Rivertown Lodge Tavern: A Hudson River School...Of Food
Chef Gabriele Gulielmetti creates a palette for the palate.
The mighty Hudson, with it surging waters, sends energy up Warren Street that can be felt in the old port city's sidewalks, trees and buildings.
Behind an unmarked door at the Rivertown Lodge in Hudson, New York, a chef with the artistic process of a Hudson River School painter contemplates his next masterpiece. A crudo, this time, raw fish and brightness in the form of a mélange, the chef rattles off on the phone to me a week after I dined there. A friend had urged us with a late night call that there was something on the menu at the Tavern at Rivertown Lodge that must be tried. It was pasta with vegetable ash, a concoction born out of a stroke of creativity by a chef not content with just housemade pasta and standard-issue sauce. His sauce is made of a concentration of onion, caramelized almost to ash and pulverized into poetry, in a dish of vegetable ash papardelle, spring lamb and wild fennel.
The dish was worth the trip to Warren Street but what came as a surprise was the crudo, a raw fish dish that blew the table away. Several days later, Chef Gabriele Gulielmetti, owner and former chef of Bonfiglio and Bread, held forth on the creative process behind this creation.
“Oh man this is exciting...” said the chef about the crudo in question, a dish described on the bill as, simply, “Crudo.”
“Mustard oil is something we fought for,” he said. “We believe in the flavor. Sure, we could just make it clean and fresh, simple with good olive oil, but this isn’t just about the fish, it’s about the dressing. We use a drizzle of the mustard oil, cut it with quantities of fresh acid, poppy seeds, fenugreek powder and finish with fresh olive oil.”
When we tasted the dish and passed it around at the table, there was mutual astonishment, witnessed by a man walking by.
He was Philip, the dining room manager. “Our crudo is not just showcasing a fish,” he said. “It is Gulielmetti as a sculptor turned chef. The process in his cooking is like the process that goes into making art.”
The crudo came after cocktails and before a shared dish of housemade fresh ricotta, hazelnuts and nduja (a cured meat from Italy) along with a dandelion salad with anchovy and bread crumbs, as beautifully bitter and pliant as the ricotta was fluffy.
Describing a spring lamb dish, Gulielmetti expounded on the thinking of the ragu of succulent and tender lamb, peas and fennel — four ways. “Lamb could get heavy,” he said when asked about his choice of spiking it with an anise flavor. “We’re always trying to add a fresh and delicate taste. Here we achieve it by layering the dish with crushed fennel seed, chopped fennel stalk and a leaf finished with fennel fronds. We’re using all levels of the herb.”
The noodling around with levels and acids and texture requires a custom larder where sour cherry tincture or preserved citrus or salted chili peppers from Calabria are at the ready.
“And,” Gulielmetti added with respect to the Calabrian peppers, “we no longer have to get them from Calabria. The Ironwood Farm in Philmont is growing them.”
But local isn’t always possible and the chef is sanguine on the topic; he believes in the provenance of the food first. That might mean greens from a hot house in Connecticut in winter or anchovies from one of three countries where they originate.
“I can be as self-contained as possible,” he said, referencing a housemade hot sauce, but added that it is best to go to the best source for the food. Farms can have limited product, and 40 steaks per week, for example, isn’t always an option, so getting meat from farms farther away is at times a better choice, depending on the meat and the time of year.
As for self containment, the sourdough bread served at Rivertown Lodge comes from the chef’s wife, who runs a bakery across the river. It is served throughout the meal, even as an accompaniment to a dessert that consists simply of bread, whipped cheese and honey.
Rivertown Lodge Tavern
731-739 Warren St., Hudson, NY
(518) 512-0954
Open Friday – Tuesday, 5 p.m. – late. The kitchen serves from 5-10 p.m. Brunch Saturday & Sunday, 8 a.m. – 2 p.m.
