Stissing House’s pastry chef, Suzanne Nelson, told me that on a recent afternoon, her order of rhubarb showed up late and unusable, so she had to improvise. In late winter, it was hard to source from local vendors. The farmland-adjacent setting is part of the appeal, though in practice it has proved an occasional challenge. The tavern sets a similar stage it’s in the middle of beautiful farmland.

The vision was a kind of country Americana take on what she’s known for at King - what the New York Times critic Pete Wells approvingly labeled, “food on a plate in a room.” In De Boer’s words, it is to “serve nice easy food and do it really well.” She likens it to the earthy abundance one finds in Italy - “local people eating local stuff, and it’s amazing, just because it’s so simple.

With the fate of King uncertain, and a growing frustration with the online chef life (“cooking demos, Instagramming what you’re doing for dinner - it sucks”), De Boer lit up at the possibility of breathing new life into a space with good bones and its own story. Before the pandemic, De Boer had already been away from a restaurant kitchen for half a year, on maternity leave after the birth of her first son, Abe. When I first visited, on a night in late spring a few months after the restaurant’s opening, my eye went directly to Clare de Boer, the chef and owner, a striking figure in white working on the line, and then to a massive, appealingly askew tower of butter under a glass cake dome.ĭe Boer, best known for King, a jewel box of a restaurant that she opened with two partners in Manhattan’s SoHo, first saw the Stissing House space back when the world was closed due to Covid. Behind a high counter, a half dozen cooks move from prep stations to an enormous wood-fired oven. It leads past a warren of small dining rooms to the main action: a capacious space with north- and east-facing windows, anchored by an impressive bar (seating for 12) and a busy open kitchen. FROM THE ENTRANCE of Stissing House, a new restaurant with a long history at the corner of Main Street and NY-199 in Pine Plains, you can see three fireplaces and a wide hallway.

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