When Efren Hernandez moved to the Hudson Valley in July 2020 to take over the kitchen at Rivertown Lodge in Hudson, it was a pandemic-era reset, not the opening act of a planned regional expansion. The restaurants where he’d worked in New York City had just shut down. He came north to cook and to work—nothing more structured than that. Four years later, he finds himself leading two of the region’s most thoughtful kitchens, balancing his post as executive chef at the Tavern at Rivertown Lodge with the wood-fire Mexican restaurant he opened in 2023, Casa Susanna, at Camptown in Leeds.
Casa Susanna arrived fully formed, as I wrote in 2023: heirloom corn nixtamalized and ground in-house; a masa program as the foundation of the menu, not a flourish; wood fire as both flavor and structure. “The vision is still the same now as when we started,” Hernandez says. “I think we’re getting better at executing it. We’re more playful now. We’re changing the menu more. We know who we are.”
That confidence shows in the food. Tlacoyos made from blue corn come topped with sweet potato and feta. A pork belly tamal in a dark, fermented mole negro lands with the gravity of a dish made slowly and on purpose. Lamb shank braised in salsa verde arrives heavy with herbs. His beef tongue—braised, peeled, compressed, cut into medallions and crisped in a wood-fired pan of beef fat—is treated like prime steak, not off-cut. “I wanted to treat it the same way you would treat a filet mignon,” he says.
For Hernandez, masa is both ingredient and identity. “It’s the most important part of Mexican cuisine,” he says. “It’s like pasta—there are shapes and forms and vessels, and each one is meant for something.” Guests unfamiliar with tlacoyos or tamales or tetelas aren’t corrected so much as welcomed. “I like sharing things I’m interested in with people,” he says. “If someone doesn’t know what something is, we just tell them. It’s not teaching—just sharing.”
The kitchen has evolved structurally, too. Earlier this year Hernandez formalized a more traditional brigade system at Casa Susanna, naming chef Ruben Mills chef de cuisine—giving him both creative room and responsibility. “He’s doing a great job,” Hernandez says. “The food feels more interesting.” That shift has allowed Hernandez to move more fluidly between his two kitchens, trusting Mills at Casa Susanna and chef de cuisine Tadd Johnson at Rivertown to carry out the work. “I hire the right people and support them,” he says. “I make sure they have what they need so they can be chefs.”
If Casa Susanna is the expression of Hernandez’s Mexican heritage—ground corn and chile and fire—Rivertown gives him a wider canvas. He calls it an “American palette,” meaning a freedom to pull from anywhere without falling into the easy mashup logic of fusion. He is quick to draw the line. “Fusion always feels bolted together,” he says. “Like, this is the Korean part and this is the Mexican part. I don’t want you to see the line.” At Rivertown, he aims for a synthesis that reads as a new thing, not a combination of old ones. “If I want a sauce from Brazil and ingredients you’d see in a Japanese dish, that’s fine,” he says. “It just has to feel cohesive.”
That desire—to build something coherent rather than clever—runs through both kitchens. Raised in Los Angeles by Mexican immigrants, Hernandez’s curiosity about Mexican culinary history has led him deeper into pre-Hispanic ingredients and techniques. He mentions sikil pak, a Mayan pumpkin-seed sauce, and huitlacoche, the earthy corn fungus sometimes called Mexican truffle. Sometimes the inspiration comes through Guatemala, where his wife is from. “There’s so much there I never knew growing up,” he says. “I’ll find something and think, ‘How do we use that now?’”
The masa program extends into unexpected places, too. He and his team make meso—a miso-style paste made from corn—a technique he first encountered in the Noma Guide to Fermentation. Masa as starch, masa as ferment, masa as base matter. “It keeps masa in the conversation in a new way,” he says. But for all the experimentation, the aim is clarity, not novelty for its own sake. “We want to do things that are interesting,” he says, “things you wouldn’t do at home, where someone eats it and feels excited by it.”
Recognition has followed—the James Beard Foundation has taken notice; national press has written about both restaurants—but Hernandez doesn’t sound particularly interested in the performance of acclaim. If anything, validation has removed pressure rather than created it. “It lets us experiment more,” he says. “Like, okay—we can cook. Let’s keep cooking.” The pressure he acknowledges is internal: a desire to keep pushing, keep refining, keep finding new corners of Mexican cooking and new applications for Hudson Valley ingredients.
Hernandez speaks about the region with a kind of adopted-home pragmatism. He didn’t move here for the farms or the quiet but he has built something connected to the place. Casa Susanna’s masa is shaped by local grains, and its vegetables come from nearby fields. Rivertown’s plates shift with the Valley’s seasons. In summer, he cooks weddings outdoors over wood, whole animals turning slowly over embers. “We try to bring restaurant standards to events,” he says. “A lot of wedding food isn’t great.” The fire remains a constant through-line.
Asked what’s next, Hernandez doesn’t hesitate. “I want to open more concepts,” he says. A Mexican bakery. A seafood place. More ways of exploring the cuisines he cares about. He does not sound scattered—he sounds restless in the way people do when they’ve found their footing and feel the room around them widen.
Late in the conversation, he mentions sunchokes—Jerusalem artichokes, knobby and earthy, polarizing in restaurant kitchens and home ones alike. He loves them, especially pureed. “They’re creamy, a little sweet,” he says. “People either love them or hate them.” He knows the complaints. He waves them off.
“People talk about how they make you fart a lot—but I don’t care about that,” he says. “I’m thinking about eating first.”
