Amanda's Restaurant

The Restaurant

Amanda's Restaurant has occupied the 1885 Federal brownstone at 908 Washington Street since opening in 1991, making it Hoboken's longest-running independent fine-dining room and one of the most consistently Zagat-cited restaurants in New Jersey. The building was restored to its parlour-floor configuration: a small front bar room with a pressed-tin ceiling, a main dining room of about thirty seats with a working fireplace and an original stained-glass window over the streetside banquette, and an enclosed garden room at the back used for private parties of up to twenty-four. The dining floors are reached up a short flight of original brownstone steps from Washington Street.

Executive chef Caesar Valera runs a French-and-Mediterranean menu with a seasonal turn. Starters include a salt-baked beet salad with whipped goat cheese, a beef tartare with quail-egg yolk, a charred octopus with romesco, and the kitchen's signature lamb skewers with cucumber-mint yoghurt — a Zagat-noted dish for over a decade. Mains include a herb-crusted rack of lamb, a pan-roasted Long Island duck breast with cherry gastrique, a daily fresh-fish preparation, and a slow-braised short rib over horseradish mashed potato. The Sunday brunch programme — eggs Benedict, a brioche French toast, a Maine lobster Cobb salad, beef empanadas — has run essentially unchanged for two decades and is a Hudson County standby.

The wine list runs about one hundred and twenty references with a careful by-the-glass programme and a small section of half-bottles for two-person dinners. Service is led by long-tenured staff who know how to step away at the right moment — a pacing skill that has carried more proposals than any other room in the city. A bartender who has been there since the early 2000s mixes a guava margarita that has its own city-wide following. Amanda's is the Hoboken table to choose when the evening is the occasion rather than the food alone, and Valera's kitchen ensures the food does not let the room down.