13 SOUTH 3RD STREET
HUDSON, NY 12534
(518) 822-1500
OWNING PARTNERS: ZAK PELACCIO, JORI JAYNE EMDE, AND PATRICK MILLING SMITH; CO-CHEFS: ZAK PELACCIO AND KEVIN POMPLUN
On the face of it, Fish & Game in Hudson could not be further from Zak Pelaccio’s introduction to the spotlight (in 2003) at Chickenbone Cafe in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At Chickenbone, where Pelaccio landed after stints at the French Laundry and Restaurant Daniel, the young chef was required to cook without using actual fire. Zoned as an “assembly kitchen,” Chickenbone Cafe’s kitchen was—in essence—a few plug-in crockpots and panini presses. Pelaccio’s remarkable artistry shone through, and within a decade Pelaccio was steering an international brand with his landmark restaurants, Fatty Crab and Fatty ’Cue. At Fish & Game, Pelaccio’s current batterie de cuisine reflects his stature. His kitchen bears a nearly pornographic wealth of wood-fetishizing grills, smokers, and rotisseries.
Still, Fish & Game shares key characteristics with Pelaccio’s launching pad. First, there’s its size. At only thirty-six seats Fish & Game is more minuscule than even Chickenbone, which had forty. But more striking, both restaurants were opened on bohemian frontiers. In 2003, when Chickenbone opened, Williamsburg was as yet undominated by youthful trust fund recipients; it was a gritty, ethnic nowhere on the wrong side of the river. As in Hudson, artists and musicians could actually afford to live and work in Williamsburg. Says Pelaccio, “What is interesting to a lot of people coming up from the city is that they feel the same way about Hudson as they did about Brooklyn or parts of Brooklyn at the time I was opening Chickenbone Cafe. There was still potential. You could still do things in Brooklyn because the cost of getting in was not that high. People felt that they could try things out and take a risk. It wasn’t such a huge investment—and if they failed, so what?”
Though some found Pelaccio’s defection from New York City and the Fatty juggernaut shocking, the transition for Pelaccio and his life and business partner, Jori Emde, could not have been more natural. “Jori and I have been coming out here since 2005. We have a place in Old Chatham, and we fell in love with the place—we got hooked. We’d been gardening for a couple of years, and we’d built relationships with the people and the farmers. We were thinking the same way about committing to the area and having the products be a focus of a new restaurant.”
Located two hours north of Manhattan, Hudson is a tricky proposition. It is a town with many past lives, and not all of them have been glamorous. Settled in the nineteenth century by Nantucket whalers—when a sandbar made access to Nantucket harbor difficult for increasingly large whaling ships—Hudson offered a deep harbor and access, via river and rail, to the lucrative markets of the west.
But unlike Nantucket, whose post-whaling lull was eventually followed by a prosperous tourism boom, Hudson has struggled through multiple booms and busts. Warren Street’s historic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture might rival that on Nantucket’s Main Street, but you won’t find Warren colonized by Murrays Toggery or a Ralph Lauren store. Instead, Hudson (along with Brooklyn) is home to an outpost of Etsy, the cultish hipster shopping website. When musician Melissa Auf der Maur and filmmaker Tony Stone debuted The Basilica, Hudson’s art/event/performance space housed in a former factory, proto-punk poet Patti Smith herself gave her blessing. Just try to catch Smith on Nantucket.
Urbanity will always be a part of Hudson’s charm. Says Pelaccio, “It’s got an edge and a diversity, and that’s healthy. There’s no white picket fence that you have to get behind before you unveil the underbelly that exists in everything. Nothing is totally whitewashed in Hudson. It all takes place before your eyes.”
For increasing numbers of city dwellers, Hudson is the anti-Berkshires or anti-Hamptons. “People need a place to go,” says Pelaccio. “And people of my generation are not buying out in the Hamptons. So where are they going to go? Here, there’s affordable land. You can get something opulent or you can get something modest and spend, like, two hundred thousand dollars. Those deals are still around. And here, there are fields and woods and rivers, and, obviously, towns. It’s accessible and it’s easy. It’s still agricultural, too—and that resonates with people, especially nowadays.” He continues, “People are more into their lifestyle. I mean, people were always into their lifestyle, but now it’s about food and green, organic wholesomeness. Everything from using green laundry soaps to eating from farmers’ markets, that’s just living well, right? The valley is the closest place to New York City where you can live that way.”
