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A fine dining establishment is the perfect setting for a date, a break-up, or an a cappella flashmob. Expand your social possibilities with today's Groupon. For $20, get $45 worth of hip American cuisine at Hudson Restaurant & Lounge in Dupont Circle/West End.

Like a Barcalounger draped in velour, Hudson offers home-style comfort rendered in upscale splendor. The restaurant re-imagines the family dining room, with hip pink light, plush seating, and a granite-topped bar. Crisp, professionally dressed servers sport snazzy pink ties, but the comfortable atmosphere welcomes everyone from the casually dressed to the club ready. With options for lunch, afternoon meals, dinner, late night, and brunches, Hudson’s menu updates familiar American classics with contemporary gourmet flourishes, like an Oldsmobile with an iPod jack.

For a mom-and-apple-pie dinner (possibly followed by actual apple pie, or apple butterscotch tart, $7), fill your gullet with the crispy buttermilk-fried chicken ($20). It comes with creamy whipped potatoes, a country-style buttermilk biscuit, honey, and pan gravy. Recommended: light some firecrackers to distract your date while you lick the plate. Real American families, of course, grow their children on beef. Hudson honors that tradition with a red-blooded slab of flavor named Angus. Hudson’s New York strip steak ($33) comes from 100% Meyer Farms Angus beef, making ravenous carnivores howl for miles around with a flavoring of herbed butter and sel gris. The wild-mushroom risotto ($21) somehow makes creaminess a flavor, adding smoked gouda, herbs, and red-wine reduction to seasonal mushrooms.

For lighter fare, head to the appetizer list, where a light and tasty matzoh ball soup ($7) with pulled carrots and accents of dill awaits, alongside a sophisticated mac ‘n’ cheese ($10) made from gruyere, fontina, and parmesan cheeses enlivened with shaved black truffle. Hudson’s hip but comfortable atmosphere extends to its lounge, where you’ll find white seats, a backlit bar, and two 42” LCD TVs, conveniently facing outward from the wall so that people can see the screens. Serving up handcrafted cocktails such as the Hudson Dark and Stormy ($10) with house-made ginger beer and the French Chocolate Martini ($12), Hudson’s attracts a young after-work crowd for its lively happy hours (4 p.m.–7:30 p.m., Monday through Friday). Your Groupon works during all meals and happy hours, so come check out the nightly drink specials or settle in for a home-away-from-home-cooked meal. This Groupon can also be applied to tax, but as always, does not include gratuity.

Reviews

Gayot named Hudson Restaurant & Lounge one of the Top Ten Restaurant Views in the metropolitan area. The restaurant has also been featured in numerous publications, including Daily Candy, Dupont Current, and the Washington Post, where critics praise the commendable comestibles:

• [The risotto] was creamy and luscious, each grain swollen with stock yet firm to the touch. Mushrooms and cheese weighed in with their charms, making for a dish that could easily have starred in a high-end Italian restaurant and that arrived as a heaping "half-portion" for $12…Every bit as memorable that night was a plate of crackling buttermilk fried chicken… – Tom Sietsema, Washington Post

OpenTable users give Hudson Restaurant & Lounge an average of three stars, and Yelpers rate it a solid 3.5:

• One of the best chopped salads I have had, outstanding matza [sic] ball soup. My clients swooned over the truffle mac and cheese. – OpenTable.com user who dined on 12/01/2009
• The atmosphere is very chic, the food is great, and the staff awesome. – OpenTable.com user who dined on 01/01/2010