Pelaccio's bartender Kat Dunn. (Photo: Laetitia Hussain)

Zak Pelaccio’s newest venture differs from most mod-country, locavore eateries these days in one crucial way — it actually is in the country.

In the small upstate city of Hudson, a two-hour ride from Manhattan, the Falstaffian Fatty Crab/’Cue king has converted a former blacksmith shop into a louche temple of locavorism. Named to evoke both the bill of fare and a nearby country lane, and aiming to reap the bounty of the Columbia County landscape, Fish & Game officially opens this week.

Mr. Pelaccio has joined the northward migration to an area popular among artists including Marina Abramovic. Apparently, he is leaving the fat behind in the city. His new cuisine is "less fatty, less heavy," said Mr. Pelaccio, who lives in nearby Old Chatham. "Saturday night was cool; our friend gave us some turnips, which we glazed. We did some asparagus with a poached egg, and a ramp ragu over Vermont shortgrained rice.” (Lest anyone think he’s gone vegan as well as native, Pelaccio’s Twitter feed still features a slaughtered pig; and several chickens were roasting on a spit in the main dining room during a recent preview.)

Zak Pelaccio (Photo: McMullan)

Mr. Pelaccio plans to offer both an à la carte bar menu and a rotating six- or seven-course tasting menu for $65, roughly half the cost of a similar menu downstate: “In the city, this menu would run 120 to 125 bucks. Shopping locally here, we can get the same complexities and product quality at a lower number,” he said.

The cuisine may be less aggressive than at his city outposts, but milk-braised does not suggest milquetoast, neither on the menu nor in the aesthetics. Architect Michael Davis's décor makes a sharp nod to the less-than-spotless history of Hudson, notorious as a center for prostitution and gambling until its rackets were broken up in the early 1950s by Governor Dewey. Velvet-printed hot red wallpaper punches up an otherwise subdued palette of hardwoods, dark gray beadboard, a raw plaster fireplace and copper-studded open kitchen.

Melissa Auf der Maur, the former bass player for Hole and Smashing Pumpkins whose nearby Basilica Industria recently hosted its third annual Ramp Fest, was at a preview last Friday—which started with speciality tequila drinks before meandering through a seven-course tasting menu. Roasted duck with Hokkaide turnips and softshell clams in broth were spelled by pretzel bread with yogurt butter. “Zak’s definitely raising the bar here,” said Ms. Auf der Maur. “It’s the next major step in putting Hudson on the culinary map.”

Times style desk, are you listening? “Hudson has morphed into this cool spot," said painter and weekend homeowner Robert Roane Beard. "There's  a mix of farmers, locals, Manhattan transplants, weekenders, and now hip Brooklynites plus music and movie folks. The restaurant scene has exploded, from crazy-great burgers to very high style.”

Bartender Kat Dunn, a veteran of past Pelaccio ventures, brings the first bespoke drinks (mercifully without handlebar moustaches and bowlers) to Hudson — which H.L. Mencken pegged in a 1948 New Yorker article as the possible Birthplace of the Cocktail. Reviewing various theories about the term’s origin, Mr. Mencken wrote that “It seems much more likely that the cocktail was actually known and esteemed in the Albany region some time before [Antoine] Peychaud shook up his first Sazerac on the lower Mississippi.”

On Friday, Ms. Dunn saluted the city's seamy past with a Tainted Lady (a blood orange margarita “good enough for a monk”), named for a now-defunct Hudson lounge. She also named a blend of champagne, cognac and Crème Yvette the Ménage à Trois.

But it's the green meadows more than the red-light vestiges that have lured Mr. Pelaccio north. "It’s beautiful," said Pelaccio. "I’m walking with my son picking dandelions. Next we’re going to play ping-pong in the barn. That’s why we’re here.”

Illustration by Victor Juhasz.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment New York’s fascination with pork turned into a fascination with pigs. Though similar, the difference between pig and pork is vast. It’s the difference between life and death. Pigs are undead pork. Pork is a former pig.

Nevertheless, in recent years the object of the food scene’s affection has undeniably shifted from post- to pre-mortem. Once we contented ourselves with the worship of pork belly, the Omniscient Meat Xenu, and to ape Roman indulgence with gout-inducing meatopias.

But even in our most fervent bacchanal, the focus was on the animal after he had crossed the threshold from life unto death, from a breathing being to an eaten thing. But these days, mere meat isn’t real enough. Chase it back up to the gates of the abattoir. Undead it. It’s pig we’re after.

