Walk into High Falls on a Friday night now and you'll find a line at Ollie's, not a reservation book at the DePuy Canal House. That swap, more than any single closing, is the story of what happened to this Route 213 hamlet over the past several years, and it's a better story than the one that gets repeated.
For decades, if you said "High Falls" to anyone who cared about food in the Hudson Valley, you meant one address: the stone tavern building where chef John Novi ran the DePuy Canal House from 1969 until the mid-2010s. The New York Times gave it four stars, an honor the paper reserved almost exclusively for Manhattan kitchens. Novi's building was the reason people drove out from the city for dinner in a hamlet of fewer than a thousand people. When he stepped away and handed the property to the Delaware & Hudson Canal Historical Society, and when a run of other local spots followed him out the door in the years after, the easy read was that High Falls was losing its food identity.
It didn't lose it. It relocated it. And if you actually live here, the current version is worth knowing in its own right.
What the Old Landmark Became
The building at the corner of Main Street and 2nd Street was constructed in 1797 by the Depuy family as a tavern for canal workers. After the Delaware & Hudson Canal opened in 1828, it became the spot where canawlers gathered to trade news and load cement and bluestone onto barges. Novi turned it into a restaurant in 1969, and for close to fifty years it stayed the fanciest table in the hamlet.
The Historical Society bought the building in 2015 with help from the Open Space Institute and the state parks office, and after years of roof, window, and structural work, the space reopened in June 2022 as the D&H Canal Museum. It's open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., admission is free, and the collection runs from tintype photographs to period boat tillers and a working model that shows how a boat actually moved from lock to lock.
That's not a downgrade for High Falls. It's a different kind of asset. A four-star restaurant, by its nature, could only serve so many tables on a given night. A free museum with daily hours, sitting directly on a trailhead, serves anyone who walks by, which in a hiking-and-canal-town like this one is most of the foot traffic that exists.
The New Anchor Is a Pizza Counter
If the museum absorbed the historic building, Ollie's absorbed the restaurant traffic. It's owned by Innis Lawrence, who was born and raised in High Falls, along with his wife Sophie Peltzer-Rollo and their colleague Ilan Bachrach. The business opened around 2020, and it has been the busiest kitchen in the hamlet ever since, doing what one local news account called "unparalleled" business on pizza alone.
Lawrence has been candid about what he thinks the hamlet can actually support. As he put it in an interview with the Times Union, "It's a town for breakfast or lunch or dinner, or you go to shop." That's not a modest statement, it's a correct one. High Falls has never had the density to sustain a restaurant row the way Hudson or New Paltz can. What it has is a handful of destinations that people plan a trip around, and Ollie's has become the one that works on a weeknight.
The team's ambitions haven't stopped at pizza. They've since opened a slice shop and a provisions store called Fletcher & Lu in Kingston, and they're still working to restore the former Kitchenette building itself, a project that's taken longer than expected but keeps the door open for another food business to land in High Falls down the line.
If You're Deciding Where to Go Tonight
The current lineup, for anyone who actually lives close enough to choose between these on a given evening:
- Ollie's for pizza, self-service with food brought to the table, the busiest spot in the hamlet
- The Spy Social Eatery & Bar, one of the newer additions tracked in Hudson Valley Magazine's roundup of 2026 Hudson Valley restaurant openings
- Stone House Tavern, just outside the hamlet proper, still the go-to for a sit-down dinner that isn't pizza
That's a shorter list than High Falls had a decade ago. It's also a list that matches how people actually move through a small hamlet like this one: a quick bite before or after a hike, a bar that doesn't require a reservation, and one proper dinner option a short drive away.
The Walk That Ties It Together
None of this works in isolation, and that's the part that gets missed when the story is framed as decline. The Five Locks Walk, a half-mile multi-use trail that follows the old canal towpath past Locks 16 through 20, starts right outside the door of the same building that now houses the D&H Canal Museum. The locks were cleared and partially reconstructed in 1999 specifically so visitors could see how the canal's engineering actually worked, and interpretive brochures for the walk are available right at the trailhead.
Put the pieces together and a Sunday in High Falls looks like this: walk the towpath, stop into the museum for free, grab a slice at Ollie's, maybe a drink at The Spy if you're staying late. That's a genuinely different rhythm than the one built around a single four-star dinner reservation, but it's not a lesser one. It's a rhythm built for people who are already here on a regular basis rather than people driving in for a special occasion, and that's exactly who lives in High Falls now.
The Real Shift
The version of this story that circulated a few years ago treated every closing as a data point in a decline narrative: Kitchenette in 2022, Egg's Nest not long after, the Last Bite serving its final customers the same year. Read that way, High Falls looked like a hamlet running out of restaurants.
Read differently, with three years of hindsight and a museum that's now been open for four of them, High Falls looks like a hamlet that traded one high-maintenance anchor for a set of lower-maintenance ones that actually get used more often. A restaurant that requires a special trip closed. A trail that anyone can walk any day, tied to a free museum and a pizza counter that's been packed for six years running, took its place. For a resident deciding what to do with a free Saturday, that's not a smaller town. It's a more usable one.
If High Falls, or a hamlet like it, ever ends up on your radar for more than a Saturday walk and a slice, Fresh Air Realty knows this stretch of Ulster County from the inside, not from a listing sheet. We split our time between Brooklyn and the Catskills for exactly this reason.
