It's Friday night in Bloomville, New York, population 213. I’m sitting at a communal picnic table in the backyard of an 1860s Italianate house, eating what must be one of the most exquisite wood-fired pizzas west of the Hudson. The crust is sourdough, thin, chewy, and salted in a way that makes me wonder what exactly I’ve been doing wrong with salt all this time, and it’s topped with lemon-marinated fennel, feta cheese, and fresh parsley. It tastes like a garden. A guitarist and drummer are playing pleasant instrumental music in a corner of the yard, while families at other picnic tables clink wine glasses under crisscrossing strings of glowing lights. It seems impossible that a pizza this remarkable was baked in a no-stoplight town. But more to the point, it seems impossible that a spot this rural and remote-feeling should exist three and a half hours by car from my home in New York City.
The restaurant is called Table on Ten, and it’s a café, inn, and something of a hub for the farmers and artists who populate the area, which is Delaware County, just west of the Hudson Valley. New Yorkers like to say that Upstate New York is the new Hamptons, but the towns most often associated with that pronouncement are the ones along the river and the Amtrak line: Cold Spring, Garrison, Rhinebeck, Woodstock, andof course Hudson, which with its strip of antiques stores and upscale restaurants feels increasingly like a satellite of Brooklyn. In more than one sense, Delaware County is somewhere else.
It’s in the Western Catskills, to the north of the Catskills Forest Preserve, and perhaps because it was never properly part of the Borscht Belt—the chain of Jewish summer resort towns of the 1920s through the 1970s—it still feels like the 19th century. Its villages are smalland spread out, and there’s no clear center. These virtues, along with low real estate prices, have in recent years attracted New Yorkers of a certain stripe and, over time, made permanent residents of them. This was the case with the couple behind Table on Ten, Inez Valk-Kempthorne and Justus Kempthorne, a former model and woodworker, respectively, who first visited Delaware County in the mid-aughtsand by 2010 had relocated from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“We had a small community of friends who decided to buy inexpensive land here and build cabins,” Inez says. “That’s how we got up here. And at some point it was just kind of our turn.” Once their own cabin was built, Inez says, “the question came up: What are we going todo next?” The answer for them, and for an increasing number of other city transplants, was to open a business. And it’s this growing crop of outposts—mainly in the towns of Bovina, Andes, and Delhi, which are about ten miles from one another—that is turning this once off-the-gridbucolic corner of the Catskills into an on-the-grid bucolic destination.
To get here you turn off I-87 near Kingston and head west on Route 28, but rather than stop in Woodstock, you keep going, past Phoenicia and Big Indian to Belleayre Mountain, where the valley opens onto rolling meadows and the real farmland starts. On my trip up, the first super moon of the year was rising behind the mountains, casting a gold light on the green fields and deciduous trees below. Somewhere near the county line, the temperature began to drop, and by the time I reached Highway 10, from which Table on Ten takes its name, the air was a full ten degrees cooler than it had been an hour before. If you didn’t know what to look for, you might breeze right by the inn and perhaps through all of Bloomville without knowing you’d missed anything. This is true of many of the spots worth seeking out in Delaware County, making a long weekend here feel a bit like a scavenger hunt.
