. We laid in bed with the clamor coming up through the floorboards—music, conversations, movement—until it died down, about an hour later. (I should note here that if you’re not a fan of noise, look elsewhere; the floors in this old house aren’t just porous, they’re also perniciously creaky. And, if you don’t fancy sharing a bathroom with another couple, even if that bathroom has a charming clawfoot tub, consider booking the more private attic suite instead.)
All told, I have exactly zero regrets about foregoing my normal weekend responsibilities, and doing a little elbow-jabbing, just to get some room to breathe. (And oh, by the way—neither does Mike.) Sometimes you need a little distance from your real life—160 miles of it, to be exact—to be able to see things in the light.
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