817: TASTE Travels: Kingston, NY

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
Morning Decisions.

**Jenn Sit** (0:32)
How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:34)
Or a sweet vanilla?

**Jenn Sit** (0:36)
Smooth caramel maybe?

**Matt Rodbard** (0:37)
Or a white chocolate mocha?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:39)
Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.

**Anthony Sasso** (0:53)
We've always been this place that things branch from us, so we've been lucky in that part for sure. But we've also been the place where people can try concepts that you might not want to try somewhere else because there's definitely an audience for it for sure. And like, there's a creative as hell landscape out here.

**Matt Rodbard** (1:10)
This is TASTE. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.
I spent 20 plus years living in New York City, and about five years ago, I said goodbye to Brooklyn and made the jump up to the Hudson Valley.
There are a lot of towns up where I live, cool towns with interesting restaurants run by passionate chefs, towns with a nice bakery, an above average third wave coffee shop, and you may even find a guy who makes his own vermouth. But if you ask me to pick a single favorite for the food and drink alone, it's Kingston. Part of it is just proximity. It's under a two hour drive from New York City and accessible via bus or train. But it's also that Kingston has quietly transformed into one of the best food cities in the entire state. And it did it without the usual playbook. There hasn't been a single splashy opening covered in New York City media, no single chef everybody's writing about, no big headlines, and very few James Beard Awards, let alone nominations. We've actually had a handful of Kingston's best chefs on this show, but we wanted to give the whole town its own Taste Travels episode. So that's what this is. We covered a lot of ground in one day.
A farmer's market, a lunch counter that feels beamed in from another decade, a roadside legend with a secret hot dog sauce, natural wine, Spanish tapas, and a Chinese American restaurant that goes back nearly a century. Consider this your official summer into fall Hudson Valley trip planning assignment. That is, go to Kingston. Welcome to Taste Travels.

**Jenn Sit** (2:51)
Growing up, I remember the places that we would go to dinner if we went out were a lot of the diners. There's a really great diner scene and culture in the Hudson Valley.

**Matt Rodbard** (3:03)
This is Jenn Sit, a longtime friend of mine and currently the editorial director at Clarkson Potter.
Jenn was born and raised in Kingston and has found her way back there to live full time. We start at the Saturday Farmers Market, a community hub located in the town Stockade neighborhood. How do you describe those restaurants? Like those restaurants that were there in the 90s, that was like establishment places?

**Jenn Sit** (3:25)
That are local? Yeah. I think they're Kingston Staples. Yeah. They're longtime Kingston Staples and they still serve a lot of generations today.

**Matt Rodbard** (3:37)
Yeah.

**Jenn Sit** (3:38)
Hello.
Hey guys. Hey, what's up?

**Matt Rodbard** (3:41)
Yeah, what's up? Definitely. How are you?

**Jenn Sit** (3:44)
Good. How are you doing? Good to see you guys.

**Matt Rodbard** (3:46)
It's not even 10 minutes into our Kingston crawl, and we've already run into some friendly faces, including a previous guest of the show, Ines Lawrence, chef-owner of Ollies and Aliza. After a quick stop and chat, Jenn surveys the current Kingston food and drink scene.

**Jenn Sit** (4:01)
I think what's really cool about Kingston right now is that there are a lot of different layers to the restaurant scene and the culinary scene up here. Like we still have a lot of the old time staples, institutions that made Kingston so special for a long time that people have a lot of like heart and feeling for. And then there's been room for a lot of creative, passionate people to come to Kingston and sort of do their vision of what their restaurant, what their bakery and what their sort of little corner looks like and that's been really, really cool to see.