Pigs and New York, of course, have had a long and rich history. The New York Police Department was formed in 1845 ... Kidding. I’m kidding. Hogs famously roamed the city’s squalid streets up until the mid-19th century. “Pigs were,” writes Henrick Hartog in his seminal text Pigs and Positivism, “an ordinary part of the American urban landscape.”

Until around 2002, however, pork was not present on the menus of “the right crowd.” The first pork fetishist of the modern era is a matter of some debate. Some say it was David Chang at Momofuku Noodle Bar in Manhattan, others say the honor belongs to Zak Pelaccio at Chickenbone Café in Brooklyn. April Bloomfield certainly had something to do with it. Lady loves a good sow.

Unlike chicken tenders, which have been on menus since time immemorial yet have failed to ignite an ardent passion among foodies, pork in the modern age started a meatwave. Photographs of chefs posing with dead pigs became a meme. Chang did it. So did Bloomfield. Andrew Carmellini draped a pig across his shoulder as he rode a bicycle. Seamus Mullen held his pig, eyes closed sweetly, a little piggie smile fixed in death on its snout. Call it the Abu Ghraib moment of food porn.

For pork, unlike chicken, beef and certainly fish, has developed around it an ineffable sexiness. Eating trotters and nibbling on a crispy pig ear has become a debauch, the a table equivalent of finger-cuffs. There’s a reason Babe was a pig and not, say, turbot.

Two new restaurants illustrate the breadth of this fascination. Swine, a pig-and-wine bar in the West Village; and Pig and Khao, a Thai/Indonesian restaurant in the Lower East Side.

These new pig temples share an aggressively proletarian spirit, even as they charge bourgeois prices. Both also contain some element of word play in their names. Perhaps coincidentally—but I suspect there is a correlation—the quality of each restaurant is directly proportional to the quality of the pun in its moniker. Swine, which is properly written with a minuscule s and majuscule W, is the best in show. Pig and Khao—khao is a Thai for rice and sounds vaguely like English for “cow”—places a distant second.

Swine occupies the old bi-level space in the WestVillage that used to be Ruby Foo’s. (Pan-Asiatics are the latest victims of rampaging pigs.) The insides are all beat-up ersatz dive bar. The plaster has been painstakingly aged by Jason Volenec, who also designed Tertulia, into a scuffed palimpsest of manufactured past. Posters for rock concerts you haven’t been to hang on the wall. Sure, it’s all fake, but what past isn’t mitigated by what we wanted it to be?

John McNulty, who owns the restaurant along with an entertainment lawyer from Oklahoma named Cris Criswell, told me, “I’ve always wanted to have a dive bar with a great wine list.” He finally has his dream.

The word “swine,” he said, does double duty. It connotes a certain uncouthness, and it indicates how seriously the place takes its charcuterie. Another indicator of seriousness is the Berkel meat slicer in the open kitchen downstairs—a slightly quieter retreat from the jauntily chaotic main dining room. “It’s the Ferrari of meat slicers,” Mr. McNulty boasted.

The chef manning the slicer is Phil Conlon, formerly chef de cuisine of nearby Cafe Cluny. This might explain why so delicate a hand is manifest in the cooking, despite the rough milieu. The pork rillettes are tremendously porky without being aggressive. They are served, in an indication of thoughtfulness, with apricot mustard. The pork belly, in which crispness and unguent fat exist in perfect proportion, is accompanied by sweet chili glaze and offset by spicy pickled cabbage, a five-point-palm exploding heart technique of flavor. And the burger—a bone marrow and brisket outlier in a local burger landscape dominated by aged ground beef—proves Mr. Conlon’s touch isn’t confined to swine.

The food, in short, is familiar yet delightful. The service, however, is familiar to the point of impertinent. The first thing the server, a scruffy man with a lip piercing named Steven, said as he approached us—my wife, who was drinking a glass of grenache, one of the four wines on tap; a friend named Karl who drank a Bronx Ale and me, sipping a perfectly round and lightly oaky pinot noir—was “Hey, where’s the nursing convention?”

I was confused, since St. Vincents had closed. Karl thought he was alluding to breast-feeding, the topic of conversation at the moment. (We’re into it.) Only my wife had the wherewithal to realize Steven was obliquely criticizing the rate at which we were drinking. “People grow to like me?” said Steve, with doubt-tinged hopefulness.

