A New Farm-to-Table Restaurant in Upstate New York

08.11.2024 - 10:17 / nytimes.com

When Ivy Nallo and Zack Nussdorf moved to Taghkanic, N.Y., in 2020, they envisioned having a small garden where they could grow enough produce to host dinners on the screen porch. Four years later, the 625-square-foot plot has grown into a one-acre farm with greenhouses and a herd of Mangalitsa pigs, known for their lard. At the end of October, Nallo and Nussdorf opened Restaurant Manor Rock in Hudson, N.Y., a 20-minute drive from their farm. Much of the produce, like the patchwork peppers and the Barbarella eggplants, comes from their land, as does the pork for their loin chops and charcuterie. Nussdorf briefly worked as a line cook at the Michelin-starred Brooklyn restaurant the Four Horsemen. Here, he and the chef Diego Romo, previously of Gem and Estela in Manhattan, are making simple, seasonal dishes, like grilled squid with turnips and potatoes cooked in Mangalitsa lard. Before it hosted a string of restaurants, Manor Rock’s Warren Street space was a townhouse. It was overhauled earlier this year by the design and architecture firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero, who outfitted the restaurant with porcelain sconces, cream-colored walls and a red-oak bar made of trees from Manor Rock Farm. “We wanted it to feel like it’s been here for the last hundred years,” Nallo says. .

The American artist Peter McGough, who for four decades beginning in the early 1980s served as one half of the art duo McDermott and McGough, has long employed antiquated media and methods of photography. One of his favored techniques is cyanotype, a 19th-century invention in which objects or photographic negatives are placed against paper covered in photosensitive chemicals. When exposed to UV light, the paper turns a brilliant blue, with the image appearing in white negative space. This month, McGough’s first solo exhibition in New York at Karma Gallery in downtown Manhattan features 26 cyanotype prints, each depicting a letter of the Latin alphabet formed by either individuals or groupings of nude male models (both “M” and “W” required four sitters). Most models appear completely unadorned, though some sport floral crowns; rare props include a ribbon representing the upper arm of “T,” and two skulls placed at one model’s feet, creating the serif of an uppercase “I.” Though these are new images, cyanotypes require a lengthy exposure that results in imagery with a softly blurred quality reminiscent of 19th-century portraiture. To coincide with the exhibition, Karma is releasing a catalog of the suite of works, which is fittingly bound in blue linen. “

In 1999, George Gorrow launched the denim label Ksubi in Sydney with a few surf buddies. Five years later, with one of his Ksubi partners, he opened the Slow, a 12-room hotel in Canggu,