Hudson's Best Restaurant News This Year Didn't Happen On Warren Street
On April 1, Shaina Loew-Banayan posted a photo to Cafe Mutton's Instagram. They were holding a red balloon, wearing a look that read somewhere between deadpan and dread, standing in front of a garage door with the word "Merkin" painted across it in gold letters. The caption said "Not April Fools." Which, naturally, made half of Hudson assume it was exactly that.
It wasn't. Merkin Hudson opened for real days later, and it's still one of the stranger, better things to happen to this city's food scene in 2026. But the story that matters here isn't really about the joke. It's about where these two things happened. Merkin sits on Columbia Street. Its closest sibling in the local news cycle, Soluna Cafe Cantina, sits on Green Street. Neither one is on Warren Street, which is the block every visitor guide points you toward first. The two most-talked-about food openings in Hudson this year both landed one block over, in spaces that already belonged to people who were already cooking here.
Cafe Mutton has spent five years turning odd cuts of meat into a reason people drive up from the city, working out of a small corner storefront at 757 Columbia Street. When Loew-Banayan needed to figure out what to do with a garage they'd been renting next door at 45 8th Street, the answer wasn't a second restaurant in the conventional sense. It was Merkin, described by the chef as a place to hang out, drink wine, listen to records, buy charcuterie, and eat sandwiches and maybe some soup.
The name comes with a backstory Loew-Banayan attached to the building: a merkins factory that reportedly ran from 1881 to 1934 in what was then Hudson's red light district, in a stretch of the city once known for brothels and illegal gambling before a 1950 state police raid shut it down. The Times Union reported that the paper couldn't independently confirm the history, and the city historian didn't respond to a request to verify it. Loew-Banayan, asked directly whether the factory's supposed founder was a real person, said only "no comment." Take the history with a grain of salt. Take the sandwiches at face value.
The menu is short by design: a bologna sandwich for sixteen dollars, a country pâté sandwich for seventeen, pig foot mortadella with caper mayo, head cheese on a baguette with celery root remoulade, pickled mackerel with butter and dill. There's a rotating soup Loew-Banayan calls "mean and greasy," recently a lamb head version and a sausage-potato-fermented radish one. Oysters show up when they're available. Wine, beer, and liquor round it out, but no cocktails. When asked if more items were coming, the answer was blunt: "Adding more is always the problem."
As of this spring, Merkin ran Thursday and Friday, noon to nine, with plans to add another day once the weather warmed. Sundays belong to Cafe Mutton's Long Lunch, a five-course, family-style meal for about a dozen strangers that stretches across four hours and ends in small pours of amari. Tickets go through Cafe Mutton's Resy page. Loew-Banayan says most groups leave having made new friends, which tracks with a restaurant built around the idea that people are lonelier than they used to be and a communal table is one modest fix for that.
A few blocks away, on Green Street, Soluna Cafe Cantina tells a version of the same story with a different rhythm. Juan Carlos Granda and Gina Macias had been business partners since working together at Casa Susanna in Leeds. Last fall, Granda was helping Casa Latina move into a new Fairview Avenue location when he clocked the space they were vacating on Green Street. He and Macias had been talking about opening something of their own. The timing lined up.
They renovated the space themselves and soft-opened in November 2025 with eighteen seats and a tight menu, six weeks after Casa Latina moved out. That's not a typical build-out timeline for a restaurant. It's the timeline of two people who already knew exactly what they wanted to build and didn't need to go hunting for a location, because the location found them.
The food draws on Macias's background, tacos she'd made a name for at the now-closed Bodega Aguila Real, alongside sweet tamales, avocado toast, and a Cuban sandwich regulars already ask for by name. Breakfast runs five to twelve dollars. Fridays are themed dinner nights: a Cuban night, an Asian fusion night, and an anime-inspired dinner that ran in late February 2026, built around dishes from Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Kiki's Delivery Service, with katsudon and gyudon served in bento boxes for a sixty-dollar prix fixe. After that one, Granda and Macias said they'd put up sticky notes so diners could pitch the next theme themselves.
As of this spring, Soluna was still waiting on its liquor license, with a Cinco de Mayo debut for the full bar program planned once it clears, mariachis included. The outdoor patio, and with it the evening margaritas-and-tacos concept the two originally imagined, was set to open once the license came through. Whether that timeline held depends on how the permitting process moved through spring, but the plan itself tells you something: this was never meant to be a breakfast counter forever. It was a foothold, taken quickly, with the rest of the vision built in stages as the paperwork allowed.
Here's the pattern once you put these two side by side. Neither Merkin nor Soluna required a search for available commercial real estate in a city where storefronts on the main drag turn over slowly and rents track with tourist foot traffic. Merkin exists because Cafe Mutton was already paying rent on the garage next door and had to decide what to do with it. Soluna exists because its owners happened to be in the room when a lease was ending and moved before anyone else could.
Chronogram's write-up on Merkin noted something else worth sitting with: there's a small trend in Hudson of new spots naming themselves after the industries that used to occupy their buildings. Loew-Banayan called the city "an amusement park" in that sense, layering new identity directly onto old use rather than erasing it. Merkin's garage was a rental unit before it was a wine bar. Soluna's storefront was Casa Latina before it was Soluna, and Bodega Aguila Real before that, under the same owners, just moved down the street. The city's food scene right now isn't being built by outside capital scouting fresh real estate. It's being built by people who already had a lease, a relationship, or a next-door garage, and used what was already theirs.
If you live here, this changes where you should be paying attention. The flashiest news isn't coming from a new storefront on Warren Street with a grand opening banner. It's coming from the block behind it, from an existing kitchen deciding to do something else with the space it already has.
For anyone who wants the shape of it, here's where things stood as of this spring. Merkin was open Thursday and Friday from noon to nine, with Sundays reserved for Cafe Mutton's ticketed Long Lunch. Soluna ran Monday through Saturday from eight to four for breakfast and lunch, with Friday night themed dinners announced on Instagram a few days out, and a patio and full bar set to arrive once the liquor license cleared. Hours and offerings at small kitchens like these tend to shift with the seasons, so a quick check on Instagram before heading over is always worth it.
Neither one needed a marketing budget to get talked about. Merkin got there by looking like a joke long enough that people had to find out for themselves. Soluna got there by feeding people who already knew the food from somewhere else and just followed it a few blocks over. Both are proof that in a city this size, the interesting stuff tends to happen sideways, in the space next door or the storefront someone just left, rather than in whatever's advertised loudest on the street everyone already photographs.
If you're settling into Hudson and want the kind of on-the-ground read that doesn't show up in a visitor's guide, that's the sort of local detail Jamie M Mazuryk tends to track. Reach out anytime you want a longer conversation about what's actually happening in this corner of Columbia County, whether that's a new lunch spot or a house down the street.
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