HIGH FALLS – John Novi is taking stock for a change, instead of making it. After fifty years of cooking in the kitchen of his iconic restaurant in High Falls, things are changing.

Novi bought the Canal House in 1964. The house was built in 1797 by Simeon DePuy, one of the leading citizens of High Falls back then. Three decades later, Lock 16 of the Delaware & Hudson Canal was operating nearby and the canal had begun the task of shipping about a million tons of hard anthracite coal from Pennsylvania to feed the furnaces in the burgeoning city of New York. The canal, however, could not operate in the winter and was replaced by railroads in the 1890s.

Novi, who grew up in his family's bakery just up the road at the corner of Mohonk Road and Route 213, was a keen preservationist, and the decay of the canal offended his sense of what should be.

"Buying the Canal House in '64 led me to realize the value of the DePuy house as a piece of history, belonging to the canal for over a hundred years. That led me to start an organization to preserve what little was left of the canal, especially in High Falls," he noted in a recent interview. "A section of the canal just outside the hamlet was being used as a dump. Smells and rats were in abundance. We also discovered that water flowing through this dump was going right into the Rondout Creek — big time pollution."

And so the D&H Canal Society was born on March 31, 1966. John Novi was the first President of the Society.

"We had 65 people join that night," he added, "At five dollars a head for membership."

Novi's other great passion, of course, was for cooking. At that time a revolution was just beginning that would transform American attitudes to fine dining. And in June 1969, John Novi and a small band of staff opened the DePuy Canal House Restaurant.

Those were exciting days for anyone who remembers them. In the air that summer was the approach of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace and Music." Of course, the residents of Woodstock had thrown the festival out early on and by springtime, the Town of Wallkill had literally banned any giant concert there.

Novi remembers the excitement of the time.

"Woodstock was in the plan, scheduled for August. We were so ready for that!" he recalled. "It's funny to think now, but we thought hundreds of cars would be coming through High Falls to Woodstock. But, of course, 'Woodstock' took place many miles away over in Sullivan County and we had no cars coming through town looking for the festival."

Meanwhile the restaurant was in the forefront of something else — a move back to farm food, fresh vegetables, and locally sourced items of all kinds.

"Back then, everything came already portioned and tenderized," he went on. "Hotels, even Mohonk, went the way of cooking with canned foods instead of vegetables from their own farms. They bought their meats from distributors instead of going to their own farm raised meats."

Word must have spread about the great little restaurant in the tiny town tucked away upstate.

"Eight months after opening we were visited by nine people on a busy Sunday night. They sat in the main dining room around the blazing fireplace. The night before, I'd run out of a lot of food, and I had to improvise the menu for Sunday night," he remembered. "I took leftover squid and conch soup and used it on whole, fresh, Boston Mackerel. After dinner they went into the bar and had cognacs. Later, after finishing up for the night, I went down to the tavern and they were still there. One of them asked me if I knew Craig Claiborne was part of his group. I had to admit I didn't even know who Craig Claiborne was. They got playful and each of them pretended to be Claiborne. But then the real Craig Claiborne came over with his snifter of cognac and said, 'Mr. Novi, you will read about this visit in the New York Times.' Well, 'wow' was my response to that!"

Claiborne, at the time, was the principal restaurant reviewer for the Times and among the nation's leading food eminences.

"Two weeks went by and sure enough, on Friday, March 7, 1970, we read that the DePuy Canal House was worth the three hour drive from Manhattan and we received four stars, the highest rating a restaurant can get."

Novi soon found out what that meant!

"This opened the sky to us, and to my career at its most important stage," he went on. "We had people coming by at eleven p.m., asking for anything we might have left! But, of course, that also meant I had to make the effort to keep that high rating. I guess I was doing something similar, here in America, to what French chefs were doing in the nouvelle cuisine movement. I can honestly say I just cooked in my own instinctive style. My mom would say I was following my natural destiny."

Of course, not every American diner was ready for this approach.

"We had many people who just got up and left," Novi said with a laugh, noting how he refused to make hamburgers. "It was not what I wanted to do with food in those days. Most of all I did not want to become bored with working in my kitchen."

Novi also only opened four days a week. His other interests — painting and music — needed time to breathe as well.

The restaurant prospered, even after the initial fame passed. It was a different style of dining, and it attracted its fans.

"We booked only one sitting a night, for a seven course meal," he explained. "That idea lasted for at least fifteen years. Serving a seven course meal was not to be found anywhere else. We had strolling musicians playing for people while they waited on the next course."

The rich and the famous found their way to High Falls.

"One night John Lennon and Yoko Ono came to dine. They ate in the private dining room we had upstairs and I went up and chatted with them," he said. "They were actually looking for a weekend country home two hours from the city and were scouting our area. The dishwasher saved the bones from the baby poussin chicken that Lennon enjoyed."

Looking ahead, there are now changes coming to the DePuy Canal House, and all Novi created. The D&H Canal Society has bought the historic home.

"My hope is that since the Canal House will soon be incorporated as the new D&H Museum, my kitchen will stay intact and I will design value added products in the kitchen," Novi said. "This could also be done in conjunction with the Rondout Valley Growers' Association... And my kitchen will also be open to benefit local not-for-profits with special dinners served in a small part of the existing restaurant, seating up to thirty guests. The downstairs part of the restaurant, once called "Chefs On Fire Bistro" would operate as the Canal Society's museum cafe, with inexpensive, light meals for lunch and dinner when the museum is open."

In a way things have come full circle for Novi. While the revolution of fresh food, fine dining, local produce and exciting experimentation has gone all around the world, Novi is back to his original project.

"What I discovered in the beauty of the DePuy house set me in motion," he said. "I wanted to restore this great place and keep it the way its builder Simeon DePuy wanted it."

And for cooking?

"Teaching others the art of cooking starts with the art of growing. I find that young people are beginning to like the mystery of plants for food, and working the garden with their own hands to produce what they want to cook," he added. "I look forward to conducting cooking classes in the Canal House kitchen, and working with local farmers to produce added value products with what they're growing."

We have to think that Simeon DePuy would surely approve.