Montclair’s Greatest Tables
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The Top 5 Montclair Restaurants
MM by Morimoto
MM by Morimoto opened in July 2023 at 193 Glenridge Avenue, one block south of Bloomfield Avenue in Montclair Center, as a full collaboration between Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto and the Montclair Hospitality Group (the team behind Faubourg's New York and Montclair locations and the wider Montclair restaurant resurgence). The room is the town's most architecturally ambitious — a 130-cover space across a sushi counter, a robatayaki bar, a main dining room, and a separate cocktail lounge that runs late on Friday and Saturday until 2 AM. The chef's counter, seating nine, is the centerpiece of the room and the most coveted reservation in suburban New Jersey.
Faubourg
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.
Sam's Table
Sam's Table opened in 2023 at 377 Bloomfield Avenue, a few blocks west of Faubourg in the heart of Montclair Center, as the personal project of chef Sam Marvin — a Per Se and Frantzén alumnus who relocated to Essex County after a decade in New York and Stockholm fine-dining kitchens. The dining room is intentionally small: 26 seats across a single rectangular room with an open kitchen pass along one wall, oiled-walnut tables set without cloths, low-volume lighting, and a quiet sound stage that lets the kitchen's pace set the room's tempo. There is one seating per evening.
Raymond's
Raymond's has anchored 28 Church Street since 2001 — the pedestrianised crosswalk that runs perpendicular to Bloomfield Avenue in the centre of Montclair — and has earned its position as the town's most reliable all-occasion table across two decades of careful operation. The dining room runs to about 120 covers across a main room, a long marble-topped bar, and a glass-fronted patio that opens to Church Street in season. The space is warm and well-worn in the best sense: bistro-style banquette seating, soft incandescent lighting, framed black-and-white photographs of mid-century Montclair, an extensive list of daily specials chalked on a large board above the bar.
Turtle + The Wolf
Turtle + The Wolf has occupied 622 Valley Road in Upper Montclair since 2014, a fifteen-minute drive north of Montclair Center along Valley Road and a fundamentally different feel from the Bloomfield Avenue scene — closer to a small neighbourhood Brooklyn chef-owner room than the bigger downtown Montclair operations. The dining room is intentionally small: about 50 covers across a main room with banquette seating along one wall, an open kitchen pass at the back, a small sidewalk patio that opens during the warmer months, and a careful sound design that lets the room run quiet through dinner. Chef-owner Lauren Hirschberg (Chez Panisse, the Marlow Collective in Brooklyn) cooks every dinner service.
Dining in Montclair
The Dining Culture
Montclair's dining culture has quietly become the most serious in suburban New Jersey, helped by a generation of Manhattan and Brooklyn restaurant veterans who relocated across the Hudson during the 2010s and brought their hospitality standards with them. The town's six-square-mile footprint now holds a Michelin-trained French brasserie on Bloomfield Avenue, an Iron Chef Morimoto omakase room on Glenridge, a sub-thirty-seat tasting-menu kitchen with Scandinavian sensibilities, and a clutch of chef-driven New American rooms that would sit comfortably in Cobble Hill or the Lower East Side. The cooking is metropolitan in ambition without the Manhattan markup, and the diners — a mix of media, finance, and academia who commute east each morning — bring real palates to the table.
Best Neighbourhoods
The Bloomfield Avenue spine, running from Watchung Plaza in the north down through Montclair Center to South Park Street, holds most of the senior addresses: Faubourg, Sam's Table, and the densest cluster of chef-driven rooms. Glenridge Avenue, a block south of Bloomfield in Montclair Center, holds MM by Morimoto. Church Street — the pedestrianised crosswalk one block east — holds Raymond's and the Wellmont Theater dining cluster. Upper Montclair (Valley Road north of Watchung Avenue) holds Turtle + The Wolf and the small Upper Montclair business-district restaurants. The South End neighbourhood, between South Park and the Bloomfield border, holds the newer wave of chef-driven openings.
Reservations & Practical Tips
MM by Morimoto books three to four weeks ahead for weekend dinner and is the hardest table in town; Faubourg, Sam's Table, and Raymond's two to three weeks; Turtle + The Wolf about a week. Lunch and brunch are widely available across all five — Saturday and Sunday brunch at Faubourg and MM by Morimoto have become the town's signature mid-morning bookings. The DeCamp 33 express bus runs from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan in approximately forty-five minutes; NJ Transit Montclair-Boonton Line runs from Hoboken and Newark. Parking on Bloomfield Avenue is metered through 9 PM; the South Park Street and Church Street municipal lots are the most reliable for dinner.
Dress Code & Tipping
MM by Morimoto and Faubourg are smart casual — jackets welcomed but not enforced, and most tables run business-casual on weekdays and smart-casual on weekends. Sam's Table, Raymond's, and Turtle + The Wolf are casual-smart. Standard New York-metro tipping applies: 20% on the pre-tax total at fine-dining tables, 22–25% at the omakase counter at MM by Morimoto. Service is bilingual at Faubourg (French and English) and at MM by Morimoto (Japanese and English) at the counter.