When Chef Efren Hernandez announced that he was closing Rivertown Tavern on Warren Street in Hudson and reopening the space as Pez, a coastal Mexican seafood restaurant, his reasoning was refreshingly direct. (Hernandez is also in charge of 2026 James Beard-award semifinalist Casa Susanna in Leeds.)
Every ambitious restaurant in the Hudson Valley, he told me, seemed to be drawing from the same playbook. Farm-to-table had become less a movement than a default setting. The region didn’t need another restaurant built around local vegetables, heritage meats, and a list of farms on the menu. It needed a different point of view.
A meal at Pez suggests Hernandez was right.
Not because he has rejected the farm-to-table ethos. In many ways, he’s applying the same logic to different source material. Instead of beginning with farms, he’s beginning with fishmongers. The result is one of the most distinctive new restaurants to open in the Hudson Valley in recent years.
The restaurant occupies the former Rivertown Tavern dining room inside Rivertown Lodge, and while the food represents a decisive break from its predecessor, the room itself remains largely recognizable. The dark-toned clubbiness of Rivertown has been softened by marine-green walls that subtly evoke water without leaning into nautical cliche. The space is still narrow. Thirty seats inside and another 40 on the patio mean every inch gets used. A 6:45 reservation became a 7:30 seating on a busy night, and diners should be prepared for close quarters and the occasional passerby brushing through the narrow aisles. The intimacy creates its own energy, however. The room hums.
Outside, the marquee reads “PEZ OFISHALLY OEPN,” a groan-worthy fish pun that perfectly captures the restaurant’s personality. Hernandez may be serving some of the most ambitious seafood in the region, but he’s not interested in creating a temple to gastronomy. The goal, as he told me before opening, is for people to have fun.
The menu is built around mariscos, Mexico’s vast and varied coastal seafood tradition, interpreted through East Coast fish and shellfish. Atlantic bluefin tuna arrives with black garlic and bone marrow salsa macha. Chesapeake Bay blue crab appears atop a tostada with asparagus and chicatana. (By the way—chicatana are ants.) A whole dry-aged Atlantic mackerel is served with pipian rojo, escabeche, and burnt strawberry salsa.
Reading the menu, one might expect a parade of esoteric ingredients and culinary one-upmanship. The menu reads adventurous. The food tastes assured.
What struck me throughout the meal was not Hernandez’s creativity, though there is plenty of it. Nor was it his technical proficiency, which is evident. What impressed me most was his judgment.
Take the hay-smoked mackerel aguachile ($22), a dish bathed in a striking magenta broth made from blackberry and habanero. The color alone suggests something aggressive. Instead, the dish was balanced and measured, smoky and spicy without overwhelming the fish. The blackberry deepened the dish without making the mackerel wonder what happened to dinner. The habanero supplied heat without dominating. Every element knew its role.
The Chesapeake Bay blue crab tostada ($20) demonstrated a similar confidence. Visually, ribbons of asparagus seemed to claim center stage, but the sweet, forthright flavor of the crab quickly asserted itself. Chicatana ants—smoky, crunchy, and surprisingly familiar tasting—were scattered over the tostada like blackened pine nuts. Hernandez trusted the crab enough not to bury it beneath a mountain of garnishes or culinary flourishes. The crab’s natural sweetness carried the dish. That confidence extends beyond the seafood.
A little gem salad dressed with cilantro-tahini vinaigrette, crispy fava beans, and aged Romano Gouda ($18) initially raised an eyebrow. Tahini is not an ingredient most diners associate with Mexican cooking. Yet the dish never felt confused or self-consciously global. The fava beans supplied crunch, the cheese brought salty creaminess, and the dressing tied everything together. The result felt coherent rather than clever.
Coherence may be the defining characteristic of Pez. Many contemporary restaurants present diners with a collection of interesting ingredients and ask them to admire the chef’s thought process. Hernandez seems more interested in serving dishes than ideas. That became especially clear in a bowl of Bangs Island mussels served with English peas, chochoyotes, and chileatole negro ($28). The dark broth possessed remarkable depth, but the revelation was the chochoyotes, small masa dumplings that soaked up the liquid and returned it concentrated with each bite.
Dumplings are one of humanity’s great culinary inventions. Whether they’re called pierogi, gyoza, momos, tortellini, or chochoyotes, they perform the same essential function: transforming broth into food. Hernandez’s version connected an unfamiliar Mexican preparation to something universal and deeply comforting.
The meal’s centerpiece was a whole dry-aged Atlantic mackerel, grilled and presented intact ($35). Dry-aging had tightened the flesh, which pulled away in flavorful strips that could be tucked into tortillas with escabeche, pipian rojo, and burnt strawberry salsa. The resulting tacos delivered a cascade of flavors—oily, salty, fruity, smoky, and pickly—without any one element overwhelming the others. Mackerel is an inspired choice for a restaurant built around East Coast seafood. Assertive and unapologetically fishy, it possesses far more character than the anonymous white fish that populate so many menus. Here, it embodied Hernandez’s larger project: Atlantic ingredients interpreted through a distinctly Mexican lens.
The wine program, assembled with beverage director Natasha David, follows a similar philosophy. There is no encyclopedic wine list. Instead, a concise selection—11 selections by the bottle or glass, from $14 to $22 by the glass)—feels carefully calibrated to the food.
A classic Chablis delivered exactly what one hopes for from Chablis: minerality, acidity, and clarity. A Cour-Cheverny offered a brighter, slightly more adventurous companion to the seafood. Most memorable was the Bichi “No Sapiens” Dolcetto from Baja, a lightly cloudy Mexican wine alive with acidity, dark fruit, black tea notes, and a faint prickle from suspended lees. At $22 a glass, it wasn’t inexpensive, but it felt entirely in conversation with the kitchen. Like the food, the wine list favors specificity over abundance.
Dessert continued the theme. A green strawberry sorbet arrived topped with nixtamalized green blueberries and anise hyssop oil ($10). The sorbet itself was lovely, but the blueberries transformed the dish. Their popping texture and fermented tang provided contrast and complexity, turning a refreshing dessert into a memorable one.
It’s tempting to describe Pez as Casa Susanna’s seafood sibling, and there is some truth in that. Diners familiar with Hernandez’s acclaimed restaurant in Leeds will recognize the same curiosity, the same confidence, and the same willingness to draw from Mexican culinary traditions while working with Hudson Valley ingredients.
But that description undersells the achievement. Pez is not a departure from Hernandez’s cooking so much as its next logical step. At Casa Susanna, his imagination is organized around corn. Here, it is organized around fish. The underlying sensibility remains intact.
On its fourth night, Pez was still finding its footing. Reservations were running behind. The room felt tight. They were out of lobster. Those are real concerns and worth noting. They also felt secondary to the larger impression.
Hernandez correctly identified a sameness creeping into ambitious Hudson Valley dining and proposed an alternative. The result is a restaurant with a clear point of view, one that feels distinctly Mexican rather than merely Hudson Valley-adjacent. The menu may contain ingredients unfamiliar to many diners, but the food never feels like a lesson. Again and again, dishes built around chicatanas, chochoyotes, nixtamalized blueberries, and blackberry aguachile resolved into something simpler: pleasure.
