The Best New Openings in Columbia County Are Not on Warren Street

Ask someone who has never been here where to find Columbia County's most talked-about new restaurant this year, and they will guess Hudson. Warren Street has the antique shops, the galleries, the reputation. It is the postcard image of the county.

That guess would be wrong in 2026. The two openings drawing the most attention this year, one from a pair of veteran restaurateurs and one from a couple who left Brooklyn to build something from scratch, both chose to skip Hudson entirely. If you have spent the summer assuming the interesting stuff is still clustered downtown, you have been looking in the wrong direction.

What actually opened in Hudson this year

Hudson itself is not standing still. Soluna Cafe Cantina opened at 78 Green Street earlier this year, run by Juan Carlos Granda and Gina Macias, who built a following at Casa Latina before striking out with their own 18-seat space. The all-day menu moves from egg tacos and avocado toast into a Cuban sandwich regulars already ask for by name, and Fridays bring themed prix-fixe dinners that swing from Cuban nights to anime-inspired menus depending on the week.

A few blocks over, Merkin Hudson opened out of what its owner initially posted as an April Fools' joke. Chef Shaina Loew-Banayan of Cafe Mutton put up an obvious prank announcement on April 1, and days later it was a real restaurant tucked into a converted garage next to Mutton itself. The menu is tight: cold sandwiches like bologna and head cheese, oysters, wine, and a rotating "greasy soup of the moment." Sundays bring a four-hour "Long Lunch" that stretches the whole idea of what a quick meal is supposed to be. Loew-Banayan called it "genuine and good and also a deep prank," which is as fair a description of Hudson's current sense of humor about itself as any.

Both are worth a visit. Neither is the story of the year.

Where the county actually grew

That story is happening in Germantown and in the hamlet of West Taghkanic, both a fair distance from Warren Street's foot traffic.

In Germantown, restaurateurs Avery Jannelli and Ryan McLaughlin took over the former Gaskins space and opened Nines this year, leaning into a French and Italian menu built specifically around Columbia County's farm network. Mackerel crudo, lamb meatballs, and swordfish skewers share the menu with a roast chicken fricassee that reads more like a recalibration of what came before than a full reinvention. Jannelli and McLaughlin are not newcomers guessing at what the area wants. They are veterans who looked at Germantown, not Hudson, and decided that was where to make their next move.

Just off the Taconic Parkway in West Taghkanic, Alejandra and Peter Stewart partnered with restaurateur Chul Kim to open Tiny Town Farm Store & Grocer inside a renovated barn on Route 82. The Stewarts moved from Brooklyn specifically to build this. The shelves carry dairy from Ronnybrook, mushrooms from Tivoli Mushrooms, honey from Taconic Range Apiary, and meats from Kinderhook and Overlook farms, alongside pantry staples like preserved lemons and za'atar. It functions less like a farm stand and more like a general store built for people who already live here and want a single stop that does not feel like a tourist gift shop.

Put those two openings next to each other and a pattern shows up. The talent and the capital moving into Columbia County's food scene this year picked Germantown and the Route 82 corridor near Ancram over Hudson's Warren Street. That is not a knock on Hudson. It is a sign that the county's food geography got wider this year, not narrower.

The farmers markets already knew this

If you want proof this was never really a Hudson-only story, look at where the Saturday morning crowds have been going all season. The county runs a full slate of markets, each with its own schedule, and none of them defer to Hudson's calendar:

• Hudson Farmers Market, corner of 6th and Columbia Street, Saturdays 9am to 1pm, running its 27th season from April 18 through November 28. More than 30 vendors show up weekly, and this season brought six new full-time additions: Atina Foods, Egg Man, From Below Farm, Mei's Dumplings, Romanaccio, and Via Ravioli.
• Chatham Farmers Market, Route 295, Fridays 3pm to 7pm, May through October.
• Kinderhook Farmers Market, 1 Hudson Street, Saturday mornings from 8:30 to 12:30, May through October.
• Germantown Farmers Market, 50 Palatine Park Road, Saturdays 10am to 1pm, May through October.

Hudson's market is the largest by vendor count, and it earned that scale over 27 seasons. But Chatham, Kinderhook, and Germantown are not satellite events. They run on their own days, draw their own regulars, and this year absorbed some of the same energy that sent Nines to Germantown instead of downtown Hudson. A market calendar built entirely around Saturday mornings in one town would look very different from what Columbia County actually runs.

The one weekend the whole county shows up in one place

There is an exception to all of this dispersal, and it happens at Basilica Hudson. The former rail depot turned arts space hosts its Farm & Flea market twice a year on fixed weekends, a Spring Market timed to Mother's Day and a Holiday Market over Thanksgiving weekend, plus a smaller Mini Farm & Flea tucked into the Sunday of the annual Basilica SoundScape festival every September. That festival weekend is coming up next month, and it is the closest thing the county has to a moment when Hudson pulls everyone back in at once, vendors, farmers, and artisans from across Columbia County setting up under one roof for a single Sunday before scattering back to their own towns and their own market days.

It is worth noticing that even Basilica Hudson's flagship event was born as a counterprogram. The Farm & Flea started on Thanksgiving weekend 2013 as an alternative to Black Friday, not as an extension of Warren Street retail. The instinct to build something apart from the main strip runs deeper here than one restaurant season.

What this means if Warren Street is still your mental map

None of this is an argument that Hudson has lost its footing. Warren Street still has the density of dining and galleries that no other stretch of road in the county can match, including 510 Warren Street Gallery, which has run as an artist-owned collective since 2010 and remains the only gallery of its kind left in the city. That kind of concentration does not happen by accident and it does not disappear because a couple of restaurants opened in Germantown.

But if you have spent 2026 assuming that anything worth knowing about in Columbia County shows up on Warren Street first, the season's actual openings suggest otherwise. The people making real bets this year, on space, on staff, on a specific hamlet outside Hudson, looked past Warren Street and found it. That is worth knowing whether you are heading out for dinner this weekend or just trying to keep an accurate picture of where the county's energy actually sits.

If you are watching Columbia County closely enough to notice these shifts as they happen, that same attention to detail is what shapes good decisions when the time comes to buy, sell, or simply understand what a property here is really worth. You can browse more on the Columbia County neighborhood page, and if a historic property in this market is somewhere on your horizon, our guide to buying a historic home in Columbia County is a useful next stop.

For anything more specific to your own address or your own plans, Daisy Blair is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.