As for Pig and Khao, perhaps the less said the better. The chef there, Leah Cohen, the former Top Chef contestant who partnered with the Fatty Crew, has become so enamored by the idea of extreme pig preparation she’s forgotten to make good food. Like Euripides’s Agave, who in her Dionysian derangement slaughters her own son, Pentheus, Ms. Cohen is so deranged with idea of pig slaughter, she winds up doing a real hatchet job on what she purports to love most.

The menu boasts pig face, which arrives sizzling with liver and a waiter bearing an egg. The egg, cracked upon a skillet tablesideand mixed in, is the best part. The menu also boasts grilled pig jowls, small inedible discs of pure gelatinous fat pared with overly salty chicharon and watermelon. And the pièce de résistance is a crispy pata, chunks of pork leg fried so excessively they could be just about anything—Werner Herzog’s shoe, deadstock Ho-Hos, tubes of lip balm—and it would taste the same. There are other similarly ill-considered items on the menu. Quail adobo, for instance, in which the bone-to-flesh ratio is so high as to render the labor-to-enjoyment ratio infinitesimal.

The error isn’t so much in the execution here, or the unbalanced flavor profiles, but in the perverted vision of what and why we serve pig.

I suspect that the pork-to-pig movement was a well-founded reaction against both commodity meat and fussy dining that resulted in a renewed focus on the whole hog (as opposed to endless plastic-wrapped tenderloins). Initially, it was couched in the language of sustainable farming and championed by chefs like Fergus Henderson at London’s St. John. But at a certain hazy point, this laudable aim began to mutate into an unseemly fascination with offal and off-cuts, couched in the language of machismo.

First there were The Spotted Pig and Momofuku. Then there were Traif and Fette Sau. Then Swine. Pig and Khao is the end game, the reductio ad absurdum. The object of macho disregard was once the pork, but now it’s the pig—as if being cavalier about the life of a pig is somehow honoring the animal’s spirit.

I eagerly await the arrival of boutique slaughterhouses, where discerning locavores can spend a Friday night trying their hand at hacking through the carotid arteries of pasture-raised piglets. They’ll let the animals bleed out all over their Alden boots and pretty No.6 clogs, then repair to the dining room to devour their handiwork, high-fiving and smugly tweeting: #Squeal

Zak Pelaccio’s Williamsburg hotspot Fatty ‘Cue opened its West Village outpost last month, and, now, Bedford Cheese Shop—probably Brooklyn’s most noted cheese monger—has signed a 15-year lease at 67 Irving Place.

Besides grabbing 5,000 square feet of high-end retail space in Gramercy Park near Mario Batali’s Bar Jamon and historic Pete’s Tavern, the cheese purveyor’s landlord has also agreed to modify the space to make it more Williamsburg-y.

“The doors and façade will be changed. We’ll make it more suitable to Williamsburg clients,” said George Constantin, Principal at Heritage Realty Services, the operator of 67 Irving Place.

The landlord is a high net-worth European family, which owns the building through a corporation in the Netherlands, said Mr. Constantin.

The boutique cheese purveyor, which currently operates at 229 Bedford Avenue, will pay $240,000 in annual rent, or about $80 per square foot. They plan to offer cheese classes and charcuterie in addition to lots of fromage at the new location.

The 12-story, 46,000-square-foot Gramercy Park address is home to retail and commercial tenants, and close to the Union Square subway station.

Al Lawrence of Heritage Realty Services represented the landlord, Puble N.V., and David Chaiken of Sunburst Advisors represented the tenant.

A correspondent to foodie blog Eater is reporting that Zak Pelaccio is opening up a new restaurant at the top of a building at the southwest corner of 27th Street and Fifth Avenue. Most of the 22,000 square feet is said to be a lounge, with a corner mapped out as a restaurant and dim sum carts trolling around for customers throughout.

Eater categorizes it as Flatiron--which is a whole other issue. (We seem to remember the Times trying to dub this area, which is neither Gramercy Park nor, probably, Flatiron, nor Murray hill, "Nomad," a roughed-up "North of Madison Square." We don't care to look it up.)

At any rate, another place to spend an expense account in this newly fashionable southeastern edge of what we always had previously thought of as the Wigs-Hats-Bags district ("Al Por Mayor!"), but which probably now can't be called that.

- Tom McGeveran