Serre: The Maker’s Secret Garden Restaurant Finds Identity With Driven New Chef

The Maker hotel has presence. The 11-room boutique property spread across three connected historic buildings on Warren Street in Hudson radiates a singular identity with bespoke antiques, rich textiles, and luxe bohemian eclecticism. It could have earned its Michelin Key on atmosphere alone. But its restaurant, housed in an elegant tropical solarium at the back of the property, was being overlooked. This spring, that's changed.

Executive chef Jonas Offenbach arrived last summer, fell in love with the glass dining room, and had an idea: give the restaurant its own name, its own identity, something that could stand alongside The Maker's design vision while making its own statement. Serre—the French word for greenhouse—felt right, announcing both the space as its own structure.

The room is grand, flooded with natural light, and enveloped in layers of lush tropical plants climbing toward the glass ceiling. Regal upholstery and bespoke furniture are transportive to an earlier more elegant age. At night, glass, and greenery, and candlelight make it feel like a place apart from the rest of the world.

Maker founders Alina Roytberg and Lev Glazman say Serre is a reflection of the hotels style and ethos. Finding Offenbach put the pieces together in the right way. "We’d heard about Jonas’s work at several previous restaurants and invited him to create a progressive tasting that would reveal who he is as a chef—the ultimate maker," Glazman says. "His storytelling through the food told us everything we needed to know: Jonas is a creative maker with a passionate commitment to both flavor and hospitality."

The Chef

Offenbach grew up in Queens and spent his early career in some serious New York City kitchens like Gramercy Tavern, Momofuku Ko, and Contra, where he worked alongside chef Sean Gray in a kitchen with its own deep affection for the French tradition.

When Covid shuttered Ko, he took a private chef position in Aspen, where a Nakazawa Japanese pop-up arrived and he found himself working there next, learning to think about fish with the same obsessive rigor he applied to teaching himself French cooking from his collection of over 200 cookbooks. Eventually he and his wife headed up the Hudson and he helped open Matilda at the Henson boutique hotel in Windham. Then The Maker came calling.

Serre is the first restaurant where Offenbach's name is on the marquee. The menu reflects the chef’s obsessive study in French technique and a confident artistry. The result is not exactly a French restaurant, but something more personal and specific.

"Not having had the experience of cooking in a classic French kitchen, and only reading about it it's my own interpretation of these things," he says. The dishes are precise, with spare plating, contrasts of texture and temperature, and a playful tension of acidity against fat. "I would never look at a dish and be like, ‘Oh, this needs some green, so we put something green on it.’ Everything is very intentional."

The Menu

Offenbach's craft announces itself immediately in the opening course of small plates. A potato dauphine with Boston mackerel and sauce au poivre ($12) blends classical French technique with a sushi-like application. Similarly the  east coast oyster with yuzu, soy mignonette, and salmon roe ($12) isn’t so much culinary “fusion,” as it is a collaboration. Crisp buckwheat with young kohlrabi, crème fraîche, and toasted nori ($8) covers similar ground in two crispy and juicy bites. 

The second courses are where the classicism sharpens into something more personal. The stuffed morel mushrooms with turnips, sea beans, curly parsley, and pieds de porc ($28) are the menu's most technically demanding dish. Offenbach draws from a classical preparation (sweetbreads stuffed in pigs' trotters) but working without sweetbreads, braises the trotters instead, dices the meat and stuffs it into the morels. The sea beans provide a vibrant counter to the richness of the pork. It’s a reinterpretation rather than a recreation. The beef tartare with black garlic, sauce foyot, and fried onions ($22) signals the kitchen's ambitions. Sauce foyot, a bearnaise enriched with reduced meat glaze, is a preparation not often seen outside very classical kitchens. A scallop with leeks, cherry tomatoes, sorrel, and sauce choron ($28) rounds out a section.

The mains, likewise, are grounded in classical preparation and inflected with something specific to this valley and this season. The lamb chop crepinette with spring peas, mint, arugula, and sauce madere ($52) sources its lamb and caul fat from Kinderhook Farm. It’s a preparation Offenbach traces to peasant food from the 1800s, the caul wrapping basting the meat as it cooks. The beef bavette with grilled fava greens, three-cornered leeks, and sauce bordelaise ($57) gives a cut the French have long prized the full classical treatment, the bordelaise a deep reduction of red wine and bone marrow. The spring chicken in vin blanc with smoked hay cream, spigarello, and artichoke ($48) is ambitious, deep, and silky.

For dessert, there’s a frangipane galette with chocolate and rhum ($14) is rich and direct, and a crème caramel with vin jaune and Marcel Petite comté ($12) takes a French classic somewhere unexpected with the aged cheese adding a savory undercurrent. There’s also a rhubarb granita with yogurt ice cream and pink peppercorns ($12) that can close the meal with something light, tart, cold, and faintly floral.

Hudson's dining scene is crowded this spring, and the bar for what constitutes a serious restaurant in a 30-block city has risen accordingly. Serre clears it, not by playing it safe within the Maker’s proven brand but through the authority of a chef with personality, who has spent 20 years preparing for this moment. Sere has been open a month. What is already on the plate here suggests the beginning of something that will only deepen.