CAFE MUTTON

Welcome to the country's most uncompromising restaurant

- Elazar Sontag

 Shaina Loew-Banayan should have made the bologna last night. Alas, there was no time in the rush of the once-weekly dinner service, as plates of jellied pork terrine and fingers of buttery shortbread next to hunks of soft goat cheese landed on each table. So at 7:30 a.m. on a scorching Saturday in May, before the brunch rush and while most of the small riverside town of Hudson, New York, is still asleep, Shaina is blending beef.

This is how mornings often begin at Cafe Mutton, a warm cottagelike restaurant that has proven, on each of my many visits, to be one of the country's most delightful, unpredictable, and consistently delicious new restaurants.

By 8:30 a.m. Liz Malatesta and Feather Krein, the restaurant's two other cooks, are baking orange muffins and whisking crepe batter. Bettina Loew-Banayan, Shaina's wife and the smiling face that greets you at the register, stacks vintage china plates and polishes silver. Bologna now setting in the fridge, Shaina has moved on to grinding and stuffing sausages that will be served with crisp medallions of potato and onion, all drenched in the silkiest hollandaise.

Shaina's confidence is mesmerizing as they perform the acrobatic feat of stabilizing a small sausage stuffer and twisting the crank with one hand while using the other to guide the stuffing into a long sheath of casing. It's hard to imagine Shaina working anywhere other than this narrow kitchen, boiling bologna and turning chunks of meat into sausages so supple and juicy that the first time I tasted one I turned to my partner totally speechless, mouth agape. On one wall there's a faded photograph of the chef's great-grandfather and assorted distant relatives from Hungary.