Jersey City’s Greatest Tables
5 restaurants listedGet the complete Jersey City dining guide.
New openings, reservation tips, and editor picks — updated quarterly. Free to join.
$ under $40 · $$ $40–$80 · $$$ $80–$150 · $$$$ $150+ per person
Best for First Date in Jersey City
Best for Business Dinner in Jersey City
The Top 5 Jersey City Restaurants
87 Sussex
87 Sussex opened in 2022 inside a restored 19th-century brownstone in Paulus Hook, the cobblestoned historic-district grid south of Grand Street and four blocks from the Exchange Place waterfront. The dining room — a single sixty-cover space across the parlour floor, with a smaller private room of fourteen at the rear — runs in restrained Greenwich-Village fine-dining mode: white tablecloths, low Murano-style lighting, a marble-topped bar with eight stools facing an open pass. Executive chef Brian Walter spent two decades through Le Cirque 2000, Lespinasse, and Guastavino's before opening 87 Sussex as his first solo project, and is an honorary member of the James Beard Foundation.
Razza Pizza Artigianale
Razza Pizza Artigianale opened on Grove Street in 2012 — owner Dan Richer and partner Fred Shandler — and reset the regional understanding of what pizza could be. The dining room is a single seventy-cover storefront with an exposed wood-fired Acunto oven at the back, open kitchen, polished concrete floors, and the kind of unselfconscious neighbourhood format that the cooking quietly contradicts. Richer trained as a serious obsessive — flour milling from heritage wheat, San Marzano tomatoes from a single Campanian farm, mozzarella made fresh each morning — and his book The Joy of Pizza (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) remains the most carefully researched modern pizza text in English.
Battello
Battello occupies the Newport Yacht Club pier on Washington Boulevard, a five-minute walk from the Newport PATH station and directly opposite Lower Manhattan across the Hudson. The dining room — a two-hundred-cover glass-and-steel pavilion that cantilevers over the water — and its outdoor terrace deliver the metro area's most uninterrupted sight line to the World Trade Center skyline. The restaurant reopened in 2024 after an 18-month pier-engineering closure and immediately returned to its position as the city's headline waterfront destination.
Madame
Madame opened in 2023 in the basement of a 4th Street brownstone, replacing the long-running Madame Claude in the same space, and immediately registered as the city's most carefully constructed wine destination. The room — a single forty-cover basement format with exposed brick, banquette seating, and an eight-stool marble bar called Panache at the entrance — runs in the deliberate hidden-gem mode of a senior Parisian brasserie. The beverage director tasted three hundred bottles before opening and built a list where every bottle is exclusive to Madame within the city.
Luna Restaurant
Luna Restaurant opened on Grove Street in 2019 inside the restored Hudson Bank building — a 1920s vaulted-ceiling banking hall with the original marble teller counters preserved along one wall. The dining room runs about a hundred covers across the main hall, with a separate twenty-cover private room in what was once the bank vault. The cooking is unambiguously Italian — handmade pasta, dry-aged steaks, wood-grilled fish — and has settled into the role of Downtown's most reliable serious dinner for groups of six to twelve.
Dining in Jersey City
The Dining Culture
Jersey City's dining culture has, in fifteen years, completed one of the fastest gentrification arcs in American restaurant history. Five PATH stops from the World Trade Center, the city's downtown grid filled first with displaced Manhattan refugees after September 11 and then — with the post-2010 high-rise build — with a young professional class that demanded a serious restaurant scene of its own. The signature of Jersey City cooking is ambition at value: kitchens that would be one-star contenders in Manhattan operate in Downtown and Newport at half the rent, with cooks who can run lobster cocktail and quail-egg ravioli at $90-per-person ceilings that the same plate would clear $180 across the river. The dining culture skews young, professional, and confident.
Best Neighbourhoods
Downtown — Grove Street, Newark Avenue, the pedestrianised Grove Street plaza — holds the densest cluster: Razza (six-time James Beard-nominated chef Dan Richer's wood-fired pizzeria with a three-star New York Times review), Luna Restaurant in the converted Hudson Bank building on Grove, and Madame's basement French bistro on 4th Street. Paulus Hook, the historic waterfront grid south of Grand Street, holds 87 Sussex in a restored brownstone — the city's most polished fine-dining room. Newport, the post-2000 high-rise corridor along Washington Boulevard, holds Battello on the actual yacht-club pier with a fifteen-minute walk to the Holland Tunnel. The Heights, north of the Pulaski Skyway, holds the next-generation indie kitchens — Sam A.M., Latham House, Sapthagiri — that the dining press hasn't yet caught up with.
Reservations & Practical Tips
87 Sussex books two to three weeks ahead for Friday and Saturday dinner; weekdays available within a few days. Razza takes walk-ins for the bar; tables book three to four days ahead. Madame books a week out for prime time, especially the small-room basement format. Battello takes Resy reservations a week ahead and books up entirely for waterfront-sunset slots in summer. Luna takes OpenTable reservations one to three days ahead. PATH from World Trade Center to Grove Street runs every five minutes off-peak — twelve-minute ride — and is the only practical inbound route on weekends. Driving across the Holland Tunnel during dinner hours is to be avoided. Uber from Manhattan runs $25–$45 depending on traffic.
Dress Code & Tipping
87 Sussex runs smart — jackets welcomed but not required, and the room sets the tone without enforcing it. Battello reads smart-casual with a slight Manhattan-waterfront polish. Razza, Luna, and Madame all run on the comfortable side of smart-casual — denim and a serious shirt is the working uniform. Tipping at the senior tier runs the standard 20%; the sommelier teams at 87 Sussex and Battello carry real wine programmes that reward direct conversation. Jersey City has no jacket-required rooms and no formal-attire enforcement — the dress code is set by what the table next to you is wearing, which in 2026 is professional with an evening-out tilt.