Rona Boyer

After eleven years in Pine Plains, this locally cherished wine store has moved to bigger digs and is now on Route 199 two blocks west of the traffic light (on the road to Rhinebeck).   “It's nice when your business grows considerably, but not nice when you have increasingly inadequate room for it. The opportunity to have a larger, newly-built space in a significantly better location with a better landlord could not be passed up.” explained proprietor Will Carter. The new space originally intended for an out-patient clinic for Sharon Hospital was completely unfinished. “The community was incredible in helping us get built, moved, and up and running in short order - completely built-out in under six weeks.”” Local workmen, town authorities and many townspeople all pitched in to help make the move happen.

You have two different restaurants in New York City, both highly rated. Can you explain the differences between the two?  Oxygen is the difference. Graffiti is a small, casual restaurant on East 10th Street, the tables are fairly close together, it is always crowded, noisy, and there is usually a line outside waiting for a table. On the other hand, Mehtaphor, which is downtown on Duane Street, is more spacious, has more oxygen per guest and is generally more upscale.

Sunday I discovered this Dover Plains delight. Before then I considered maple syrup to be overly sweet and reserved it to use sparingly on French toast and pancakes. I was forced to revise my opinion when I encountered the refined and complex flavor profile of this sophisticated yet natural maple syrup. To introduce it, Hudson Valley Table had 40 Restaurant Week chefs compete to create dishes featuring the syrup—cocktails, appetizers, main courses and desserts. Restaurant X’s Executive Chef James Kelly made a sensational salad of heirloom beets with whipped ricotta, Crown Maple, pistachio oil and candied pecans, which is now on the menu full-time in Congers, NY.

Who knew that there were so many types of garlic? Or so many things you could do with it, like make those garlic–chocolate chip cookies that I tasted and found surprisingly good? Or that more than 30,000 people would come out for the festivities? The Saugerties Garlic Festival is the second largest in the country, and on many levels it is impressive, including how it began.   A bit of research taught me that there are more than 600 known types of garlic, which differ in color, shape, size, taste, number of cloves per bulb, pungency and storability. Garlic began to appear on our shores with the influx of German, Italian, and Polish immigrants. But most garlic species actually arrived quite recently—all at once, in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Until then permission for Westerners to visit the USSR’s Caucasus region, home to so many garlic plants, had always been refused by the Russians because of the many missile bases and the Soviet spaceport in the area.