For anyone who grew up eating at Hamilton's Grill Room, dinner there was never a warm-up act for the rest of the evening. Jim Hamilton, the Broadway set designer who spent decades turning a derelict Coryell Street sausage factory into the courtyard everyone in Lambertville still calls the Porkyard, used to say almost exactly that himself. He treated dinner as the whole occasion, not the preamble to one, and that idea shaped the restaurant as much as any recipe did. It's part of why the place closing at the end of 2022 felt less like a business shutting its doors and more like losing someone from the family.
The story most locals tell themselves about what happened after that, an outside group buying the property and turning it into something unrecognizable, skips the one detail that actually explains why walking into the space today still feels familiar. The company that now runs it, Refined Hospitality, is led by Ron Gorodesky, and Gorodesky's very first client, back in 1990, was Jim Hamilton. He was hired to help with the programming and day to day operations of the Grill Room itself, years before he ever ran a restaurant group of his own.
What Actually Happened To Hamilton's
Jim Hamilton came home to Lambertville after a career building sets for Broadway shows, including the original productions of Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Equus, plus touring sets for David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. In the late 1970s he started reimagining the abandoned former sausage factory tucked behind Coryell Street as a working cluster of restaurant, bar, and studio space, the idea he'd sketch out for anyone who'd stand still long enough to listen. He opened Hamilton's Grill Room there in 1988 with his daughter Melissa running the kitchen, building a menu around locally sourced fish and produce before that was standard practice at Jersey restaurants. His other daughter, Gabrielle Hamilton, would go on to open the East Village restaurant Prune and win a James Beard award. Jim also designed the Boat House next door and helped shape the bar at the Swan Hotel, and he was part of founding Shad Fest, the festival that still celebrates the return of shad to the Delaware River following the Clean Water Act.
He died in February 2018 at 86. Chef Brian Held, who had taken over the kitchen as Brian's at the Grill, closed the restaurant for good at the end of 2022, ending a run that started in 1988. One longtime customer told the Bucks County Herald at the time that she used to make the forty five minute drive down once or twice a year just for one dish.
"The shrimp in anchovy butter changed my life! I will miss the twinkly charm of this unmatched place."
After sitting dark for a stretch, the courtyard space is open again today as Revolution Woodfire Grille, run by Refined Hospitality in partnership with Brickstone Realty and Trax Partners. The new operators kept the same courtyard entrance off the alley and the same open kitchen concept, adding a new outdoor dining garden under the existing canopy of mature trees rather than clearing the site for something else. Given Gorodesky's own history with the family, it reads less like a new concept dropped into a landmark and more like someone finishing a project he'd already had a hand in three and a half decades earlier.
The Boat House Didn't Get Touched
If Revolution is the visible half of this change, the building next door is the quieter half of the same decision. The Boat House, the two story bar Hamilton designed and helped open, still runs as its own separate business at 8 and a half Coryell Street, still filled with the nautical memorabilia and the harpoon hanging over the bar that regulars have been describing to each other for years. Refined Hospitality now owns both properties, but the choice to leave the Boat House exactly as it was while reworking the restaurant next door says something about what the new operators decided was worth preserving on that block and what wasn't.
The Real Uncertainty Is At The Other End Of The Same Street
The part of Coryell Street that's genuinely unresolved right now isn't the restaurant courtyard. It's the western end of the block, where Finkle's Hardware operated for more than a century before closing, out of a building that started life as the Strand Theatre, Lambertville's first movie house, which opened in 1915. The Strand burned in 1969, and Finkle and Sons used the brick shell as a warehouse for the next fifty years. In 2021, local artist Kelly Sullivan bought the building with plans to reopen it as a performance space and gallery, but the project stalled over a shared alley needed for fire exits, and the neighbor holding rights to that alley filed suit over it. In the spring of 2025, residents were invited to a public meeting where Gorodesky was set to present early concepts for what might eventually replace the old Finkle's site, including ideas floated as a boutique hotel or a parking structure, though nothing has been formally proposed to the city yet.
What's Still Standing In Between
Walk the block today and the restaurant story and the hardware store story turn out to be bookends around a stretch of working galleries that never stopped operating in between.
- Coryell Gallery, at 8 Coryell Street, sits inside the same Porkyard courtyard as Revolution Woodfire Grille.
- Artists' Gallery, at 18 Bridge Street, has represented a rotating group of sixteen working artists for more than 25 years, with exhibits that change monthly.
- ArtsBridge, at 32 Coryell Street, runs classes and studio space just a few doors from where Finkle's used to be.
Why This Matters If You Live Here
The easy version of this story treats Coryell Street as one long narrative about a beloved local landmark slowly getting replaced. The actual sequence runs closer to the opposite. The change everyone already grieved, the one with Jim Hamilton's name attached to it, landed softer than expected, because the person who reopened it had already spent time inside the business before most of Lambertville had heard the name Refined Hospitality. The change nobody has fully reckoned with yet is happening a few doors down, where the outcome for the Strand and the old hardware site is still genuinely open, and where a public meeting, not a press release, is where residents will actually find out what comes next.
For a Flemington based advisor who spends as much time on this side of Hunterdon County as she does in her own backyard, keeping track of what's actually changing in towns like Lambertville, block by block, is part of the job. If you'd like to talk about what's happening in your own corner of Hunterdon or Somerset County, Christine Cura is glad to have that conversation. Let's Connect.
