Vogue.com - “There’s something very magnetic about this town and this area,” says Jori Jayne Emde. She’s driving me through rolling hills to the field where she grows the bright green peas that were charmingly arranged on my plate an hour before at her restaurant, Fish & Game, in Hudson, New York. Opened last year in a nineteenth-century former blacksmith’s shop, Fish & Game draws on the produce, livestock, and fish from the surrounding area as prepared by Emde; her husband,Zakary Pelaccio, best known for his work at New York’s Fatty Crab and Fatty ’Cue; and a third chef, Kevin Pomplun.
The chef-couple left New York City three years ago, part of the drive north of city-dwellers relocating to the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. The town of Hudson, tucked into the east side of the Hudson River two hours north of New York City, might be ground zero for the Brooklynification of Upstate. Jori and Zak opened their restaurant amidst the new crop of galleries, antique stores, and indie boutiques on Warren Street, which today offers Mid-Century Modern furnishings at Regan & Smith, drop earrings made of hammered metals at Shana Lee Jewelry, the work of hot new Brooklyn artists at former Prospect Heights galleryConcepto, statement pieces from nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists at Terenchin, and the iron and bronze pieces by David DeSantis, whose work has been commissioned for John Varvatos’s Madison Avenue shop.