Two historic country inns get destination-worthy chef makeovers

The onetime mill towns that dot the Delaware River in New Jersey’s Hunterdon County, north of Trenton, have long been a draw for Philadelphians out for a bucolic weekend. They come in search of country inns, art galleries, small-town Main Street charm — as well as culinary talent with a national reputation.

Milford’s Canal House Station is one such oasis, launched in 2019 by the two cookbook pioneers who also founded Saveur magazine; it’s still going strong with its weekly changing Sunday dinners. The past year has seen a particularly exciting infusion, as longtime chefs from two of America’s most influential restaurants, Sean Gray from Momofuku Ko and Cal Peternell from Chez Panisse, have come home to cook in Hunterdon County, reviving a pair of storied addresses.

These two arrivals, it seems, are purely coincidental. But the historic restaurants they’ve taken over, Sergeantsville Inn and the Frenchtown Inn (now called Finnbar), are both destinations. In fact, as these two veteran chefs fall deeper in sync with their new environs — crafting distinctive menus along with progressive beverage programs in vintage settings weathered by centuries in ways you just can’t fake — they’ve built two of the most impressively complete dining experiences in the entire region.

Sean Gray has come a long way since his first restaurant job as an 18-year-old parking cars at Lambertville Station. He’s also come full circle. The Upper Bucks County native worked for nearly 15 years at New York City’s Momofuku Ko, succeeding Peter Serpico as executive chef at David Chang’s edgy Michelin-starred tasting room, which was, according to Eater critic Ryan Sutton, “without question one of [NYC’s] greatest restaurants” before it closed in 2023. The intense pressure to constantly create innovative dishes at Ko, however, prompted Gray to seek a refuge from the city in his personal life, so he moved to sleepy Sergeantsville, N.J., in 2016 — all the while commuting more than an hour each way to Manhattan for five years.

The Sergeantsville Inn, an 18th-century stone tavern that had been meticulously rebuilt after a devastating fire in 2015, became Gray’s local bar for a burger and a beer. No one at the Inn had any idea what Gray did until 2023, when he was finally introduced to owner Henry Amoroso. (By that time, Gray was working at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown — an even longer commute.)

The transition since Gray took over last spring has been exceptional even if the details are unexpected, given there are virtually none of the Asian-influenced small plates from the Chang Universe. One notable exception is a version of the soy-brined fried chicken Gray made famous at Ko and its more casual bar (where two of his best cooks were current Philly stars Amanda Shulman and Alex Kemp). A shatteringly crisp drumstick glazed in a spicy red yuzu koshu sauce is served with pickles as a $5 “blue plate special” for the inn’s happy hour — although here it’s served hot, not fridge-cold as it was at Ko’s bar. It’s worth asking if there are any leftovers if you get there later.

The dinner menu has its own worthy draws. As Gray revels in the opportunity here “to tell my own story,” he has expanded on that fried-chicken instinct — to update familiar comforts with meticulous technique — and is delivering straightforward, bistro-style presentations that showcase great ingredients with perfect execution in service of deeper flavors.

The shrimp casino is one you can’t miss. Head-on Spanish blue prawns are split open, stuffed with garlicky breadcrumbs, and roasted over a Big Green Egg grill. You’ll need to dive in and get messy with these majestic crustaceans to pry that tender meat off the shells with your teeth — or simply eat the whole thing. (“Clean-plate shrimp club!” boasts Shulman, who recently visited her former boss.) For a tidier seafood starter, opt for the char-grilled oysters stuffed with shallot and wine butter. You can’t lose either way.

There’s also house-smoked, molasses-brined ham to devour with French butter and crusty sourdough from Flemington’s Bread & Culture. The same sourdough is used for the carpaccio, toasted in beef fat, then topped with ruby rare curls of thin-sliced rib-eye that hover over a puddle of gravy made from dry-aged beef drippings. The beef trimmings come from the massive 2-pound côte du boeuf and the 14-ounce grass-fed sirloin that’s served with perfectly crisped frites and an irresistible green peppercorn cognac sauce. The Inn’s 8-ounce house-ground burger is also infused with those deeply savory trimmings. At $18, it’s the kind of affordable luxury that preserves the inn as a neighborhood mainstay, even as it becomes a regional draw.

