The Restaurant
Faubourg occupies a transformed historic building at 544 Bloomfield Avenue in the centre of Montclair, opened in 2018 by Manhattan restaurant veterans Marc Murphy (Landmarc, Ditch Plains) and Stephen Distler (Knickerbocker Hospitality). The dining room is the most architecturally ambitious in Montclair — a 140-seat indoor-outdoor space across a main dining room, a long zinc-top bar, a glass-roofed atrium that opens to an outdoor terrace in season, and a private dining room for parties up to 16. The interior is sleek and modern but unmistakably French in its references: marble, brass, framed posters, banquette seating in a deep oxblood leather.
The cooking is classical French brasserie executed with metropolitan polish: a textbook Croque Monsieur at lunch, a five-onion soup gratinée, escargots with garlic-parsley butter, steak frites with a proper béarnaise, a roasted duck breast with cherry gastrique, branzino with fennel and Pernod, a daily crab benedict that has built a Sunday-brunch following of its own. The pastry programme is the room's quiet star — butter-laminated croissants made in-house, a tarte tatin served warm at dinner, a chocolate mousse in the classical Parisian register.
The wine list runs to approximately 250 references with serious depth in Burgundy and the Loire, a careful Champagne grower-producer section, and a by-the-glass programme that lets a diner taste through three or four French regions across a single evening. The cocktail bar runs a classics-first card — proper Manhattans, French 75s, a serious Negroni — and stays open well past the dinner service. For a date or a quiet client dinner that wants real Manhattan-brasserie standards on the west side of the Hudson, Faubourg is the default move.
Why This Is Montclair’s First Date Pick
For a first date in suburban New Jersey — and Faubourg has become the town's signature first-date room over the seven years since opening — the formula is precise. The room is dimly lit and conversation-friendly without being intimate to the point of pressure. The classical French menu structure gives the table a natural shape (apéritif, starter, main, dessert) and removes any awkward menu-navigation work. The cocktail bar is comfortable for a pre-dinner drink and forgiving for a post-dinner stay. The pricing lands serious-but-defensible at around $80 per person, and the bar's late-evening run means the date can extend naturally without a relocation. For an early-stage relationship that wants the evening to feel deliberate, Faubourg is the textbook Montclair answer.
Leave a Review
Registered members get published by default; guest reviews are moderated first.