If a friend tells you to meet them at the Taphouse in Center Harbor this summer, the smart follow-up question isn't what time. It's which one.
Main Street here is short enough to walk end to end in under ten minutes, and somehow it currently supports two separately owned businesses with nearly the same name: The Taphouse, occupying the village's oldest landmark, and Gusto's Taphouse, the newer offshoot of a beloved Italian café a few doors away. They opened around the same stretch of years, they share a word in their name, and even the internet has started mixing up which one is which. Sorting out which is which turns out to say something real about how fast a small lake town's dining scene can turn over.
The One in the Presidents' House
The better-known of the two operates out of the Coe House, an 1820s mansion that spent the mid-19th century being remodeled into the Victorian landmark it is today. It's one of ten structures that make up the Centre Harbor Village Historic District, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. Built for storekeeper John Coe and his wife Lavinia Senter, the house is said to have hosted Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Grover Cleveland, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Mary Todd Lincoln, and it later served as a station on the Underground Railroad. The Taphouse's own site describes the building as once frequented by presidents and poets, which is less a marketing flourish than a fairly literal description of the guest list.
The current tenant, The Taphouse Winnipesaukee, opened its doors officially on May 2, 2025, after a ribbon-cutting soft opening earlier that week. It's owner Sam Schwartz's project, a Massachusetts native who spent two decades in hospitality in Boston, New York, Washington, and New Orleans before bringing that experience back to the lake where he summered as a kid. The build-out is sized for a crowd: a 150-seat dining room, a 100-seat biergarten overlooking Lake Winnipesaukee, and three full bars, with live entertainment running Thursday through Sunday from May into October, according to the Laconia Daily Sun's coverage of the opening.
This isn't the Coe House's first turn as a restaurant, either. Long before the Taphouse, the same building ran for years as Lavinia's Relaxed Dining, named for the same Lavinia Senter, before that operation closed and the property changed hands. The name on the door has shifted more than once. The building's job, feeding people who came for the lake, hasn't.
A Second Taphouse, Born a Few Doors Down
The other Taphouse has nothing to do with Sam Schwartz or the Coe House. It belongs to Elena and Nick, the couple behind Gusto Italian Café on Main Street, whose own site tells the story of how they met on a train in Florence and eventually opened a taste of Tuscany a very long way from home. Gusto Italian Café built a genuine following on pastas, paninis, and pastries, the kind of place where the tiramisu gets its own line of praise in reviews.
Riding that success, the owners opened Gusto's Taphouse just across the street, a pizza-and-pasta spinoff with its own bar program. Early reviews were warm. Later ones described a menu that had been quietly trimmed down, with at least one diner reporting that staff attributed the cutback to trouble keeping two kitchens fully staffed at once. Pricing drew some pushback too, with reports of simple pasta dishes running close to $27 and a dinner for two, with tip, easily clearing $100.
How to Tell Them Apart Without Guessing
Until you've eaten at both, the fastest way to sort them out is to ask two questions before you commit to a reservation.
- Is there a biergarten with a lake view and live music most nights? That's The Taphouse, in the Coe House.
- Is the menu built around pizza and pasta, with ties to an Italian café up the street? That's Gusto's Taphouse.
The two aren't affiliated, don't share a kitchen, and don't share pricing. One is a 250-seat operation built for a crowd and a sunset. The other is a smaller bet by a café that already had Main Street's loyalty.
What This Month's Restaurant Lists Actually Say
Here's the part worth knowing before you drive over expecting a table. A Yelp roundup of Center Harbor's best restaurants, last updated this August, names Gusto Italian Café, The Breeze By the Bay, Little Red Schoolhouse, Canoe Restaurant and Tavern, Mug Restaurant, Vida at the Lake, The Taphouse, Off the Rails, and Walter's Basin. Gusto's Taphouse doesn't appear on it.
That absence doesn't prove the doors are shut. It could mean a quiet closure, a schedule that's shrunk to a few nights a week, or simply a listing that hasn't caught up. What it does mean is that if someone mentions Gusto's Taphouse this month, the polite move is to call ahead rather than assume it's running the same hours it was last year. Main Street here doesn't announce its changes. It just stops showing up in the next roundup.
Main Street Was Never Going to Sit Still
Two restaurants with nearly identical names is a small story, but it fits a pattern this village has followed for a long time. A short walk from either Taphouse, Canoe Restaurant and Tavern has been serving Center Harbor and the wider Lakes Region for more than 23 years out of its spot on Whittier Highway, with a lakeside dining room and a bourbon list built up over decades. The Center Harbor Diner keeps its own steady, more modest hours a short drive from the village core. None of these businesses stay static. They just don't all change at the same speed.
The rest of a Center Harbor summer keeps its own rhythm regardless of who's cooking that week. The Center Harbor Town Band still plays free concerts at the bandstand, with guest bands filling in through the end of August, so there's likely still time to catch one before the season closes out. The town docks run on a strict three-hour limit, with a $35 fine for anyone who overstays and a steeper $250 penalty for overnight docking, a detail that matters more to someone actually tying up a boat than to anyone just passing through. Back on the Fourth of July, the town marked the holiday with a parade at 2 p.m. and fireworks over the bay at 9:15, the kind of schedule a village keeps because it's done it the same way for generations, not because it needs to impress anyone.
That's the real thread here. A town this size can hold a mansion that's fed guests since before the Civil War and a two-year-old spinoff pizza spot on the same block, and both can end up called some version of "the Taphouse." Knowing which is which, and knowing that the answer might be different by next summer, is just part of what it means to actually live here rather than visit once.
If you're the kind of person who wants to know not just what's open on Center Harbor's Main Street but why the village works the way it does, that's the same instinct that matters when you're looking at a house on this lake. Becky Fuller has spent more than two decades paying attention to these small shifts, from the docks to the dinner reservations. Let's Connect.
