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The Mexican Restaurant Hidden in a Barn on a Rural New York Farm

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A restored dairy barn on a Catskills back road hides one of upstate New York’s most unlikely dinner reservations.

Greenane Farms sits on County Highway 10 in Meridale, part of the town of Meredith, where Patrick Rider and his wife, Thanya Rider (Ledezma), run a working farm and an authentic Mexican restaurant out of the same converted barn. Patrick’s family has worked this land for eight generations; Thanya grew up in Mexico City. Together they built an operation where nearly everything on the plate — the pork, the beef, the produce — was raised or grown a few hundred feet from the dining table.

• Patrick Rider bought raw land in 2003 and built it into a farm raising pastured Angus cattle, heritage pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, quail, and turkeys.
• Over a dozen extended family members work the operation, covering livestock, the kitchen, and table service.
• Signature dishes include a sizzling Jalisco-style “volcano” molcajete with house-made guajillo chorizo and a two-day mole made from more than 30 ingredients served over roasted Cornish hen.

From Raw Pasture to Working Farm

Patrick’s motivation wasn’t nostalgia for farm life — it was a rejection of industrial food. He wanted clean, traceable meat for his own family, so starting in 2003 he turned bare Catskills acreage into pasture for Angus cattle, heritage-breed pigs, sheep, and goats, plus flocks of chickens, quail, and turkeys. Seasonal vegetables followed. What began as a household food-security project scaled into a full farm capable of supplying a restaurant kitchen almost entirely on its own.

Beyond the pastures, the farm now functions as a small vertically integrated food business — livestock raised, slaughtered, and cooked within the same family enterprise, a structure closer in spirit to small-scale permaculture operations than to a typical restaurant supply chain.

A Mexico City Kitchen in Dairy Country

Thanya Rider brought recipes from Mexico City, Hidalgo, and Baja into a barn surrounded by dairy farms, and the menu leans hard into that regional specificity rather than generic Tex-Mex fare. The molcajete arrives sizzling in volcanic stone, loaded with guajillo chorizo, cactus, and queso blanco in salsa verde. The mole — a two-day process built from over 30 ingredients — gets poured over roasted Cornish hen. Scratch-made empanadas, tamales, and enchiladas round out a menu built entirely around family recipes rather than restaurant-trend dishes.

Nearly every meat and vegetable on the menu is raised or grown on-site — the only imports are things the Catskills simply can’t produce, like avocados, limes, and cactus.

That sourcing model extends to produce as well, with fresh seasonal vegetables grown alongside the livestock — the same logic behind guides on growing your own produce close to the kitchen, just scaled up to feed a full dining room.

A Family Operation, Table to Barn

More than a dozen extended family members keep Greenane Farms running, moving between feeding livestock, working the kitchen, and serving tables — there’s no separation between the people raising the animals and the people plating the food. That structure is part of why the restaurant reads as authentic rather than themed: the recipes came from Thanya’s family in Mexico, and the ingredients came from Patrick’s family land, with the same relatives handling both ends.

A Destination in the Middle of Nowhere

Despite sitting on a rural highway in the middle of Catskills dairy country, the barn restaurant has become a genuine destination, pulling in diners willing to drive multiple hours for a meal. Munchies featured the farm in its “Word of Mouth” series in January 2020, putting a spotlight on an operation that had built its reputation almost entirely by word of mouth among people willing to make the drive to Meredith.

There’s no walk-in crowd out here — the nearest town of any size is well down the road, and the barn isn’t marked for passing traffic. Every table filled at Greenane Farms is someone who already knew what they were driving toward, which is exactly the kind of reputation a two-day mole recipe and eight generations on the same land tend to build.