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Darren Waterston, pouring wine, co-owns the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook and two of its component businesses including The Aviary restaurant.

Hudson Valley trout tartare at The Aviary restaurant in the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook is served with rice crackers that are meant to be broken and used as scoops.

A painting  at The Aviary, part of the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook, is by co-owner Darren Waterston. 

The bar at The Aviary, part of the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook.

Charred beans at The Aviary, part of the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook, are decorated with pickled radish and mushroom confit blended to a thin cream with vegan mayo, garlic, shallots, pickled chile and ginger.

Cocktails at The Aviary, part of the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook, include The Aviary Manhattan, left, featuring turmeric shrub made by the 2 Note parfumerie, also at the Knitting Mill; and Red Sand, based in reposado tequila.

The entrance to The Aviary is through the side of the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook.

Rendang, a popular Indonesian meat stew, is serve as a mushroom-based version at The Aviary in the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook.

Ornamental wooden panels from a stately Hudson Valley home have been repurposed as partitions for private nooks at The Nest, the name of the cocktail lounge of The Aviary restaurant at the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook.

Darren Waterston, co-owner of the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook, is completing a wall mural in The Nest, the name of the cocktail lounge of The Aviary restaurant at the Knitting Mill.

Pork shoulder at The Aviary at the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook, is braised in coconut milk and made with a yellow-tomato sauce.

Pineapple cake at The Aviary restaurant in the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook sits in a pool of palm-sugar butterscotch and is topped by tangy whipped creme fraiche.

Sslagroom pudding at The Aviary, in the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook, is a cross between creme brulee and flan. 

Sorbet of damson plums at The Aviary restaurant in the Knitting Mill complex in Kinderhook.

Located on the Village Green in Kinderhook, the Knitting Mill complex takes its name from a textiles factory that opened there in the 1870s. Over the past couple of years it has been renovated to include a cafe, The Aviary restaurant, an art gallery, forthcoming bookstore and three retails shops, for perfume and cosmetics, wine and spirits, and boutique home items.

You might think, in reviewing The Aviary, the latest addition to open in the much-covered Kinderhook Knitting Mill in Kinderhook, I’d lead with the transformation of the 19th-century textile mill into a multi-occupancy food and arts emporium. Or wax lyrical over dishes from chef Hannah Wong’s seasonally crafted menu, which has already outgrown the confines of its original Dutch-Indonesian theme. The sibling cafe Morningbird has already attracted a loyal following, and other entities, like Kinderhook Bottle Shop and the parfumerie 2 Note, the latter relocated from Hudson, are already rounding out the complex's spaces, along with an upstairs gallery called September. 

Or I might start with the slightly obscured side entrance into The Aviary's cocktail lounge, The Nest, where ornamental wooden panels from a stately Hudson Valley home have new life as partitions for two private nooks. It is an intimate room where artist/co-owner Darren Waterston is softly finishing a full-length mural in woodland tones and flashes from bright birds, like a foggy Hudson Valley walk shot with a cardinal or two. I could also talk of the wall sconces behind thick optical glass or the marble bar atop a base of dark wood carved like the chunks of a Yorkie chocolate bar. 

But my first read is of an easy camaraderie across Knitting Mill operations. With a crowd hovering in The Aviary’s open bar space like guests in a gallery, we’re ushered to our seats, where Waterston radiates enthusiasm tableside, pointing out the finer points of the building including a future entrance and under-construction mezzanine with a bird's-eye view. Darcy Doniger, one half of  2 Note, is running plates to and from the kitchen and talking about their housemade spice shrubs, inspired by musical chords, that feature in  bar manager Sarah Jane McLoughlin’s bespoke cocktails. Later, we learn that a local surgeon is in the kitchen washing pots, and Wong has three chef friends from Manhattan helping out on the pass. With the July closure of The Kitchen Table (formerly New World Bistro Bar) in Albany, bartender McLoughlin and Nick Ferrandino are familiar faces at the bar. When one door closes, another door opens, and it happens to be in Kinderhook right now.

The airy dining room is very much part of the meal, along with some hand-thrown plates borrowed last minute from the owners’ own collection. Metal struts frame cavernous heights while walls shushed in pale Venetian plaster (by a trio of Italians brought in for the job) lend the minimalist appeal of a stark gallery, all the better to frame the large-scale green-blue painting by Waterston against the heads of fiercely colored dahlias grown in his Kinderhook garden and dotting tables like pompoms flecked in yellow and red paint. 