For Pelaccio, the move to Hudson was not about bugging out; it was about tuning in. “We were looking inward. And it was where we wanted to be right now. It wasn’t like we wanted this gigantic career and we wanted to open a ton of restaurants in cities all over the world. Instead, we really looked at the valley and looked for a good place to showcase what we love about the Hudson Valley. Doing what we do here just dovetails with what we are doing with our lives at this time. It’s about expressing how we feel right now in our careers and where we are in the world.
“The restaurants in the city have their own built-in infrastructure, and slowly, over time, my role had been marginalized. They had more and more structure and a way of doing things. I’m a creative guy, and, for me, I need to roll onto something new. So putting my talents to use up here seemed to make more sense. But it’s also just where my life is headed right now. It been over two and a half years now, and I owe it to Jori and to Kevin and to Patrick to be here and to be focused and to be dedicated. And I owe it to myself, of course. It’s not much fun to spread yourself too thin.” Cooking in restaurants is “brutal. And you can either become more involved in management or keep cooking on the line from day to day. And I realized that I was doing more management than the thing I was interested in. I like to be immersed in it.”
(SERVES 6)
For the pork brine:
3 quarts water
1 quart white wine
7 tablespoons salt
1 cup maple syrup
3 onions, sliced
1 bulb fennel, sliced
2 heads garlic, crushed
2½ teaspoons toasted white peppercorns
5 tablespoons toasted coriander seeds
2 tablespoons plus 1½ teaspoons toasted fennel seeds
4 fresh cayenne chiles
3 bay leaves
1 pork shoulder
For the basting mixture:
2 cups sunflower oil
¼ cup salt
¼ cup maple syrup
1 clove garlic, peeled
3 pickled jalapeños
For the pork loin:
1 (5-plus pounds) pork loin
For the pork sausage:
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon black pepper
1½ teaspoons granulated sugar
1½ teaspoons red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon whole cumin
1½ teaspoons ground coriander
1½ teaspoons fennel seeds
5 pounds pork
1½ pounds fatback
Hog casing
For the sauce:
Pig skin, reserved from shoulder and loin (above)
Bones from shoulder and loin (see above)
A few whole heads garlic
1 quart fresh currants
Maple syrup, to taste
Fish sauce, to taste
For the radishes:
A selection of radishes: Pelaccio recommends Red Globe, Golden & Breakfast, and Rat Tail, which, according to Pelaccio, “is actually a bean that has a spiciness similar to the flavor of radishes.”
A few tablespoons of homemade fennel vinegar or white wine vinegar, or just enough to dress the radishes
For the congee:
2 cups high-quality short grain rice
Skin stock
A few cloves of thinly shaved garlic
Salt to taste
Fish sauce to taste
For the finished dish:
Anise hyssop
To prepare the brine: Pour everything except the pork into a large pot and bring to a simmer. Leave at a low simmer for 30 minutes, then remove from heat and allow it to cool to room temperature. Meanwhile, remove the skin from the pork shoulder and reserve it for the sauce, below. Place the shoulder in the prepared brine. Be sure that the meat is fully submerged (place a plate over the shoulder to weight it down in the brine, if necessary). Brine the shoulder in the refrigerator for 4 days before proceeding with the recipe.
To make the basting liquid and roast the pork: Heat a fire under a rotisserie large enough to hold the pork roast. In a blender or food processor (Pelaccio uses a Vitamix), puree the basting mixture ingredients together. Reserve. After the pork has brined, thread it onto a rotisserie rod and roast it, turning constantly, over a medium-hot wood fire for about 7–8 hours, or until a thermometer inserted into the meat’s center reads 150°F. Remove the pork from the rotisserie and remove the rod from the roast.
