KINGSTON >> PAKT Restaurant at 608 Broadway brings a bit of southern flavor to a corner space right across from the Ulster Peforming Arts Center.
On a weekday afternoon co-owner Niels Nielsen, known for DUO Bistro at the corner of Wall and Fair streets, was in the kitchen, while his business partner Eryn Stutts was working the eatery’s lunch counter space.
Nielsen said after being involved with a lot other restaurants in the area, he decided the time was right to open a place in Midtown.
“There are significant signs of growth in activity in the near future,” he said. “Midtown was in a slumber, and it’s gradually waking up.”
VIDEO: PAKT Restaurant brings Southern flavor to Broadway in Kingston.
He said he’s not afraid to try new things, noting how a decision to gamble on offering brunch at DUO on Sunday when most places Uptown are closed, paid off.
Since PAKT opened in mid January, it’s catered to mostly a brunch and lunch crowd, with weekend brunches being some of the busiest times, he said.
He said the restaurant will push into dinner once he gets a liquor license, adding that the place was widely popular when he opened on show nights at UPAC.
Nielsen said Southern cuisine was perfect for this space because it isn’t so narrowly defined that it scares potential diners away.
“And no one else was really doing it,” he said. “I had done a little bit of it on the Frogmore menu and it seems like people really responded to it.”
“But we didn’t really want to duplicate that menu,” he added.
He pointed out most of the other restaurants on Broadway offer pizza, Italian or Latin American food.
A Maryland native, he said he was looking for different influences for PAKT.
“Wherever I go, I try to bring a whole new menu,” he said.
He said people are taking a fresh look and Southern food.
“Southern has been redeveloped, they’ve been doing farm-to-table forever,” he said. “They just call it sensible cooking.”
“It’s just starting to waft. It’s way up here,” he said.
While a large majority of his ingredients, including meat and produce, come from local farms, he said he still goes south for his country ham.
“We order country ham from some of the best ham producers in the country,” he said.
He added a country ham recently beat out world-renowned hams from Spain in tastings.
While he admitted they are quite salty, he said these hams feature other flavor nuances, with some being smokier than others.
“These are not Hormel cured hams,” he said.
On top of serving as entrees, the staff finds uses for other parts of the hams, like using the bones in broth.
Another Southern staple in the menu is peaches.
As they created their menu, they were working on putting together a signature dressing with a “Southern imprint, he said.
Eventually they settled on peaches, he said.
That decision later led to peach appearing elsewhere on the menu in a peach habanero glaze and in a barbeque sauce.
In keeping with a mission of having the widest appeal possible, he said he offers a range of gluten free, vegetarian and vegan options that are not an afterthought.
“Our skillets are a vehicle for all of that,” he said. “They have a vegan base,” he said, adding that vegetarians can add even more meat-free options.
Gluten-free options include the cornmeal pancakes and the breakfast of champions, which features two eggs, two meats, hash browns and a cornmeal pancake.
Other diners opt for his burgers made with grass-fed beef, he said.
One of the most popular burgers is the Jethro Burger, which features habanero bacon, fried green tomato and pimento cheese on a ciabatta bun, He added
“It’s getting recognized,” he said.
PAKT’s offerings are served up in a relaxed casual atmosphere he described as a mix between a diner and cafe.
The dining room features tin ceilings, a lunch counter space and another counter that faces a large storefront window that looks out onto Broadway.
Antiques abound including an old farmhouse sink that sits in the back of the dining area.
The salt and pepper shakers are shaped like cats and dogs, and likenesses of bulldogs abound honoring Nielsen’s two bulldogs.
As for the name PAKT, he said it came from a “stream of consciousness type thing,” that Stutts came up with.
“It’s sort of a play on the word pact, and making a pact with the community, that sort of a thing,” he said. “When you see the logo, it is out of a Mason jar, which is a reoccurring theme.”
“We often serve some of our beverages and some of desserts in Mason jars, which is kind of associated with country kitsch,” he said.
Later this summer PAKT will take part in Smorgasburg Upstate, he said.
Smorgasburg, an outdoor market at the former Hutton Brickyard property at 100 North St. was founded by Jonathan Butler, who created the “Brooklyn Flea” outdoor market in 2008 with Eric Demby. It’s slated to feature dozens of food vendors starting in August.
Stutts who was born in Atlanta and grew up in Ashville, North Carolina, and she said she later lived in Brooklyn for 16 years, Eventually she said she had enough of the city and she decided to move to the Hudson Valley.
She said Kingston reminds her a bit of Asheville. North Carolina,
“I really felt at home in Kingston,” she said. “Of course my mom said, ‘Why don’t you just move back home?'”
She described PAKT as “classy trashy.”
“We want it to feel like grandma’s house, where you grab coffee and read a vintage cookbook,” she said.
She said she’s exciting to see rumblings of revival and growth in Midtown.
But as a former resident of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, she hopes growth in Midtown doesn’t lead to the kind of gentrification in that borough that caused rents to skyrocket and displaced scores of longtime residents.
“It consumed itself,” she said.
Recipe: PAKT’s Sausage Gravy
Ingredients:
2 ounces of butter;
8 ounces of ground sausage;
2 ounces of shallots, minced;
1 ounce of minced garlic;
2 ounces of white flour;
8 ounces of chicken stock;
8 ounces of whole milk;
A pinch each of salt and pepper.
Instructions:
Cook sausage in the butter, then add garlic and shallots and sweat until translucent.
Add the flour and stir.
Add milk and chicken and stock, season with salt and pepper and pour over buttermilk biscuits.
PAKT is located at 608 Broadway, Kingston, and is open Wednesday-Sunday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.. For more information call (845) 331-2400 or visit http://www.pakttogo.com/
This story was amended on June 27, 2016 at 2:48 p.m. to correct the name of Smorgasburg Upstate.
