The Maker Hotel’s in-house restaurant is called Serre, after the French word for “greenhouse.” It serves dinner nightly.
Sara Wallach/The Maker
Jonas Offenbach, executive chef of The Maker, says his menus offer a lighter, contemporary take on dishes informed by French classics.
Sara Wallach/The Maker
With 11 rooms, a cafe, lounge and restaurant spread across several buildings, The Maker is located at Warren and Third streets in Hudson.
Francine Zaslow/The Maker
HUDSON — The Maker, an 11-room boutique hotel on Warren Street that opened during the pandemic summer of 2020, has rebranded its in-house restaurant as Serre, French for “greenhouse,” and made it a showcase for the well-regarded chef Jonas Offenbach.
Previously known informally as the Conservatory, the glass-roofed space nestled within a hotel created from three contiguous buildings started service under the Serre name on March 30. The menu features dishes that are recognizably informed by classic French cooking — Offenbach said he owns about 200 French cookbooks, most from the 1970s and ’80s and many in the original language — but with contemporary twists and lighter preparations. As Offenbach puts it, “French cuisine through a modern lens.”
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“I wouldn’t say all that we do is French, but it’s the core of my thinking,” he said.
Case in point is an entree called Lamb Chop Crepinette. The latter word traditionally refers to a patty-like sausage of ground meat trimmings wrapped in caul fat, a lacy membrane that surrounds internal organs. At Serre, Offenbach mixes lamb, chicken and foie gras into a sausage blend, puts it on top of a lamb chop and cooks it all encased in caul fat, finished with a smoked-eel jus. The chef calls it a “playful ode or spin” inspired by a recipe in a decades-old French cookbook that paired lamb with eel sauce.
Freshwater eel from the Catskills, delivered by a purveyor Offenbach described as “a bearded guy who shows up at the back door,” is a favorite of the chef’s, as are raw red prawns, a scarlet-colored shrimp that was long associated with Spain but in recent years was found in the deep waters off Montauk. Offenbach serves them with fennel, a cantaloupe variant called Cavaillon melon, green tomato and sauce Americaine.
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“Like eels, the prawns come with me wherever I go,” said Offenbach, who most recently was chef de cuisine and part of the founding team at the restaurant Matilda at The Henson, a hotel near Windham. He previously was chef de cuisine at Momofuku Ko and also worked at Wildair and Gramercy Tavern, all in Manhattan.
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Offenbach was hired at The Maker six months ago by the owners with the intention of revitalizing the hotel’s food service, which also includes a cafe and lounge, new menus for which the chef also created.
“Jonas has a similar sensibility to us, an approach to artisanship and an attention to detail (that) the hotel is really built on,” said Lev Glazman, who founded The Maker with Alina Roytberg, his partner in the beauty brand Fresh, and hospitality expert Damien Janowicz.
He said, “We wanted to give the restaurant its own name and identity, to create a narrative for it around (Offenbach’s) techniques and cooking philosophy.”
While Serre offers a few expensive main plates, with the lamb chop costing $52 and a bavette steak $57, its appetizers average less than $9, its lighter fare under $24.
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“I didn’t want to be a restaurant with an $80 lobster dish or a really expensive salad — charging prices like that just because I could get away with it in Hudson,” Offenbach said. Similarly, the cafe’s lentil salad with soft-boiled egg, shallots, herbs and mustard vinaigrette is $15, and while the lounge’s signature cocktails will set you back at least $18, its burger and fries are only a dollar more.
“His food feeds into the whole environment of the hotel,” said Glazman. “It’s a bohemian sensibility. It’s sultry, sensuous, sexy, and Serre is a big runway for his creativity.”
The Maker’s cafe is open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., the lounge from 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday and from 3 p.m. Friday to Sunday; dinner in Serre is served from 5 to 9 p.m., all daily. The address is 302 Warren St. The website: themaker.com.
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