Editor’s Note: We just found out last week that John Novi, longtime chef/owner of the Depuy Canal House in High Falls, had died in September at the age of 83. A towering figure in the Hudson Valley food scene, Novi pioneered the region’s cuisine and the very concept of farm-to-table dining.
The old stone house sits close to the road in downtown High Falls. The building predates the nation—it served the D&H Canal in its commercial heyday, then a boarding house, then a ghost of usefulness as small river towns emptied out and forgot themselves. When John Novi bought it in 1969, it was not an obvious site for a revolution. The kitchen was ruined, the roof leaked, and the Rondout Creek ran past like time itself: steady, cold, unmoved. Yet this was where Novi decided to plant a flag, and from that improbable outpost he quietly altered the course of American food at the Depuy Canal House.
Long before farm-to-table became a marketing mantra, before regional cuisine became a publishing category, Novi was already doing what would later be tagged as the New American movement: grounding fine dining in place, drawing flavor from landscape, and using ingredients not as status symbols but as expressions of a region. He did not announce a movement. He did not write manifestos. He cooked. Seasonally. Locally. Fearlessly. If a thing grew here—watercress from a cold stream, trout from the Esopus, apples from an local orchard—he found a way to honor it. Then he served it in a four-course meal alongside a global wine list, in an 18th-century room lined with wainscot and candlelight. The juxtaposition was startling: elegance without pretense, cosmopolitan imagination rooted in small-town soil.
When The New York Times awarded the Depuy Canal House four stars in 1970, it didn’t just change Novi’s fortunes; it changed the region. Suddenly the Hudson Valley—long dismissed as a rural pass-through between Manhattan and Albany—had a culinary destination. People drove two hours up the Thruway to try Novi’s smoked trout mousse or venison loin with wild herbs. They discovered that just beyond the commuter towns lay orchards, dairies, foraging woods, and riverbanks rich with ingredients. The Hudson Valley was not an afterthought. It was a larder.
Novi had trained as an artist before he trained as a chef, and he never abandoned that sensibility. His dishes were composed like mixed-media works—playful, intuitive, sometimes daring. He believed food should evoke feeling as much as flavor. A plate might arrive adorned with a single edible petal, a swoop of sauce that looked like a brushstroke. But beneath the grace notes was rigor: classical technique, careful sourcing, and relentless curiosity about how to coax maximum character from simple products. He was not an ascetic. Butter and cream had their place. So did whimsy. The point was never austerity; it was attention.
His legacy rests on three pillars that reshaped not just the Hudson Valley, but American dining at large.
First, Novi practiced local sourcing long before it had a name. He built relationships with farmers decades before wholesale networks linked chefs to growers. He bought lamb from people he knew personally, mushrooms from foragers who came through the kitchen door with burlap sacks still damp from the woods. This was not a philosophical stance—it was common sense. Freshness mattered. Provenance mattered. Working within seasonal limits sparked creativity. That approach would later be codified by chefs across the country, but in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Novi was mostly alone in that thinking outside of a small California contingent led by Alice Waters. He didn’t imitate them. He arrived there on his own.
Second, he fused European technique with American terroir. Novi admired the structure, discipline, and clarity of classical French cooking. He respected the canon. But he refused to be bound by it. He was among the first chefs to argue, through practice rather than polemic, that America had its own ingredients worth elevating: shad roe, black walnuts, concord grapes, heritage pork, fiddleheads. They could be handled with the same seriousness once reserved for Normandy butter or Vichy carrots. If Paul Bocuse defined nouvelle cuisine in France, Novi did something parallel along the Hudson—lighter, freer, guided by instinct and landscape rather than doctrine.
Third, Novi built a lineage. Every region with a meaningful food culture can trace its genealogy through kitchens. The Depuy Canal House was the forge. Young cooks passed through, absorbed his sensibility, then went on to open their own restaurants or lead influential kitchens. The ripple effect carried forward through the decades. When people now speak of a Hudson Valley food identity—Silvia’s vegetable-forward grace in Woodstock, Chleo’s pastoral precision in Kingston, Blue Hill’s agricultural intellectualism at Stone Barns—they are, knowingly or not, standing on ground that Novi cleared. He made it possible to take this region seriously as a culinary landscape.
His style was generous, sometimes eccentric, always personal. He collaborated with artists, musicians, and winemakers long before “experiential dining” became an industry trend. He cooked with abandon in the best sense of the word: open to surprise, uninterested in repeating himself for the comfort of critics. Yet his restaurant never slipped into self-indulgence; there was always a spine of hospitality in the room. Dinner at the Depuy Canal House felt like entering a small world—illuminated, self-contained, yet profoundly connected to the place around it.
Calling Novi “the father of New American cuisine” undersells him. He was not trying to define a genre. He was trying to articulate a relationship between food and place: the river, the soil, the orchards, and the people who worked them. He proved a simple truth that now feels obvious, but in 1970 had to be shown: the Hudson Valley is not merely scenic. It is fertile, expressive, and alive.
When he died, he left behind more than a resume of accolades. He left a region transformed. (The Depuy Canal House closed in 2015 and is now the home of the D&H Canal Historical Society; Novi was the organization’s first president.) Towns that once offered little more than factories and diners now sustain culinary economies. Breweries, distilleries, bakeries, butcher shops, and cider houses dot the same landscape where Novi once scavenged ingredients piece by piece. The Hudson Valley has become both a pantry and a pilgrimage site for chefs and diners alike. You can draw a straight line from farm dinners along Route 209 to the nightly hum of Kingston restaurants. That line runs through the Depuy Canal House.
In our 20th anniversary issue in 2013, I wrote: “The modern gastronomic history of the region begins with John Novi.” That remains true. He didn’t just help launch a cuisine. He helped root a culture. In a nation still learning to honor the flavors of its own land, Novi was already in the kitchen, sleeves rolled, asking the only question that really matters to a chef: What is possible here, today?
This made me cry with appreciation that I crossed paths with John. My father introduced him to corn “smut”, the delicious mushroomy fungi growing on otherwise unlucky ears of Maize and to huge flake popcorn. Then I was a low ranking baby waiter during graduate school, who grew up working on farms in Illinois and was naive and clumsy enough my first evening at the Canal House to twist the stems off two champagne flutes while polishing them for the evening. Then as a more learned and patient attendant to petulant guests, one laid on the floor “to rest” while waiting impatiently for the next course. Then as a friend who enjoyed John’s unannounced visits to my sister’s home for random meals. John was a unique and very special human and friend. RIP with the memories of many who loved you. Sherret
I have many fond memories of dining at Jon Novi’s wonderful place — more than a restaurant, it was an experience. Experience snapshots include a private birthday party for a dear friend on the second floor; the special dinner my wife and I enjoyed as the ONLY table one autumn night thanks to a storm-related power and phone outage that deflected all reservations except for ours made long before, and the charming framed picture in the bar of the Italian cleric with the heavy eyelids slurping up a giant forkful of spaghetti.