To prepare the pork loin: Two days before you plan to smoke the loin, remove the belly from the loin, cutting through the ribs with a bone saw. Remove the skin from the loin, leaving the fatback on. Brine the loin for 2 days using another batch of the brine. Smoke the loin over a wood fire until it has reached an internal temperature of 130°F. Remove the loin from the smoking shelf and allow it to return to room temperature. Once it’s cool, remove the loin from the bone, wrap it in plastic, and chill in the refrigerator.
To make the pork sausage: According to Pelaccio, it’s critical to keep your equipment cold during this process. “When making any sausage, fresh or cured, you need to make sure that all your equipment is very clean, dry, and extremely cold. You can achieve this by storing the grinder equipment in the freezer. Have your mise en place portioned and ready to go before setting up any equipment. When using the grinder, have your ‘catch pan’ sitting in another pan of ice water to keep the meat very cold during the whole process.” He also suggests that you wear rubber gloves while mixing the seasoning through the meat. “Aside from this practice just being cleaner, it helps to create a barrier between the heat of your hands and the fat in the grind. This prevents the sausage mixture from breaking down too quickly, especially when incorporating the spices. If at any point the meat becomes warm or the fat starts to render from exposure to heat, take a break from the mixing process and place everything in the refrigerator or freezer to tighten it up and avoid further breakdown. This shouldn’t ever happen, but just in case.”
To begin, toast the seasonings in a dry pan until they are lightly colored and fragrant. Transfer the spices to a spice grinder or a mortar and pestle and grind them coarsely. Mix just enough water into the spice mixture to make a stiff paste. Set aside. Set up a “catch pan” that rests in another pan filled with ice. Using a meat grinder fitted with chilled parts, grind the pork and fatback together and extrude it into the prepared “catch pan.”
When the meat is ground and resting in the prepared pan, add the spice paste. Mix the spices and meat together and knead until the mixture is tacky. Allow the sausage mixture to chill in the fridge for 2–4 hours so that the flavors meld and the mixture becomes firm. Meanwhile, rinse and soak the hog casings well. When the sausage mixture is cool and set, pass the mixture through a medium tube into the hog casing. Twist each link off at 6 inches. When all the sausages have been extruded, make tiny holes in the links so that they don’t burst while you cook them. Hang them in the refrigerator for 1–2 days to dry and set.
To make the sauce: Take the skin from the pig, remove the fat, then put the skin in a pot and cover with cold water. Bring this to a boil, then pour off the liquid, reserving the skin. Return the skin to the pot, cover again with cold water, and bring to a boil. Immediately turn the heat down to a simmer and simmer the skin in the water for 5 hours. Strain and discard the skin, reserving the liquid. Meanwhile, place the bones from the pig on a shelf above a wood-fired grill and grill the bones over direct heat. Let them smoke for 3 hours. After 3 hours place the smoked bones in a stockpot and cover with water, adding a few heads of garlic. Bring the bone stock to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and simmer for 5 hours. After 5 hours strain the stock, reserving the liquid. Discard the bones. Return the bone stock to a saucepan and cook until it is reduced by three-quarters. Add enough skin stock to the bone stock to reach a lipsmacking, gelatinous consistency. Whatever skin stock you don’t use at this point, reserve; you will need it for the congee below.
Using a juicer, juice the currants. Carefully season the skin and bone stock reduction using the currant juice, maple syrup, and fish sauce.
To prepare the radishes: Slice the radishes very thin on a mandoline and toss with the vinegar.
To make the congee: In a medium-size pot cook the short grain rice according to package directions, Strain, then transfer the cooked rice back to the pot and cover with a 50/50 blend of water and skin stock. Cook the rice in the water/skin stock blend until it has absorbed all the liquid. Cover the rice once more with just water and continue to cook until the rice has absorbed all the water. Repeat the process with water one more time. Season the rice with thinly shaved garlic, salt, and fish sauce to taste.
To plate the dish: On a wood-fueled grill, grill the sausage until fully cooked. Remove. Slice the pork loin very thin on a slicing machine. Cut a few slices from the pork shoulder. Warm the sauce and drop in a handful of currants. Plate the cuts of pork, along with the radishes, on top of a small scoop of congee. Season with salt and finish with the sauce and currants and small leaves of anise hyssop.