Though only 40 minutes from the big city (of Kingston), Urban Cowboy Lodge is a world apart: a rustic oasis with modern amenities and a restaurant with a seasonal, vegetable-focused menu that’s worth the trip all by itself.
The 68-acre property was operated as the Alpine Inn by the Griesser family, who lived onsite and built their Catskill retreat over several generations. The Urban Cowboy hospitality group—which runs two boutique hotels in Nashville with a third soon to open in Denver—bought the Alpine Inn from the Griessers in 2019. After a yearlong renovation, which consisted of minimal structural changes but a complete reskining of the interior (much of the furniture is original, merely reupholstered), Urban Cowboy Lodge opened in March 2020. For a brief weekend. You know the story.
Urban Cowboy Lodge relaunched slowly in June of 2020. Instead of fully opening during the fraught early days of COVID, the hotel rented out a fraction of its 28 rooms and collaborated with iconic Brooklyn pizza joint Roberta’s on a pop-up rather than open its own restaurant. The mobile pizza oven was a great success, but by the fall of last year, the team at Urban Cowboy, headed by Director of Operations Ryan Kresser, were ready to open the Public House, the on-site restaurant.
In October, the Lodge hired chef Jon Adair. A Philadelphia native, Adair had worked for large, tourist-focused restaurants in the city before opening two restaurants, BYOB Helm and Helm Rittenhouse, for the Helm group. Transplanted to the Catskills, Adair brings his fondness for working with farm and foraged items to the menu at Public House.
The restaurant is located in the main building at the resort, and the large lounge area outside the dining room is the Catskill’s aesthetic retooled for 21st-century: Keep the big stone fireplace and leather furniture but add a DJ booth and switch the rustic vibe into overdrive with antler chandeliers and large sections of trees installed in the corners of the room, limbs and bark included, taking live-edge woodwork to phenomenological conclusion. And there’s a bar as soon as you walk in. Nice touch. On a recent spring evening, hotel guests newly arrived after a multi-hour drive unwound with cocktails in the lounge before checking in to their rooms.
About the cocktails: There were eight signature drinks on the menu, all $14 or $15. They included the fittingly pine-y Escape from Manhattan, with rye, sweet vermouth, alpine amaro, and a lemon twist. There’s also the Yukimi, a nutty take on an Old Fashioned with Akashi Japanese whisky, Laird’s applejack, and nocino (black walnut liqueur.) Both drinks were as balanced as they were boozy. One before dinner goes a long way. You might even wander downstairs while you sip and shoot a game of pool. (If you’re staying at the hotel, you can book the screening room on the lower level for a private movie viewing.)
The dining room is a touch more understated, design-wise, which is a calming note before eating. That said, the staff at Urban Cowboy Lodge are a calming presence throughout—attentive but not obtrusive, knowledgeable, and relaxed. Our interactions with staff during our meal were a pleasure. Hats off to Kresser and Food and Beverage Director Rachel Wagers for finding and retaining such a well-trained crew in the midst of the ongoing Great Restaurant Staffing Crisis.
Of the 16 items on the menu the night we visited, only five had meat in them. When I asked Adair later why he created a veggie-focused menu, he framed it as a sort of self-imposed ideological chef’s challenge., “I try to keep it as seasonal as possible,” he says. “You can get meat all the time. Vegetables are more seasonal and require you to be versatile and adapt throughout the year.” As we visited in April, some of the heavier items, like the pork and root vegetable terrine, were about to be removed for spingier fare, like a grilled steak.
We ordered some wine, a delightful Sauvignon Blanc (Trinqu’ames from La Grange Triphaine in the Loire, $48) that split the difference between melon and mineral notes. The well-curated list is composed exclusively of natural wines, with bottles starting just under $50.
At the urging of the staff, we started with bread. Billed as “Wilson’s bread, pickles, cultured butter” ($9), it’s sourced from an artisanal bakery in nearby Andes. The tangy sourdough didn’t disappoint, and reminded a jaded eater how good gluten can be. We followed it up with squash rounds roasted with curry spices, sauced with coconut milk and topped with gremolata ($13). The parsnip pierogies ($13), served with sauerkraut and sour cream were crunchy and creamy in equal measure, a good place for pierogies to land. The pork and chestnut ragu, served over fingerling sweet potatoes ($15), was the one slightly off dish of the evening, as potatoes were not firm enough to stand up to the ragu, creating a mushy mess.
The best for last: beer battered cippolini onion, nigella seed, and horseradish ($12). Essentially, onion rings. Most onion rings are slivers of vegetable battered and fried so you get twice as much breading as you do onion, an unappetizing breading-to-vegetable ratio I tend to avoid. Adair’s version took whole cippolinis, golf-ball-sized suckers, and fried them. Bite through the crisp breading and there’s plenty of sweet onion, like if a popover and an onion tart had a beautiful baby. Quite possibly the best “onion rings” I’ve ever had.
Urban Cowboy Lodge is a luxurious forest playground where hotel guests might never leave its creature comforts and diners can relax in a bucolic setting outside or a cozy one inside and indulge in chef Adair’s unpretentious, tasty creations. Don’t forget the onion rings.
The Public House at Urban Cowboy Lodge is open for dinner from 5 to 9pm Thursday to Saturday, and 5 to 8pm on Sunday. The bar is open at 3pm daily and a limited bar menu is available.
This article appears in May 2022.