The new Sergeantsville Inn is much more than an updated chop house, though I also loved the thick pork chop, which gets koji-tenderized and cooked sous-vide before it’s grilled to a fragrant finish over an apple-fennel salad and a purple sweet potato. The radicchio salad — tossed with bitter Belgian endive, kohlrabi, Asian pear, and aged cheddar in a crème fraîche-lemon-Dijon dressing — is so good that a local regular made a T-shirt extolling its virtues. There are also memorable handmade ravioli tossed in Koginut squash purée. Gray has a talent for seafood, too, pairing chanterelles with roasted salmon over creamy polenta, and topping beautifully browned Barnegat scallops with tender ribbons of salt-baked celery root layered with shaved apples and brown butter; the celery root technique, which produces tender, pliant sheets, is another low-key move from Momofuku Ko.

With 90 seats spread across its collection of rooms arrayed over multiple floors, a mezzanine, and the lively corner tavern, every table manages to channel a sense of intimacy bolstered by friendly, well-informed service, and a drink program overseen by general manager Omy Bugazia that is particularly strong on well-made classics (try the paloma, boulevardier, or Oaxaca old fashioned) and low-intervention Euro wines. There’s already a deep cellar with nearly 200 bottles, including multiple worthy choices from the Loire and Jura in the $75 range (and splurges beyond). The by-the-glass list offers smart choices — dry riesling, real Champagne, earthy cab franc, and lush dolcetto — that are all quality pours suited to this menu.

The inn doesn’t ease up when it comes to dessert. There’s an amaro-kissed chocolate torte, a citrusy almond cake, and a silky butterscotch budino. But it’s Gray’s unconventional take on tarte Tatin I keep thinking about. He poaches sliced apples in sherry and bay leaf before stacking them with caramel into a crumbly pastry dough, then tops it à la mode with vanilla ice cream dusted with dried orange zest. It’s a roundabout way to make a dish whose ingredients are typically cooked from raw altogether at once. One could say the same thing for Gray, who went to great lengths to work far afield before finally landing a mile from home. The journey, like that tarte, was absolutely worth it.

Sergeantsville Inn, 601 Rosemont Ringoes Rd., Sergeantsville, N.J. 08557, 609-397-3700; sergeantsvilleinn.com

Unlike the Sergeantsville Inn, where there is little stylistic carryover from the chef’s previous stop at Momofuku Ko, the echoes of chef Cal Peternell’s long career at Chez Panisse in Berkeley are clear at Finnbar, his energetic and family-powered revamp of the Frenchtown Inn. It’s not so much that he’s cooking California cuisine inside the moody brick walls and dark wood tavern of this 1805 landmark at the base of the narrow Uhlerstown-Frenchtown bridge across the Delaware River. It’s that Peternell has deftly translated the go-local, produce-forward spirit that made Chez Panisse such a pioneer of seasonal cooking to the cooler climes of New Jersey.

Peternell has found stellar mushroom farmers, lovely organic radicchio from Roots to River Farm, and a rainbow of radish varieties. He’s happily discovered the fact that “there’s always a crunchy root vegetable in season.” This explains why one of Finnbar’s year-round hits is the “very crunchy salad,” which constantly morphs, like the whole menu, reflecting the harvest from week to week. These days, colorful rounds of shaved kohlrabi, carrots, and radishes are coated in a creamy tahina dressing and fanned over a hummus-like base of smashed chickpeas or white beans. With layered textures, a subtle richness, and the transporting aromatics of a cumin-scented sesame-hazelnut dukkah spice, this salad is the height of a frumpy root glow-up.

Peternell, 62, a New York Times best-selling author of five books whose braised chicken leg recipe is a five-star favorite of NYT Cooking app users, had not initially intended to open another restaurant when he moved back to his home county from California in 2022. He was following his wife, Kathleen Henderson, who had the opportunity to open Studio 29, a progressive art studio for people with disabilities connected to Frenchtown’s ArtYard arts and performance complex. Lured by the possibility of helping to fund the studio with a portion of profits from the Frenchtown Inn, however, Peternell was convinced to return to the kitchen by Jill Kearney, the ArtYard founder who bought the Inn in 2022. (The new name is Peternell’s contraction of Frenchtown Inn and Bar.) Several of his children regularly work alongside him in the kitchen.

