At the new West Village market and cafe H. Valley, you can stop in for a BEC for breakfast, leave with a rib-eye rubbed with confit garlic, grab mac and cheese for your kid, pick up dog food made with Hudson Valley trout, and buy a birthday card made from
invasive plants.
H. Valley fully opens today, Wednesday, September 23, at 569 Hudson Street, at West 11th Street, from chef Austin Johnson and Eytan Sugarman’s Hudson Street Hospitality (behind Made in New York Pizza and White Horse Tavern). Johnson, formerly the executive chef of Tribeca’s formerly Michelin-starred One White Street and its next-door sibling Rigor Hill Market, has traded tasting menus and late nights for a 2,500-square-foot market built around prepared food, local provisions, and an expanded version of the high-end grocery model he developed at Rigor Hill.
H. Valley joins a wave of fancy markets that includes the Erewhon-leaning Happier Grocery, the photogenic Meadow Lane in Tribeca, and the upcoming First Bloom expansion from Alison Roman in Brooklyn Heights. These newer markets extend well beyond groceries, with sundries, smoothies, and events like knitting workshops and podcast recording sessions. H. Valley, though, is particularly restaurant-driven. Johnson is stocking the refrigerators and freezers with prepared dinners, ready-to-cook proteins, sauces, pastas, breads, pastries, and other foods built around the same kind of sourcing and technique he used in fine dining. Expect to pay well more than at the average corner grocer.
H. Valley was designed with input from Johnson’s family: Johnson’s wife, Amanda Reilly, shaped the interiors, cherry-picked the merchandise, and sourced antiques from around the Northeast. His daughter inspired the family-friendly approach. Johnson emphasized hours that allow him to wrap up at 8:30 p.m. or so rather than work the late nights of tasting-menu service.
Mornings at H. Valley are built around coffee, pastries and breads from head baker Grayson Claes. It’ll also have bacon, egg, and cheese on a biscuit and, on weekends, the omelet bar that started at Rigor Hill.
For lunch, Johnson plans to serve three hot and three cold sandwiches, including a turkey with honey mustard, pickled apple slaw, and goat cheese on honey-oat sourdough.
In addition to refrigerators and freezers offering salads, dairy, sauces, dips, raw proteins, and prepared dinners, there’s the children’s fridge filled with items to heat up: mac and cheese, baked fish sticks, chicken Parm cutlets, spaghetti with red sauce, baked turkey meatballs, mashed potatoes and gravy, and peas and carrots. And because this is the West Village, the dogs have not been forgotten: H. Valley is making its own dog food, named Dion’s Diet, using ingredients like Hudson Valley trout, chicken, duck, and vegetables.
“The dogs are customers, too,” Johnson says.
Eventually, H. Valley will host private dinners, visiting chefs, pop-ups, and other events, with a larger dining program planned for later this year. For Johnson, that flexibility seems to be part of the appeal. He can bring in a chef friend from Europe for a weekend or throw a 40-person dinner, but he doesn’t have to fill a tasting-menu dining room every night. For now, it’s open Wednesday 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. and offers limited cafe seating.
