Review: Take a country drive to dinner at car-themed Shadow 66

The team behind Le Gamin, the all-day French cafe and bar a vin in Hudson, has jumped into the quietly growing Ghent-to-Kinderhook dining scene with Shadow 66, a vehicle-themed French restaurant in the former Red Barn diner on Old Post Road in Ghent. It’s a unique operation with salvaged pedestrian walk signs and traffic lights on the outside, a fun-house mirror and old phone booth at the entrance, the pneumatic Michelin man gracing both menu and walls and a collection of illuminated signs from Castrol Oil to the Citroen logo. Most remarkable of all are two vintage cars, one a Citroen, parked past the small bar in the center of the dining room, as though you’re somehow dining in someone’s French countryside garage. 

I imagined Shadow 66 must be named after the Citroen CX, the 1975 European car of the year, with a suspension so cushy it was licensed by Rolls-Royce for the Silver Shadow, but it turns out it is more literal than that. French chef-owner Patrick Jehanno and his wife, Astrid, embarked on a motorcycle trip on the famed U.S. Route 66, and they view Old Post Road as being in the shadow of New York Route 66 to the east in Columbia County. As a restaurant it is unapologetically French and a remarkable ode to all things Citroen, a passion project completed over three years after Jehanno and fellow car enthusiast and business partner Robert Golden purchased the diner.  

Read the full article here