A partner from Hudson’s Mel the Bakery has joined forces with the Meat Hook to open Hudson Diner, which debuted on Saturday, June 14, starting with dinner: items like straight-ahead affordable cocktails, a wedge salad, and chicken tenders.

It’s a takeover of what had been Grazin’ Diner (717 Warren Street, at Park Place), a staple of Warren Street that had been around for a decade. The Meat Hook owner, Brent Young, and Mel the Bakery partner, Ashley Berman, picked up the location back in January. Just down the street, a couple of blocks away, is Mel, owned by Berman’s life partner, baker Nora Allen, who had relocated the bakery to Hudson by way of Chinatown. It’s attached to a Hudson outpost of the Brooklyn butcher shop, the Meat Hook, with a food program Berman oversees.

Grazin’ Diner was a farm-to-table spot from 2011 to 2024, originally owned by Dan and Susan Gibson and their son Keith. They were also behind Grazin’ Angus Acres, a Ghent farm that supplied the diner’s meats. Dan died recently, and Keith decided to sell the farm and the diner. Young didn’t know any of this when he had reached out to Keith – whose name he knew through his farm contacts – right before the family planned on listing the diner for sale.

“Keith loved that I had agriculture ties to the Hudson Valley,” said Young, about his relationship with upstate farms, “and Ashley had been coming to the Hudson Valley her whole life,” says Young.

“It was the right place, right time,” says Berman. “It came together in a lovely way.”

Before Grazin’, it was a restaurant dating back to the 1940s, called Diamond Street Diner. It was open for years until 2009, when “then attorney general Andrew Cuomo brought criminal charges against the owner of the diner and Stockport town judge James Funk for stealing bail money from a court bank account.”

Berman says she grew up in New Jersey – the country’s diner capital. In her youth she spent a lot of time in Columbia County and “went to all the diners in this area, too,” she says. Young and Berman say they’re longtime friends and have been talking about opening a diner together. In driving by what’s now the Hudson Diner space, they were like, “that’s the one.”

The place is two train cars, so “the bones were there,” says Young of the 60-seat diner, but “she just needed a facelift.” The restaurant is starting with dinner service (Wednesday through Sunday from 5 to 10 p.m.) and will expand to lunch in a couple of months. The goal is to open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, seven days a week.

One of the restaurant’s missions is to be affordable, says Young. They’ve debuted with items like shrimp cocktail ($16), steak tartare ($18), and chopped liver ($14) for starters. Mains include a chopped steak with a peppercorn sauce with peas and onion rings ($25), a half-Greek chicken with tzatziki and salad ($29), and burgers ($18). There’s also a spaghetti pie ($18) on the menu, “which is kind of like spaghetti Parm that’s baked in a pie dish with cheese on top,” one of Berman’s family dishes growing up. The menu lists other diner classics like a triple-decker, a patty melt ($18), and a tuna melt ($18) made on breads that come from Mel the Bakery. Four salads include a Greek salad, a wedge, a Caesar, and mixed greens ($12 to $16).

Berman is making desserts, including a special cake and pie of the day, such as banana cream pie and a chocolate sheet cake with chocolate frosting. There’s also a citrusy Atlantic Beach pie with a Ritz cracker crust. “Since it’s summer we’ll do some fruit pies – blueberry, cherry – and we’ll always keep ice cream on the menu including rainbow sherbet,” she says.

Cocktails like martinis, Manhattans, margaritas, and a Tom Collins are $13.

Young opened the Meat Hook with Ben Turley over 15 years ago; Turley split off to work on his own projects (including the opening of Border Town in Greenpoint this fall). Young has been expanding since last year’s announcement of its Hudson butcher and its Carroll Gardens location near what had been G. Esposito & Sons pork store for 100 years – to help fill a void left by that closure.

James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Baker, Nora Allen, moved Mel the Butcher up north in 2023, at which point Berman, Allen’s partner in life, also became a partner in the bakery. They moved into what had been occupied by Breadfolks, a 3,200 square-foot spot with seating for over 30. The Meat Hook later moved into the additional ground-level space in the building.

This isn’t the first Meat Hook restaurant, with Young and Turley opening what’s now Cozy Royale in Williamsburg. The acquisition was also a revival of the old name of the Italian catering hall for 70 years. Their restaurant launched in 2020 during peak outdoor dining, serving a menu that nodded to Appalachian foodways with items like pepperoni rolls and pierogies. Today, Young’s menu pivots toward the casual tavern-steakhouse route with shrimp cocktail, spicy meatballs, oysters Rockefeller, rigatoni, and burgers.

Before rolling out Cozy Royale, the duo ran the Meat Hook Sandwich Shop, also in Williamsburg, where Young and Berman also worked together. It landed a respectable one-star Pete Wells review from the New York Times. Back then, a one-star wasn’t considered a goose-egg; Wells said the chicken sandwich could “bring your whole day to a dead stop for a few minutes.”

The opening of Hudson Diner will soon be followed by another forthcoming diner in the area: Doves Diner, by food stylist and chef, Lauren Stanek, taking over what was West Taghkanic Diner, just outside of Hudson.

(Disclosure: Eater has a video series with Young.)