Professor Luberov was a big, Russian Neo-Soviet lady—tough, hyper-intelligent, formidable, and imposing. JT Pinna was her student at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow studying Russian language and culture. Luberov recruited JT to also become her student for what she considered a higher purpose: the art of making Muscovite babka.
For 10 weeks Luberov trained Pinna on a long, old wooden table in her home in the outskirts of Moscow. The walls were adorned with nonmatching, ostentatious wallpaper in each room. Each wall displayed pictures and paintings of family members going back to the late 1800s and the professor told elaborate stories about family members, the Revolution, and Russian lore during the many pauses in the creation of babka when the dough must rise several times. “I’m getting old and I don’t want my recipe to die,” the professor told her student. For reasons Pinna didn’t understand, Luberov refused to pass the recipe on to her family and chose him to be its steward.
Babka is a Russian Jewish sweet bread that takes three to seven hours to make. It is a favorite in New York culture so much so that Seinfeld dedicated a skit to the highly regarded pastry in The Dinner Party. Recently, I stopped into the Half Moon Rondout Cafe and was delighted by the experience of eating the only authentic babka I had tasted since being a kid in Brooklyn. Curious about how it made its way to the Hudson Valley I spoke with owner, JT. “I didn’t do anything with the recipe for 30 years, and I carried it with me until three years ago,” Pinna says of Luberov’s legacy.
Pinna was born in Poughkeepsie in 1975. “The Rondout Valley was my stomping ground back in the day,” he recalls. His best friend’s father owned Numrich Arms in Kingston and together the boys frequented salty bars like the Sturgeon, Ray’s Dockside, the Golden Duck, and Mary P’s.
After graduating Marist College as a history major, Pinna worked for many years in government relations, national security, human rights, fundraising, operations, and programming. In 2020, he decided to pivot his professional focus to the region. “[I decided] I should turn my attention and the skills I developed abroad to the local community and to my aging parents,” Pinna says. “That was just as the Hudson Valley was getting hit really hard by COVID, and I wanted to help out.”
He teamed up with Ulster County’s Project Resilience, which used grant money to pay area restaurants to provide thousands of meals for food-insecure and quarantined individuals during the crisis. The United Way was the vehicle for the project and Pinna pitched in, using his skills to assist the community, helping to secure grants for Project Resilience. One of the restaurants involved with the project was the Texas Roadhouse. Kaira Tiegen was the managing partner of the Roadhouse and together, she and Pinna delivered 200 to 500 “real dinners” a day to the community.
Through this connection, Pinna and Tiegen began dating and soon decided to open the Half Moon Rondout Cafe during the pandemic to continue serving the community. In November 2020, the shop doors opened in Kingston’s Rondout district for takeout. Half Moon brought some life into a community that was ravaged by many business closures due to the pandemic. The babka recipe was revived.
In keeping with the international-to-local theme that sculpted the babka (and Pinna’s own career), the donut recipe the pair created is based on choux pastry, a kind of creme puff that comprises the French dessert tower known as croquembouche.
In the early days of Half Moon, the menu was limited to babka, donuts, and coffee. Now, three years later the Half Moon Rondout Cafe has become a full-service cafe and a popular go-to spot in Kingston, recently winning a whopping seven Chronogrammies!
Besides replicating the recipe that he laboriously learned decades ago in Moscow, at Half Moon Pinna has sought to recreate something akin to the atmosphere of Professor Luberov’s apartment, infused with community and family history. “The cafe is an extension of our living room,” he says. “Everything there is of Kaira and me. The Hudson Valley is part of our life blood. All the pictures you’ll see hanging on the walls are meaningful.”
On the walls of the cafe you’ll see paintings by Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole and Marc Chagall, who lived in High Falls, plus photos of local folks. There are also family photos of Pinna and Tiegen’s ancestors, and heirlooms from the Hudson Valley like a 130-year-old dough divider made at the ironworks in Fishkill.
Customers comment on the distinctive taste of Half Moon’s skillfully crafted donuts and babka, the great coffee, and the personal service. “It feels really good to take a skill set and think of it in a way you can give it back to the neighborhood and community you live in,” Tiegan says. “It makes you envision a different kind of future. It’s been really special to watch our neighbor's children grow up and create that place that is so special.”
The cafe’s fresh, hot donuts are made to order and ready in under two minutes. The varieties are plain, powdered sugar, and cinnamon sugar ($2.25 each, $21 a dozen). Specialty flavors like blueberry and apple are offered seasonally. Besides chocolate and cinnamon babka and coffee, the menu has expanded to offer other pastries like cinnamon buns, croissants, crumb cake, sfogliatelle, scones, and lemon bars (all $4).
A new menu of breakfast and lunch items includes all-day bites like eggs and toast ($5.25), grilled cheese melt ($10), a pastrami and swiss melt ($13), chicken and donuts ($13), and rotating soups.
“The idea is that we’re here for everyone,” Pinna says. “We are open for the community. It’s comfort food. It’s fresh, home food—and there’s a story behind everything you ask.”
The Half Moon Rondout Cafe is open every day except Tuesday, 7am to 3:30pm. .
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Dr. Bruce Schneider is a chiropractor and cranio-sacral therapist in New Paltz, as well as a freelance writer.
