Drive Route 115 through Saylorsburg on a Friday night now and you will hit three places where cars are actually parked. That was not true a year and a half ago. For most of the 2010s and into the 2020s, the stretch between Saylors Lake and Blue Ridge Road had exactly one anchor doing real business, a lakeside restaurant that has outlasted three name changes. The middle of that stretch, a hotel and restaurant that had fed this town for a century, sat dark. It reopened in the summer of 2025. Whether that matters to you depends on whether you noticed it was gone.
A Building With Thirteen Years of Silence
The building at 798 Route 115 operated as a hotel and restaurant for more than a hundred years before it closed in 2013. It sat that way for over a decade, long enough that the people who remembered eating there were mostly remembering it from childhood or from stories their parents told. Gary and Deb Kessel, who live in East Stroudsburg, bought the property in 2023 and spent more than a year gutting and rebuilding it. Gary runs GAK Construction, a general contracting business, and used that background to tackle the renovation himself rather than handing it to a developer who might have torn out what made the place recognizable.
The hotel side came back first. Most of its 27 rooms were ready by the summer of 2024. The restaurant and bar followed almost a year later, opening for dinner on June 20, 2025, under the same name it always had: Ye Olde Saylors Inne.
What Moved Back In
The restaurant is smaller than the building's history might suggest, 62 seats, dinner only, Tuesday through Sunday from 4 to 9 p.m., with reservations required on Fridays and Saturdays. Gary has said the menu itself came from the neighborhood rather than a chef's private vision.
"So, that menu is largely influenced by requests from people in Saylorsburg and the surrounding community. They told us what they wanted."
The result leans toward the familiar on purpose: crab cakes, Yankee pot roast, a meatloaf grilled cheese, wings and pierogies at the appetizer end. The one dish getting the most attention is the coleslaw, sold by the quart in the inn's earlier life and famous enough that people still ask for it by name. The Kessels tracked down the old recipe and brought it back, though by their own admission a few longtime customers say it is close but not quite identical, something about the mayonnaise. That kind of quibble is itself a signal. People do not argue over coleslaw at a restaurant they don't care about.
The bar pours wine from Homecoming Winery, a small operation the Kessels built into the lower level of the same building, directly behind the restaurant. It gives the Inn something the building never had in its earlier decades: a house label poured a few feet from where it's made.
The Other End of the Loop
If Ye Olde Saylors Inne is the middle of this stretch coming back, Blue Ridge Estate Vineyard & Winery on Blue Ridge Road is the end that never stopped growing. Its 2026 calendar reads less like a seasonal events page and more like a small venue running a full concert and festival circuit out of a vineyard.
The 9th Annual Wine and Song Festival ran May 16, five hours of programming with a rotating lineup of regional acts, food trucks on site, and no admission charge. Later in the summer the winery ran a Hawaiian Luau on August 8 and a recurring Bingo Tunes night on August 6, both free events built for a Thursday and Saturday crowd rather than a single big weekend. Owner Randy Detrick also hosts a recurring ticketed program called the Underground Experience, distinct enough that it has become its own draw separate from the wine tastings upstairs.
This past Sunday, September 13, the winery closed out the run of its year with the Blue Ridge Estate Wine Run 5K, a timed race through the vineyard that finishes with a wine pour instead of a water station. It is the kind of event that only works if a place has already built a following willing to show up on a Sunday morning for something other than brunch.
None of this is new activity in the sense of a grand opening. It is new in volume. A winery running a free luau, a free bingo night, an annual music festival, and a timed 5K inside the same calendar year is operating less like a tasting room and more like a events venue that happens to grow grapes.
The Lake That Never Stopped
The Lakeside, on Saylors Lake, is the one piece of this loop that was never dark. The building itself goes back decades under different names, a tea room, then a bar and dance hall, then a spot called The Glacier before it became The Lakeside sometime around 2020. What has stayed consistent through all those names is the format: a restaurant with a lake view and live music on the weekends. This year's calendar has included acts like the James Supra Band and Girl Crue, along with a recurring Sunday afternoon line dancing session that has apparently been running long enough to have regulars.
The Lakeside's role in this loop is different from the other two. It didn't reopen and it isn't scaling up. It is the fixed point the other two ends of Route 115 get measured against, proof that a lakeside restaurant with live music can run in Saylorsburg for years without needing a relaunch.
A Full Loop for the First Time in a Decade
Put those three together and the shape of a Saylorsburg weekend changes. For over a decade, anyone driving Route 115 for a night out had one real choice at the lake and not much else until they left town entirely. Now there is a working triangle: dinner and a glass of Homecoming wine at the reopened Inn, a festival or luau or 5K at Blue Ridge Estate a few miles up the road, and live music at The Lakeside on the water in between. None of these three businesses are coordinating with each other. They don't need to. The geography does that work on its own, and for the first time since 2013, all three points on it are open at the same time.
That is the actual news here, not that a restaurant reopened, since restaurants reopen constantly, but that Saylorsburg's stretch of Route 115 spent thirteen years running on one anchor and is now running on three. If you've lived here through the quiet years, you already know what that gap felt like. If you're newer to town, the version of Saylorsburg you're getting now is a different one than what existed even two years ago.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, not just on paper, that's the kind of texture worth knowing before you make a decision about living here. John D Keely has spent close to 25 years working buyers and sellers through the Pocono market, Saylorsburg included, and can walk you through what a specific street or lake access point actually means once you're past the listing photos. Let's Connect — Start Your Pocono Home Search or Request a Valuation.
