Walk down Coryell Street toward the river and you will pass a building that has worn three different restaurant identities since 1988, sitting next to a bar that has worn exactly one. Most people in Lambertville can tell you Hamilton's Grill Room closed. Fewer notice that the tiny nautical-themed bar attached to it, the Boat House, has now outlasted three separate restaurants next door without changing its harpoon-hung decor at all. The kitchen is the story everyone tells. The bar is the one that actually explains how this corner works.
Thirty-five years, three restaurants, one address
James Hamilton opened Hamilton's Grill Room in 1988 with his daughter Melissa, building a canal-side, Mediterranean-leaning restaurant that became one of the first in the region to lean on local meat, fish, and produce. It ran under his eye for decades and became the kind of place longtime residents measured anniversaries by.
When Hamilton's health declined and he later passed away, Brian Held, a Lambertville chef who had run his own restaurant in town, took over the kitchen. For a stretch it read as a handoff rather than an ending, the same name over the door with new hands underneath it. That didn't hold. The restaurant eventually operated as Brian's at the Grill, and by the end of 2022 it was done for good. Chef Held announced the closing on the restaurant's website, framing it simply.
"Hamilton's Grill Room would like to open our doors to our valued and loyal customers one more evening"
That final dinner ran on New Year's Day 2023, more than 30 years after Hamilton first opened the doors.
The building then sat in limbo for a stretch before Refined Hospitality, a regional operator led by Ron Gorodesky, acquired the property along with the Boat House next to it. The connection wasn't incidental. Gorodesky's professional relationship with the site goes back to 1990, when Hamilton's family hired him to consult on the restaurant's early operations. By 2024, Refined had announced plans for a new concept in the space. This spring it opened as Revolution Woodfire Grille, an upscale-casual restaurant built around an open kitchen and woodfire cooking, with a menu of pizzas, steaks, and fish alongside pastas and small plates.
The new build-out includes a few things the old restaurant never had:
- A private dining room that seats up to 40 guests
- A new outdoor dining garden under string lights and mature trees
- Rotating work from local artists displayed and sold inside the dining rooms
That last detail matters more than it looks. Rather than trying to preserve Hamilton's original atmosphere, Revolution is building a different kind of local tie, one where the restaurant functions partly as a gallery for working artists in town, not a museum piece to a chef who is gone.
The bar that watched all three eras pass
Here is what the restaurant's turnover obscures. The Boat House, the small speakeasy-style bar tucked beside the main dining room, never closed during any of this. It survived Hamilton's original ownership, survived the transition to Brian's at the Grill, survived the restaurant's total shutdown, and is still operating today under Refined's ownership with its identity essentially intact. Refined's own description of the space calls it a "tiny, hidden speakeasy," and the details that make it recognizable are the same ones regulars have described for years: floor-to-ceiling nautical decor, a massive whaling harpoon hanging overhead, furniture that reads like it came out of an old fisherman's tavern, and drinks poured at what the operators still call Navy strength.
When a restaurant group takes over a property with 30-plus years of history attached, the easy move is to gut everything and start clean. Refined didn't do that with the Boat House. It kept the room's character while rebuilding the kitchen beside it, which tells you something specific about how this corner of Lambertville actually holds its value. It isn't the menu that anchors a place like this. It's the fixed points that stay legible across three changes of ownership, the room nobody wanted to touch even while everything around it got torn down and rebuilt.
This isn't an isolated case on Bridge Street either
The same pattern shows up a few blocks over. Bridge Street Burgers opened at 23 Bridge Street in the space that used to hold Full Moon Café, run by the same ownership group behind The Hawke, a casual steakhouse on South Union Street. Neither of those two restaurants is trying to resurrect what came before them. Both are new concepts inside old storefronts, run by operators who already had a foothold in town before they took on the new address.
That's the throughline worth noticing if you live here and have watched storefronts turn over for years. Lambertville's dining scene doesn't get remade by outside chains buying up empty buildings. It gets remade by people who already run something else in town, adding a new concept to a building whose bones and reputation they understand. The Boat House stays the Boat House because the operators taking over next door know exactly what regulars would notice if it disappeared. Bridge Street Burgers can be something entirely different from Full Moon Café because the group behind it already has two other addresses in town establishing who they are.
What to expect if you haven't been back to that corner
If your last memory of 8 Coryell Street is a quiet Mediterranean dinner under Hamilton's eye, or a later visit during the Brian's era, the woodfire menu and the new dining garden will feel like a real departure, and that's intentional. Revolution Woodfire Grille isn't trying to be Hamilton's Grill Room with a new name on the door. It's a different restaurant that happens to share a building with 35 years of someone else's history.
What hasn't changed is next door. Walk into the Boat House on a weekend night and the room still looks and sounds like it did a decade ago, harpoon and all. That consistency is doing real work for the block, giving longtime residents a reason to still turn down Coryell Street even while the restaurant beside it reinvents itself for a third time.
Jennifer Dionne has spent years walking these same streets and watching Lambertville's small commercial corners shift while its residential character holds steady. If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers beyond its restaurant lineup, from its river-town scale to how its historic buildings get reused rather than replaced, Jennifer Dionne is a useful person to talk to before you assume you already know the answer.
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