Just right: Hudson’s Sonder a gem of a place for lovers of wine and small plates.
Sonder brings expertise, high standards to wine bar and small plates model
Pandemic or not, Hudson is packing fresh reasons to visit. Summer saw the opening of Culture Cream, a probiotic ice cream shack on the forecourt of Back Bar, and Fuego 69, a pop-up by Lil Deb’s Oasis on the lawn at Rivertown Lodge, as well as Buttercup, Kitty’s and Breadfolks Bakery. There was also the formal opening of
The Maker Hotel. Seemingly overnight, Sonder, a natural wine bar, opened in the tiny former home of Food Studio with a tiny staff, esoteric wine list and smallplates menu that changes daily like songs on a playlist.
It’s chilly enough outside that we sit in the front window, spaced far from other patrons — a couple at a table and two solo diners dotting the wall counter running the length of the light, skinny space. We watch dog walkers and strollers soak up the golden light and accept a laminated menu and pen to check off wines and small plates the way you might select dim sum. Once completed, server Rachel Hodes, one of the three-person team, begins sorties delivering plates and talking about the day’s natural wines by the glass.
Refreshingly, glasses are more competitively priced than by the bottle since Sonder focuses on daily selections split into a chilled white, chilled red, orange (skin contact) and pet nat (petillant naturel). Wines are as likely to hail from Croatia, Slovenia and Mexico as Austria or France, and most are small-batch boutique producers, so what’s here this week may soon be gone. Rather than pairing a bottle to a meal, Sonder is banking on out-of-thebox steerage by staff and that uniquely millennial fondness for tasting all things new.
For chef-owner Dan Bagnall — a native Californian, restaurant consultant, Level 1 sommelier, natural-wine fan and pandemic transplant from Brooklyn who has a home in Rhinebeck — the real compliment is when solo diners stop in midafternoon for a glass of wine and a small plate, novel in hand. In a pandemic, it’s fitting that “sonder,” a fabricated word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows website of neologisms, conveys the realization that each of us is at the center of our unfolding story. It’s certainly true of Bagnall.
The precision and unique flavors in the small plates now crowding our table give away something about the two-man crew sending them out. Namely that Bagnall, having worked in kitchens since he was 15 years old and trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, has Eleven Madison Park and Le Bernardin on his studded resume. When the pandemic hit, Bagnall had just wrapped up work on a regionally focused, organic, low-waste food program for Public Records, a vegan cocktail and sound bar (to go full Brooklyn on you); it was a consulting project for the Oberon Group, with which he developed seasonal, low-waste menus at their Brooklyn natural-wine bars, Rhodora and June. Joining him is at Sonder is Clyde Woodstock, who worked with him at Smile in Manhattan’s Noho neighborhood and moved upstate to help open Sonder. Staffing in a pandemic is hard, and this trio is tight.
Chunky smashed cucumbers talk dirty in sweet-and-sour honey and Catskill vinegar, tahini and black salt; charred corn sliced off the cob is dotted with a velvety corn pudding, a puree concentrating the fresh-picked flavor and soft foil to lacy pickled onions on top. We’ve chosen a baked cheese that loses all form, oozing into softly roasted piquillo peppers and garlic as we scoop it onto warm bread. In a simple salad of local gem lettuce, crisp leaves are turtled on curved backs, cupping sliced pickled turnips and speckled in green-goddess dressing. And now a bowl of sweet, blistered Jimmy Nardello peppers we pluck by the stem, devouring their long red bodies in three bites, eyes wide at the blast of black vinegar, chile oil and crushed peanuts clinging to sticky skin. Just know that after these, the
blistered shishitos in your future will be ruined by comparison.
Among the featured daily wines, it’s not hard to find something new: a Croatian white made from indigenous Dalmatian rukatac grapes, an unfiltered Austrian Zweigelt-blaufrankisch rosé packing notes of salty watermelon and sour peach, the lush pink hue of a sparkling biodynamic pet nat grolleau, and a soft, aromatic, organic orange wine, one of the palest you’ll find. For some, skin contact, known as orange or amber wine, might be something new. There’s popular advice to be sitting down when have your first orange
wine. Though the method of production is old, their popularity has soared with interest in natural wine and the textures and flavors are entirely different than whites. Color comes from fermentation on the skins of white-wine grapes ( hence “skin contact”) the way rosé derives color from red-wine grapes. Ours, hand harvested, destemmed and given only five days’ skin contact, is a strawberry gold, the color of wet straw.
Compared to tapas and pintxos, Sonder’s 15 plates are generous, largely vegetable-forward, often vegan and 80% locally sourced. Bagnall’s goal, influenced by his Brooklyn projects, is to be over
90% local, seasonal and waste free. We miss out on flame beets with fermented soybean vinegar or cold soba noodles with burnt garlic oil, but we happily dunk four sweet-and-spicy ribs in a tart, house-made creme fraiche and demolish a Boursin-stuffed French omelet executed with the exacting precision of someone who has worked at Le Bernardin. If you want to understand how close a French omelet is to godliness in France, just watch a Jacques Pepin or Ludo Lefevbre omelet video. Bagnall’s is perfect: unbrowned, tight curd, creamy middle.
It’s almost over. We savor the rosé pet nat with a deconstructed dessert of crumbled pound cake, strawberries and Chantilly cream, and head off into the night. Whether you stop in for an afternoon pick-me-up or casual date night, Sonder is a wonder. Capably rounding out Hudson’s flourishing natural-wine scene — you’ll find low-intervention wine lists at Back Bar, Rivertown Lodge, Lil Deb’s and Lawrence Park — Sonder has carved a hygge niche into its light-filled coffee shop-sized space: Unhurried, lo-fi, natural wines and a lineup of plated hits. And all available to go.