With a service team led by manager Ethan Stuart that is welcoming and detail-oriented, Finnbar is an exercise in familial, laid-back sophistication. The dark wood floors and old fixtures exude a polished historic elegance between the bar and dining room’s 90 seats, but the relaxed vibe perfectly suits this riverside oasis fueled by art and outdoor recreation. Come summertime, you can sip a bracingly fresh daiquiri, bubbly sbagliato cocktail, or one of the inn’s relatively affordable and adventurous natural wines — a sparkling chenin blanc or Czech pinot noir-gris blend, perhaps? — at 30 outdoor seats as you watch people floating lazily down the Delaware on inner tubes. Later this spring, Finnbar also plans to open a retail shop in back for its wines and pantry items to-go. But I would make the trip here just to sit, eat, and drink.

While French and Italian cuisine are at the core of the Chez Panisse canon — and Finnbar served me both memorable rillettes (with raisin chutney) and a tender duck confit (with pumpkin purée and chestnuts) — Peternell’s menu incorporates a broader palette of international cooking. The house bar-nibble mix of peanuts roasted with curry leaves is inspired by snacks from an Indian market, while a November soup special of harira, a cumin-y lamb broth hearty with chickpeas and kale, draws on the Moroccan classic.

It is first and foremost Peternell’s growing relationships with ethically minded farmers and fishermen, though, that shape this menu. A wonderful tumble of Rhode Island squid crisped in a rice flour blend over spicy tomato sauce was impossible to stop eating, while Jersey Shore scallops and rich black cod were hot-smoked and layered over an elegant toast with cucumbers and beets.

Local lamb sourced from Mt. Salem Farm in Pittstown goes into the spiced kofta patties that Peternell serves with saffron rice and yogurt raita. A meaty duxelles of sherry-creamed oyster, chestnut, and lion’s mane mushrooms cultivated by Noble Mushrooms makes for an earthy sauce that ringed a pair of buckwheat crespelle stuffed with local ricotta and a puree of pea greens — “that hopeful flavor that spring is coming,” says Peternell.

Few dishes, though, make Peternell as happy as the fried blue catfish from the Chesapeake Bay, in part because eating this invasive species is beneficial for the local ecosystem, but also because the meat has a clean taste from its habitat in the bay’s brackish waters (vs. catfish from muddier fresh water environments). At Finnbar, he cooks it inside the airy crisp of a white wine batter over a brothy ragout of meaty ayocote beans from Rancho Gordo. More local catfish, please!

Of course, after so long cooking on the West Coast, where warm-weather produce blooms eternal, Peternell craves making pesto year round. So in the Mid-Atlantic’s cold months, that means he makes it with peppery arugula, walnuts, and oregano to sauce fresh spaghetti from Hopewell’s Lo Ré. The dish gets topped with a creamy hunk of local burrata and the sundried sweetness of rehydrated tomatoes from an old source that supplied Chez Panisse, “for just a little California sunshine.” (At least, of course, until Jersey’s famous tomatoes make their splendid summer cameo.)

One of the best things about four-season cooking, though, is that it makes for cozy dessert weather, and Finnbar excels here, with a sugar-dusted apple crostata that gives Sergeantsville’s tarte Tatin a run for its money. There’s bread pudding laced with Koginut squash puree for the weekend brunch crowd that rides the delicate line between sweet and savory (especially if you, like me, consider a garnish of bacon a proper dessert). Ultimately, though, there is no beating the luxurious comfort of Finnbar’s pot de crême, a silky rich pudding of bittersweet chocolate sourced from two of Peternell’s old Northern California standbys, Guittard and TCHO, topped with whipped cream and crushed hazelnuts. When you have a recipe like that in your back pocket, a chef can roam anywhere — even back home after decades away on another coast — and make new friends.

Finnbar, 7 Bridge St., Frenchtown, N.J. 08825, 908-465-0021; finnbarjersey.com