With an offal-heavy menu influenced by chef Shaina Loew-Banayan's meat-loving Hungarian ancestors, the Hudson restaurant is an anti-trend rebuttal to social media–driven cooking.
Shaina Loew-Banayan should have made the bologna last night. Alas, there was no time in the rush of the once-weekly dinner service, as plates of jellied pork terrine and fingers of buttery shortbread next to hunks of soft goat cheese landed on each table. So at 7:30 a.m. on a scorching Saturday in May, before the brunch rush and while most of the small riverside town of Hudson, New York, is still asleep, Shaina is blending beef.
There was a time, before Shaina moved from New York City to Hudson, sights set on starting their own restaurant, that the young chef spread avocado on toast and assembled grain bowls for eight hours a day. At the helm of an all-day café in Manhattan’s financial district that Shaina describes alternately as “horrible” and “HORRIBLE,” they were forbidden by the owners from taking avocado toast or breakfast sandwiches off the menu to make room for more inspired dishes.
In those early kitchen jobs, the ideals Shaina envisioned as a food-obsessed teenager never materialized. “I started to realize the reality of what these restaurants had going on—not just oppressive cultures but a lack of sustainability. The experience of being a cook was draining and depressing,” they say. Shaina was cooking food they wouldn’t want to eat or feed friends and felt trapped at the bottom of the food chain.
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