This New England Inn Is Celebrating Its Restaurant With a Coastal Cuisine Extravaganza. Here’s What’s on the Menu.

You can still teach an old hotel new tricks. Just look at preppy White Barn Inn, which is currently celebrating its 150th anniversary and the 50th year of its eponymous fine-dining restaurant.

Located in the lovely coastal town of Kennebunkport, Maine—best known for the Bush family’s Walker’s Point Estate retreat—the 19th-century “inn-stitution” became part of the rapidly expanding, five-star Auberge Resorts Collection back in 2018. Now it’s unveiled the results of a massive renovation that brought a relaxed farmhouse-chic informality to the 27 guest rooms and suites—although the utterly luxurious bathrooms with sumptuous soaking tubs are now anything but rustic. Interior designer Jenny Wolf led the charge in revamping the spaces while still maintaining that classic New England feel.

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But for the hotel’s old guard, this is worrisome stuff, and pearls were certainly clutched when the restaurant announced this winter that guests are no longer required to wear jackets to dinner. Mon dieu!

But though thou walk . . . fear no evil, because there is still plenty of New England country glamour and snoot left in this beautiful old bird.

The renovation largely left the unique, two-story, raw-wood restaurant as it was—to do otherwise would have been to fix what wasn’t broken. Inside, most continue to willingly dress up for a dinner, which is still served at white linen-draped tables, each with a unique animal ornament made by an English silversmith at its center.

“We have something special here,” Daniel Braun, the inn’s general manager since 2016, told Robb Report. “We had conversations about what should it be and what has it been. It’s quite historic and we don’t want to change it, but we need to keep it relevant.”

The food was one area where compromise wasn’t an option. It, too, is still refreshingly nostalgic.

“We were worried about whether people still wanted a prix fixe menu,” Braun said, noting that the adjacent Little Barn bistro adds an option for a casual meal. “But people are still looking for that special experience. We asked, ‘Is it too old fashioned? Does it still make sense?’ We wondered whether we should still have the pianist.”