The Rhythm Is Gonna Get You

At Lil’ Deb’s Oasis and Casa Susanna, amazing meals make their own sweet

(Latin) music. | By Hal

Rubenstein

I’m really a happily garrulous, agreeably “C’mon, let’s just do it” kind of guy, but I’m starting to feel like The Mountains’ version of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons Last issue, your favorite magazine chose to do an edition all about love and friendship.

So, what do I write? That I don’t like eating out with a lot of people all at the same table. This month, the publication’s big theme is music. How can you hate music? It’s more bizarre than gagging on mountain air, refusing Joel Robuchon’s butter drenched mashed potatoes or putting on Janis Ian albums for laughs. Except I regard eating in a room dominated by a resident DJ, or even a thumb drive, deliberately crafted to take me on a musical “journey” to enhance my victual delight is akin to energy theft, as incompatible as me chomping on an everything bagel heavily laden with lox, carp and capers while sitting third row center at the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

I offer eternal props to restaurateur Keith McNally for first promoting the pre-Buddha Bar, R&B and TSOP, infused reel-to-reel tapes that he’d play at faintly discernible 25dB levels at his seminal spaces including The Odeon and Cafe Luxembourg which would instigate just enough low-level frisson to eradicate silence and trigger intimate conversation. You couldn’t really hear the song—if you could, you must have been one helluva lousy date—but that rhythmic undercurrent subtly jumpstarted the energy so that conversation was what dominated the room. McNally should’ve taken out a patent on this now ubiquitous technique and then he wouldn’t have to suffer shlepping back-and-forth to his hand-over-fist busy new Pastis in Miami. McNally dining outside under the Miami sun is as incongruous as me tearing into a porterhouse at The Blue Note.

What happens when stars align, and you come upon a spot—a restaurant, mind you— whose ambiance ebbs and flows with a rhythm all its own. It doesn’t announce it, or hand you a tambourine upon arrival so you can join in an upcoming sing-along (check, please!). And yet you can sense instantly by how everyone who works there, from Carla, the greeter/manager who waves hi from across the room to the server stealthily sliding effortlessly through a bar throng with a glistening lacquered mound of fried plantains, that all in residence have adopted the same languid but focused pace. What’s more, you can immediately tell who the regular customers are—and there are a lot of them—because they’ve all adopted the same sultry sway. No one’s playing an instrument. Maybe there’s actual music on. I don’t even remember, and I’ve been there a dozen times. But Lil’ Deb’s Oasis is pure jazz.

Deb’s completely original alchemy starts with a menu so singular and virtually incapable of duplication because it’s a Rorschach of the staff, unequal parts South American, Caribbean, Southern, macrobiotic, gluten free, and, hey, what about this? The staff is both visually distinct yet interchangeable (will explain later because it’s meant as high praise), all set loose in a room that looks like someone had such a really good day at the kitsch section of the Elephant Trunk Flea Market then had time to stop for some low wattage tree lights from a Walmart holiday closeout, all of which hovers under a rare Brigadoonian cloud that insists that everyone here’s going to get happy, satiated, drunk, fed to the gills or hopefully, all of the above. If Carmen Miranda and Busby Berkeley were to come back from cinema’s beyond to update The Gang’s All Here, they’d have to restage it at Lil’ Deb’s Oasis if only because the joint’s even queerer than I am, which has no bearing on what you order, just how you behave. So, here’s a small directive. This is probably the most joyful and musical restaurant for miles, and I don’t know if anyone there can even carry a tune.

Because all dishes are served family style, don’t even try to make this a group effort. Instead, choose one of you to be the ‘designated driver’ who’ll work with your savvy server to coordinate a family style meal plan. The staff ain’t there to oversell you, but then there isn’t one item on the menu I wouldn’t recommend. Sorry if that sounds like a cop out but I think part of the fun of Deb’s is being surprised by how deliciously satisfying and surprising the ensuing parade of lentil dosa, scallops in parsnip purée, octopus tambala, passion fruit marinated shrimp, vegetarian empanadas, glazed plantains and provided they have one big enough to satisfy the whole table (their one flaw in portion control), fried porgy in ginger vinaigrette can be.

Earlier I mentioned that the staff was interchangeable. The comment doesn’t have any bearing on their individual personalities, but rather that it seems as if everyone on the floor seems capable of taking over cooking, bartending, dish washing, birthday tributes, troubleshooting or spirit lifting at any moment without a beat drop. If we could only create a queer, nonbinary front this united on a national scale, we could happily scare Lauren

Boebert into never eating anywhere but at a McDonald’s ever again.

Could anything make dining at Lil’ Deb’s any better? Yup. Two things, actually. First, walk in with a smile on your face that says you’re as happy to see them as they are to serve you. Second, regardless of the extensive and impressive roster of cocktails and libations available at the spot on the menu, immediately order a massive triangular pitcher of their spicy tequila cocktail called Garden Orgy. Blissful delirium has never had an easier or faster time getting through a straw. Oh, you’ll be ordering a second pitcher. I’m just not pushing it because if you start singing, and you don’t have a designated driver, there are currently bills stalled in Congress that’ll get voted on before you ever find an Uber to come to Hudson.

LIL’ DEB’S OASIS

747 Columbia Street

Hudson 12534

Open: Thurs – Sunday 5-10pm

518.828.4307

Reservations: Resy

Casa Susanna

Yes, there’s music playing at Casa Susanna though Chef Efrén Hernández doesn’t allow any melodies running through his kitchen. It clouds his thinking. And from the look and taste of the results of his creative process, he has a lot going on, and a lot that’s deservedly being noticed. I admit to arriving at Susanna with a positive bias, since Hernández transformed a hastily conceived dining room at the Riverton Lodge in Hudson and turned it into one of the town’s most enviable dining destinations. In fact, if Riverton served nothing but Hernández’s sourdough bread and the elixir from its Merlinworthy Frozen Negroni machine (Santa, I know it’s early, but are you listening?) I’d still be a regular.

Hernández earned a solid reputation at Riverton for pairing local produce in unexpected ways, including pears and foie gras, chanterelles and blueberry mostarda and squid ink cavatelli with red crab. But for his new endeavor, located in Leeds, NY within a handsomely and playfully restored