Walk down Bloomfield Avenue in Montclair on a Saturday in August 2026 and you will pass at least four restaurants that did not exist five months ago. Walk down Ferry Street in Newark's Ironbound the same afternoon and you will pass restaurants that were serving the same seafood paella when your parents were in high school. Both streets are in Essex County. Both are having a good year. They are not having the same kind of year, and the difference tells you something real about how this county actually works.
The Avenue That Won't Sit Still
NJ Monthly's dining critics describe Montclair as a town with three separate downtowns: Upper Montclair to the north, Watchung Plaza in the middle, and a southern stretch that swallows a full mile of Bloomfield Avenue plus a parallel run of Walnut Street a few blocks over. That southern stretch is where the turnover lives, and this year it has moved fast enough to make a running list feel necessary just to keep score.
Campofiore opened March 31 at 664 Bloomfield Avenue, in a space that spent years as Thai Chef. The kitchen belongs to Dan Drohan, who spent 16 years as executive chef at Otto Enoteca Pizzeria in Manhattan and helped launch Eataly Flatiron before Stout NYC Hospitality Group, the team behind Allegory and Splendid Rooftop at the MC Hotel, brought him to Montclair for a farm-to-table Italian menu. A few blocks north in Upper Montclair, Clementina finally opened earlier this year in the former Saunders Hardware space on Valley Road, with chef Michele Rocchi drawing on Adriatic coast cooking after months of anticipation from locals who watched the buildout happen.
Then the Japanese food arms race started. Ju-Ichi, a family-owned group with roots in Morristown, opened at 512 Bloomfield Avenue in early June with a full sushi, ramen, and udon menu. A few doors down at 511, Ani Ramen, which chef Luck Sarabhayavanija founded in Montclair back in 2014, responded the same week by adding its own sushi program under executive chef Julian Valencia. Tasca opened May 17 at 377 Bloomfield Avenue with Iberian small plates from founders Sergio Moutela and Robert Santello, doubling as a retail outlet for Domenico wines. Sardela followed that same month with Aegean-inspired seafood and mezze.
The dessert corner turned into its own small rivalry. OddFellows Ice Cream, the Brooklyn shop that has been inventing flavors since 2013, opened at 450 Bloomfield Avenue in May right next to Tous Les Jours bakery. Around the corner on Church Street, Oggi Gelato took over the space that spent 20 years as Oasis clothing boutique before it closed in December 2025. Oggi is the first United States location for founder Carmelo Chiaramida, brought stateside by Maurizio and Graziano Ricci of the Romanacci restaurant group, which makes Montclair the debut market for an entire brand.
And then there is the comeback nobody expected. Signage and a live website appeared this summer at 428 Bloomfield Avenue for Mexicali Rose, a name that closed its original Park Street location back in 2011. The restaurant traces back to the late Rosemary Leone, who later opened the well-known Leone's, and was run for years afterward by her stepson Dominic Restaino, who also owns Cuban Pete's. Whether it reopens under his hand or someone else's, records list him as the registered agent, which is the kind of detail that only means something if you already know the name.
Here is the pace, laid out by month:
- April: Insomnia Cookies opens at 332 Bloomfield Avenue; Brick + Dough debuts a walk-up Slice Window at 110 Walnut Street; Oggi Gelato signage appears at 40 Church Street
- April to May: Fascino, a Montclair fixture for two decades, gives way to Gioia Mia, opened by two of Fascino's own former staff including executive chef Logan Ramirez
- May: Tasca, Sardela, and OddFellows all open within the same few weeks, with Hummus Republic joining the strip around the same stretch
- June: Ju-Ichi opens and Ani Ramen adds sushi, both on the same short stretch of Bloomfield Avenue
- Ongoing: Mexicali Rose signage goes up with no confirmed date yet
Not every storefront gets a second act this quickly. The building at 619 through 631 Bloomfield Avenue has sat empty since The Office Beer Bar & Grill closed in 2019. The nonprofit MESH used the space to feed people experiencing food insecurity until a burst pipe in February forced them out. Montclair's Planning Board voted 6 to 2 in April to recommend the property for a redevelopment designation, which could unlock new building standards and tax incentives, but the Township Council still has to approve it. Even on a street this fast, some corners take years to turn.
Ferry Street Runs On A Different Clock
Six miles east, the Ironbound operates on none of that urgency. The neighborhood packs more than 170 restaurants into roughly four square miles, according to the Ironbound Business Improvement District, and Ferry Street is where most of them live. But new arrivals there are rare enough that they still get individually noticed, because the anchors have been in place since before most of Bloomfield Avenue's new tenants were born.
Seabra's Marisqueira has served Portuguese seafood on Ferry Street since 1989, the first restaurant in the neighborhood to specialize in it, and its octopus is still what people order first. Nasto's Old World Desserts has sold Italian pastries at 236 Jefferson Street since 1939, when Frank Nasto opened it with his wife Angelina after arriving from Italy. Teixeira's Bakery now runs three locations across the neighborhood and its custard tart is the reason people plan a whole afternoon around one bakery stop.
NJ Monthly's most recent guide to the neighborhood, published this spring, credits the Iberian immigrant community, Portuguese, Spanish, and Basque, with most of the flavors that define the area, a point made by Antonio Valla, cofounder of the culinary tour company Have You Met Newark. That is not a scene that reinvents itself every season. It is a scene that got its identity decades ago and has spent the years since deepening it rather than replacing it.
The difference between these two streets is not that one is better. It is that one runs on turnover and the other runs on tenure, and knowing which is which changes what you expect to find when you show up hungry.
What Actually Connects Them
The two speeds meet in the county's parks. The Essex County Free SummerMusic Concert Series has been running since June 16 and continues through August 22, with stops that stitch the whole map together, Weequahic Park and Branch Brook Park in Newark, Watsessing Park in Bloomfield, and Brookdale Park, which sits directly on the Bloomfield and Montclair line, close enough to the restaurant boom that a concert night and a Bloomfield Avenue dinner can be the same evening without much of a drive. Earlier this month, on August 8, Monte Irvin Orange Park in Orange hosted a full Caribbean Festival as part of the same series, a different food tradition again, folded into the same county calendar, with the concert series itself running for five more days after this one.
There is a smaller version of the same story happening in South Orange, where The Able Baker, a Maplewood bakery known for its cookies and scones, is opening a second, larger location this summer as part of the new 4th + Valley development, with counter service and both indoor and outdoor seating. One bakery, one town over, taking the leap that Bloomfield Avenue's newest restaurants take every few weeks and that Ferry Street's oldest ones took only once, decades ago.
If you live in Essex County, the useful takeaway is not which street to root for. It is that the county rewards paying attention to both. A single walk down Bloomfield Avenue this month will show you a restaurant scene that looks nothing like it did in March. A single meal on Ferry Street will remind you why some things in this county have not needed to change in forty years. Both are true at the same time, in the same nine towns, and that is a more interesting fact about the place than either street tells you on its own.
Whether you're weighing a move within Essex County or just want a local team who actually pays attention to what's changing block by block, The Meena Patel Group can walk you through what a given address really buys, no matter which side of the county you end up on.
