still a favorite. i'll start off with the good about terrapin: it is the one restaurant, out of many to choose from, that has quite simply transformed rhinebeck. it's hard to believe thatrhinebeckonce was a sleepy little town with an iga. a liquor store, and a number of restaurants you could count on one hand; some great (le petit bistro), some . . . good for the money (foster's). terrapin changed all that. their food has always been tasty, the price point not too high, plus you can't eat on a better property than a sleekly-decorated renovated church within walking distance of all the shops with ample outdoor dining right on the street.
i recently popped into the bistro side for a late sunday lunch with a friend and it was just as we'd left it the last time we were there: many patrons enjoying themselves (despite it being ~4 pm), servers bustling, line cooks frying up endless stacks of french fries in the partly visible kitchen. it's a great scene. but something had been nagging me the last few times i'd eaten there, and my friend nailed it on the head: "i think terrapin's getting a bit too big for its britches."
how? well, for one, the formerly manageable menu now seems bloated, not only in terms of page count but the strange annotations next to the menu items (how many times have i looked at "mwf," which means "can be made wheat free," and thought it means "we only serve this monday/wednesday/friday"?). the quantity of offerings takes a while to get through, awkward when your server comes by--for the third time--to ask if you've decided. and i'm just talking about the bistro here, which is supposed to offer fewer items than the dining room at a lower price point. the wine and beer menu has expanded just as much, and i've noticed that the beer prices (which is what i've visited terrapin the most for--at least before the arrival of grand cru down the street) have, along with the food prices, gone up steadily over the last year or two.
that being said, terrapin's not going anywhere, and ultimately i'm glad for that. while i've griped about their seemingly endless menu, that makes it a great place to eat *because* there is so much choice. the restaurant's dedication to "locavorism," albeit a bit beaten-to-death sometimes, continues to rival any area farm-to-table restaurant. josh kroner is the only head chef i can actually identify by name in a pretty big radius, which undoubtedly says something about his good culinary reputation as much as terrapin's self-promotion of him. it's also a great place to go late-night (meaning an hour that would still represent the older local population, i.e. not 3 am; and mainly because most places have already closed their doors).
so, if you're a long-time local like me who's had a chance to see howrhinebeckhas changed--for the better and/or worse--then maybe you'll understand the teeny bit of cynicism i have for terrapin. but if you're reading this and trying to decide if this is the next place you should have a drink or a meal, then: yes. go. terrapin remains one of the many reasons i will never stop hanging out in rhinebeck.