The Montclair History Center Just Started Giving Tours of a Restaurant Scene That's Still Opening

Walk lower Bloomfield Avenue this week and you'll pass at least four storefronts that didn't exist the last time you thought about it seriously. That's the strange part. Most of us stop registering a block once we've walked it enough times. The coffee shop is the coffee shop. The corner spot is the corner spot. Then one day you notice the awning is different, the smell coming out the door is different, and you realize you've been walking past a total changeover without clocking it.

Here's what tells you it's not just you: the Montclair History Center, an institution built to preserve the town's past, has started running walking tours about what's happening on this stretch right now. On August 22, the History Center is co-leading a three-hour walk with Chow Town Food Tours from the base of the hill up to Church Street, a partnership between the two organizations returning for another year, stopping at restaurants that in some cases have been open only since spring. The tour's own description calls it a look at Montclair's "hyper-local culinary renaissance." That's an unusual thing for a historical society to build a program around while the business in question is still finding its footing.

What used to be there

The turnover on this specific run of blocks isn't gradual. It's the kind of thing you can map storefront by storefront.

Two of those closures had been fixtures long enough to outlast most retail leases in town. Oasis ran for two decades before closing in December 2025. The DaVinci's space held one pizzeria for more than 25 years before the team behind Dan & Day's signed on to bring in Farmhouse Fried Chicken. When a business that's been in the same spot since before most current residents moved in closes and a new concept takes the lease within months, that's not a coincidence of timing. That's a corridor where the market is confident enough to bet on food, specifically, as the higher-value use of the storefront.

The walk, in order

If you trace the same route the History Center is using for its August tour, the density becomes obvious in a way a list can't quite capture.

Starting near the South End, at 401 Orange Road, Pig & Butter held its ribbon-cutting this past Friday, August 7, with Mayor Dr. Renee Baskerville in attendance, followed by live music. That kicked off a three-day soft opening that ran through Sunday, August 9, with regular service, dinner Wednesday through Sunday and brunch Friday through Sunday, beginning this Wednesday, August 12. Chef and owner Sherry Grimes is a familiar name to longtime residents. She built her following at Anderson's 1949 on Glenridge Avenue before relocating her Lower East Side restaurant to Montclair. When asked what it felt like to come back, she kept it simple.

"It feels good to be back home."

Next door to the dinner room, a separate coffeehouse and eatery under the same roof will serve breakfast and lunch sandwiches alongside a wine list built around Unionville Vineyards.

Moving up Bloomfield Avenue, Hummus Republic now occupies the former Plaza Convenience space at 412 Bloomfield, and Insomnia Cookies opened at 332 Bloomfield in April, keeping late hours that run until 1 or 3 a.m. depending on the night. At 571 Bloomfield, on the corner of Maple Plaza, Sardela opened May 8 in the old Guerriero Gelato space, its blue-and-white exterior a clear nod to the Aegean menu inside. Continue to 664 Bloomfield and you hit Campofiore, which opened in late March under chef Dan Drohan, who spent 16 years as executive chef at Otto Enoteca Pizzeria in New York and helped launch Eataly Flatiron before landing here.

The walk ends, as the History Center's own tour does, at Church Street, where Oggi Gelato is set to open in the old Oasis boutique space. It will be the brand's first New Jersey location, brought to the United States by Maurizio and Graziano Ricci of the Romanacci restaurant group.

That's roughly a mile and a half, base of the hill to Church Street, the same distance the walking tour covers. None of it required a car.

Why a historical society is treating this as current events

Most of what the Montclair History Center normally programs looks backward by design: guided tours through the old section of Rosedale Cemetery, private tours of the Crane House and Historic YWCA. Pairing that kind of institution with a food tour company to walk people through restaurants that have been open for weeks, not decades, is a different kind of programming choice. It suggests the pace of change on this block has crossed some threshold where the organization decided the story was worth telling while it's still being written, rather than waiting for the retrospective version in five years.

That distinction matters if you live here. A single new restaurant opening is just a restaurant opening. A cluster of five or six concepts landing on the same three-block run inside of about four months, dense enough that a heritage nonprofit builds a $95-per-person tour around it, is a different kind of signal. It means the corridor has enough foot traffic and enough interest from operators with real résumés, not chains, but people like Drohan, with more than 20 years in New York City kitchens, and Grimes, a classically trained French chef returning to a neighborhood that already knew her name, that betting on a Montclair storefront right now reads as a reasonable business decision rather than a risk.

The rest of August moves around the same three blocks

The restaurant openings aren't happening in isolation. They're stacked against a calendar that keeps funneling people to the same stretch.

First Fridays at Lackawanna Station run monthly, shops staying open late and vendors setting up through the building, the kind of low-key evening that turns into dinner at whatever's newest on Bloomfield. The Montclair Jazz Festival's Downtown Jamboree and Block Party lands this Saturday, August 15, at Lackawanna Station, with a lineup that includes Spanish Harlem Orchestra, Dianne Reeves, the Take Me to the River New Orleans All-Stars, and Patrice Rushen. A block party of that size pulls foot traffic straight down Bloomfield Avenue past every storefront on this list.

Then, a week later, the History Center's own tour retraces the same ground on foot, this time with someone narrating why it matters.

What this actually tells a resident

If you've lived in Montclair for a while, you've watched restaurants come and go before. What's different this time isn't the volume of openings. It's that the town's own historical institution looked at the current moment and decided it was significant enough to build a public program around before the dust settled. That's not something you get from a press release or a "new businesses" roundup. It's a local organization making a judgment call about what counts as history in real time, and putting Bloomfield Avenue's restaurant scene on that list months after the fact would have been the safe choice. Doing it now, mid-renovation, mid-soft-opening, is the more interesting one.

Next time you walk past the old Oasis space and see gelato cases going in, or catch the smell of something new from the Pig & Butter kitchen on your way to the train, you're not imagining the pace of change. Someone whose job is tracking Montclair's history already noticed it too.

If Bloomfield Avenue's evolution has you thinking about what your own corner of Montclair is worth in a market like this one, The Wright Group offers a complimentary home valuation grounded in the same block-by-block attention we bring to everything else in this town.