Since 1743
Three centuries of innkeeping on West Main Street.
There has been an inn on this corner since 1743 — before Clinton was Clinton, before New Jersey was a state, back when this stretch of Hunterdon County was farmland and a river crossing and not much else.
What the inn provided then is roughly what we provide now: a hot meal, a glass of something good, and a place to stop. The building has grown in every direction since — a wing here, a porch there, three stories where there were two — and the rooms upstairs have long since become dining rooms. But the address hasn’t moved, the front door is in the same wall, and the Tap Room is still called the Tap Room.
An inn is established on this corner, on the road carrying wagon traffic between the Delaware River and the farms of central Jersey. Hunterdon County is barely settled. The village here is called Hunt’s Mills, after the family whose mill stands on the South Branch of the Raritan.
The old colonial highway past the mills is formalized as the New Jersey Turnpike, the chartered road between New Brunswick and Easton. That road is the street outside our front door — West Main Street is the turnpike. For the next half-century, everything moving between the Delaware and the coast comes past this porch.
John W. Bray and the Taylor family — the developers remaking the village — persuade Hunt’s Mills to rename itself Clinton, after Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York, who had died that February. The same partnership rebuilds and enlarges the tavern here. The post office opens under the new name the following year.
The Lehigh Valley Railroad runs a branch line to the very edge of West Main Street — directly into the yard that had always served the Clinton House. Before this, a coach carried our guests several miles to the station at Annandale. Now travelling actors, salesmen and city families escaping the summer heat step off the train and walk across the road.
The Music Hall opens up the street and the Clinton House fills most nights with its audiences. Photographs from around 1900 show the hotel grown to nearly its present size, the long portico and the balcony above it already in place.
Eugene De Cleene runs the house, and puts the phrase on the postcards. The Tap Room becomes a destination in its own right — dark beams, a long bar, barrels racked along the foot of it. A room card from these years lists a single at $3.50 and a double at $6.00, and gives the telephone number as, simply, 15.
The last overnight guests check out in the 1950s and the rooms upstairs become dining rooms. What had been an inn with a good kitchen becomes a restaurant with a serious one. The bar settles into the identity it still has: American, unhurried, and busy.
On 28 September the Clinton Historic District is added to the National Register of Historic Places, and the Clinton House is listed within it as a contributing building. Five weeks later, on 30 October, the Gialias family buys it. They close briefly, renovate, and reopen in early 1996.
Hunterdon County’s most established steak and seafood house, holding the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence every year since 2020, with a sister restaurant — Nektar — across the river in New Hope. The room you sit in tonight is much the same one a stagecoach passenger sat in two hundred years ago. The menu, of course, is a little better.
The same room across four decades — and the same painted figure on the wall behind the bar in more than one of them.
— From the Gialias family and the team at The Clinton House