Editorial
Front Page - Friday, August 6, 2010
I Swear ...
Red Hook Inn no disappointment
Vic Fleming
RED HOOK, N.Y. – Pat’s courtesy and conscientiousness were infectiously pleasing. Nabil’s meals were outstanding. The ambience in the 189 year-old physical plant was pleasant and relaxing. The hospitality seemed almost southern!
What more, really, can one ask for from innkeepers in a foreign land, such as upstate New York’s Dutchess County? Which is where Susan and I found ourselves on a recent sojourn. We came away from a weekend of R&R at a B&B known officially as The Red Hook Country Inn perfectly comfortable with recommending it to anyone who might be tooling around the area.
We drove over from Jamaica, Vt., where we’d been with some old friends from college days, on a Friday afternoon, arriving around 6:30 p.m.. We’d been able to order our dinner online earlier in the day, so Nabil, Pat’s husband and business partner in TRHCI knew what he was cooking for us. We’d agreed to a 7:15 dinner time, so we had time to unpack the car and change into the clothes that we were to wear to an event later in the evening.?
All I knew was that Susan had chosen for us the steak offering over the seafood offering, because we had had the same seafood entrée the night before. When the meal was over, I was worried that I might not wake up on Saturday morning. For what I found before me on the table, combined with how it tasted, would, without question, be the meal I would order as my last.
The first course was a salad, a very competently assembled assortment of greens with a mild salsa of sorts as a topping and dressed with a vinaigrette that was perfectly in sync with my palate.
The main course was a brilliantly prepared, pink-in-the-middle, filet mignon, with a light gravy over it, roasted potatoes, sweet baby carrots and grilled asparagus spears. (Okay, so it’s a lot of the stuff I prepare myself at home! Get over it: it was a fabulous treat!)
For dessert, there was apple pie, made earlier in the day by Pat, topped with homemade vanilla ice cream, made by Nabil. As each succeeding course arrived, Susan’s commentary about how these were my “very favorite foods in the world” took on more and more of an incredulous tone.
To say that our stay in Dutchess County was a colorful experience would be to stretch a metaphor. We were, after all, in the Blue Danube Room of the Red Hook Inn.
There was an event in a nearby town that we were there for. It was the type of affair? that brings local folk out in search of celebrities. And to which certain media employees are want to flock, hoping for photo ops. The nature of the event was such that some other people with Arkansas connections were in attendance.
One such couple with an Arkansas link consisted of Mary Steenburgen and her husband Ted Danson. Confronted by a New York Times reporter on the street in Rhinebeck (five miles from Red Hook), Danson quipped, “We must be the only celebrities in town.”
By my count, though, there were at least two other movie stars in the vicinity. One of those is better known for his longtime involvement in politics, but he did play a major role in “Wordplay.” But, for purposes of the weekend, he was cast as father of the bride.
The other (also from “Wordplay”)? Well, suffice it to say that by maintaining a low profile, he was able to slip quietly and unobtrusively in and out of a certain B&B in a nearby village.
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at vicfleming@att.net.
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