The Aviary's co-owner, Yen Ngo, recruited Wong from her role at Ngo’s Vietnamese restaurant in Manhattan, Van Da, during the pandemic, after Wong stepped away from plans to open her own eatery. If the decision to move upstate didn’t come quickly, such access to local farms cemented her interest in food security, forming relationships with farmers and viewing food as a vehicle for community building. With Kinderhook’s Dutch heritage popping up in elements like slagroom pudding, a delicate cross between creme brulee and flan, and a lacy kletskoppen Dutch cookie, the Hudson Valley produce has become a springboard against which her house-pickled chiles, rotating pestos and Southeast Asian flavors shine in pops of acid and heat. 

It’s why damson plums are preserved in the very simplest of sorbets, extending their season and tasting of iced prune juice, as soothing at dinner’s end as an aperitif. It’s why rendang, the ceremonial Indonesian meat stew, has stayed steady on the menu since a July soft opening, its meaty oyster mushrooms braised in coconut milk with chile, garlic, turmeric and galangal spices until caramelized. Served over duck-fat nasi goreng, an Indonesian stir-fried rice, and scattered with scallion chimichurri, the mound is hidden beneath a canopy of bok choy leaves that must be lifted, delicately, as a little ceremony to complete. 

Speckled dragon tongue and pole beans are given Dan Barber-style centrality to a meal, simply scorched and plated, but brightly lit with pink pickled radishes and an “umami drizzle” that is mushroom confit blended to a thin cream with vegan mayo, garlic, shallots, pickled chile and ginger — a holdover from Wong’s days at Manhattan’s Gramercy Tavern.  

Her condiments and fermentations power a menu of simple hits: Trout tartare made with local Hudson Valley trout is spiked with pickled garlic scapes and grounded by a puree of earthy beets. On top, two large rice crackers overlap like translucent wings ready to be broken and repurposed as edible spoons. 

Pork shoulder draped in yellow Sungold tomato sauce is overlaid with Thai basil, kale and thin, serrated black mint leaves that are pounded to a paste with citrus and salt as Peruvian huacatay. Marinated in coconut milk, the juicy pork slabs hide among the bronzed curves of roast summer squash. 

Service neither rushes nor lags, offering a smart pace with time to sip cocktails between plates. I’m thrilled to find escubac among gin and tonic options. Escubac exists confidently as a standalone botanical spirit, lit with citrus and spice and light yellow in color from saffron, but here it’s paired with gin, marmalade and star anise in a smashing twist. The Aviary Manhattan is also superb, mixed with a 2 Note turmeric shrub, skewing closer to an Old Fashioned than Manhattan in a rocks glass. The vodka-based Darlyn Rose (Darlyn is a contraction of the 2 Note owners’ names) is refreshing but shy, with the rose and pink peppercorn washed out by club soda and strawberry, and the Red Sand delivers the herbaceousness of red pepper but needs spice heat to light the reposado tequila fuse.

I’ve left the most decadent for last: Wong challenged The Aviary’s pastry chef, Karly Kuffler, the hands behind Morningbird’s delectable mochi doughnuts and Dutch pastries, to riff on her sticky toffee date pudding from the Wyfe Hotel. The result is a sticky pineapple cake, both tropical and moist as the gilded comfort dessert of autumn, marooned in a pool of palm-sugar butterscotch and offset by the sour tang of whipped creme fraiche. 

Dinner is a mini theater of small plates touched by acidity, funk and heat, and textures in playful contrasts for a nod, perhaps, to their importance in Chinese cuisine. If we had anticipated some great seriousness in The Aviary’s formality, the experience is instead welcoming and casual, with warmth in the service, and a surprisingly affordable price point, including an optional $50 three-course prix fixe. 

Award-winning food and drinks writer and longtime TU dining critic, Susie Davidson Powell, has covered the upstate dining scene for a decade. She writes weekly reviews, a monthly cocktail column and the biweekly e-newsletter The Food Life. Susie has received national awards for food criticism from the Society of Features Journalism and served as a 2020 James Beard Awards judge for New York state. You can reach her at thefoodlifeTU@gmail.com and follow her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefoodlife.co