text: Here and wow - Times Union
  https://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Here-and-wow-4943705.php
  Here and wow
  Fish & Game uses local, seasonal ingredients to make great food
  Published 3:22 pm EDT, Thursday, October 31, 2013
  Braised fennel with housemade cow's milk cheese, house-brined wild river salmon roe and rye crisp on Friday, Oct. 25, 2013, at Fish and Game in Hudson, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)
  If it were possible to take a perfect Hudson Valley fall afternoon, chop it up, cook it and lay it on plates, you'd get Zakary Pelaccio's mid-October fare at Fish & Game. Here's what it would look like:
  Butternut squash richly braised in maple with pine nuts, a wet smear of fresh cow's milk cheese and hints of leek, apple and turnip alongside paper-thin slivers of white carrot.
  Duck breast cut from a bird aged for three weeks in a barn across town. It's tender, spit-roasted over a small fireplace, served with sunchokes and sourdough-bread sauce with the slick texture of olive oil the loaf bathed in.
  Housemade cow's cheese again, this time whipped to a smooth pillow for pebbles of ginger candied to a jolting, sublime sweetness, a reminder of how mesmerizing that tiny root can be when in the right hands.
  Pelaccio keeps you clueless to his $75 seven-course productions — the only dinner option at Fish & Game — until you walk in, but trust him. He's turned this 19th-century blacksmith shop into Hudson's prime stage for the lush harvests of Columbia County. Each dish reflects both this hip riverside city and the farmlands surrounding Pelaccio's hearth-heated hangout.
  Most nights, the menu's centerpieces toast beside patrons in a fireplace that provides the dining room with warmth, mood and sustenance. It was pieced together of bricks pulled from the old building's foundation.
  Only whole animals and fish are welcome in the kitchen and are butchered on site. Pelaccio uses every muscle and bone.
  Fruits and vegetables are foraged by Pelaccio and his wife and co-chef, Jori Jayne Emde, from their Old Chatham farm or pulled from others nearby. The trimmings are preserved, jarred and stashed on the restaurant's shelves. This is Emde's specialty. A tomato core is used to make vinegar; its stalk is pulverized into powder and tossed into flour for fresh pasta. The fruit's remains are scraped off a food mill sieve and added to Emde's kimchi. She makes her own Worcestershire sauce that you can use to chase a shot of bourbon. Fish sauce is crafted from scratch with local catches.
  They make you feel like they could live off the grid and still eat better than most in Manhattan.
  Pelaccio and his crew often look at what they have first and then piece a menu together. Though only open Thursday through Sunday, the offerings can change nightly or even mid-meal as ingredients are used up.
  A vegetarian menu is offered. I dined with a friend who hasn't eaten meat since grade school. The menus showed sharply opposite directions only during our second course: beets. She had a delicious, traditional borscht made of fresh-squeezed beet juice, onion, cream and horseradish. My bowl, white and shaped like a trumpet horn, was steaming with a fragrant, revelatory melange of smoked sturgeon, beets and beef heart, stewed together in red wine and marrow.
  Daikon was substituted for duck breast on the vegetarian menu. Braised in leeks and mushrooms, it exploded with tastes of earth and pepper I hadn't realized were possible to draw from a radish. My pork shoulder was cooked in the fireplace, served atop spaetzle and buttered kale grilled over oak. She got extra kale. She didn't complain. Both plates were strong, salty, savory and deeply satisfying.
  Pelaccio gained fame as the wunderkind behind his Southeast Asian-inspired Fatty 'Cue and Fatty Crab kitchens in New York City. Now just off Warren Street, he's joined other Manhattan-to-Hudson transplants like Benjamin Freemole and John McCarthy at the Crimson Sparrow and Lori Selden and Mark Young of Mexican Radio.
  Backed by TV, film and theater producer Patrick Milling Smith, Fish & Game opened in May. The concept began in 2005, when Pelaccio and Emde began converting a barn on his parents' Old Chatham farmland into a home.
  Architect Michael Davis designed Fish & Game, which echoes an Italianate countryside cabin punctuated by modern art and antlers. A boar head trapped in a silent scream stares out into the dining room. It was killed with a bow and arrow by an employee's father during a hunting trip with Ted Nugent. Turn-of-the-last-century red velvet wallpaper is an ode to the city's racy red-light-district past.
  A mellow waitstaff is concerned only with making your evening memorably comfortable. Our case was an extreme example. Coming off the Thruway, I crashed into a deer that darted in front of my SUV. I explained my tardiness to the hostess, who insisted we order a cocktail, sit at one of the fireside bar's couches and relax rather than go straight to our table. After learning about the poor deer, Pelaccio would later come out from the kitchen and quip that I should have brought the carcass for him to butcher and serve.
  Remarkable cocktails conceived by Emde and bar manager Kat Dunn include "Where's There's Smoke There's Fire," a radiant mix of Vida Mezcal, Thai chili-infused Aperol, lime and fresh ground sumac. A mouthful feels as though a busy little devil is tapping your tongue with a piquant pitchfork.
  The wine list is costly — $60 bottles are more scarce than those $150 or more — and composed of heavily European and natural offerings. Pelaccio says he prefers undisturbed wines to overly manipulated, tannin-heavy choices. A pairing with dinner is $75.
  Dinner for two — with three cocktails, a bottle of wine, tax and tip — came to $320. Pricey? Without a doubt. Worth it? Unquestionably. Fruits of Hudson Valley harvests are rarely loved and brought back to life like this.
  Phone: 822-1500
  Web: http://fishandgamehudson.com
  Reservations: Necessary for dinner
  Hours: Open Thursday through Sunday. Dining room is open from 5:30 to 10 p.m.; bar hours are 5 p.m. to midnight.
  Food (****): Tasting menu only for dinner made of locally harvested fare; changes weekly, often daily; phenomenal thought and execution with simple presentation. Small a-la-carte menu offered at bar
  Beverage (****): Large, expensive wine list of heavily natural and European bottles; outstanding cocktails and dozens of before- or after-dinner drinks.
  Service (***1/2): Laid-back and extremely accommodating and knowledgeable of the menu, though some questions about a few dishes could not be answered or were incorrect.
  Ambience (****): Relaxed, fireplace-heated and lodge-like, with dim lighting and odes to the both the Columbia County countryside and Hudson.