Two restaurants opened in downtown Tenafly under the same ownership within about two years of each other. One took over a 230-year-old house on the National Register of Historic Places, ran DJ sets on Friday and Saturday nights, and closed permanently earlier this year. The other took a plain storefront on Highwood Avenue, skipped the ambiance almost entirely, and now sends roughly nine out of every ten orders out the door in a to-go bag. The same person built both. What happened between them is a better read on what downtown Tenafly actually wants on a Tuesday night than any list of new openings could give you.
The House That Was Supposed to Anchor Everything
Jonathan Krieger moved his family to Tenafly during the pandemic and, by his own account, loved almost everything about it except one thing: there was nowhere downtown that functioned as a real gathering spot, the kind of place where you run into a neighbor and end up staying for a second round. Krieger runs Cure Companies, a venture group that has built brands across food, wellness, and hospitality, including a stretch as co-founder of Bluestone Lane. Rather than wait for someone else to fix Tenafly's downtown, he got himself elected president of the Tenafly Chamber of Commerce and used the role to push a restaurant proposal through.
That restaurant was Spring House, which opened in May 2024 inside the Demarest-Lyle House at 91 West Clinton Avenue, a stone home built in the 1790s and recognized as Tenafly's oldest surviving residence. The concept leaned into that history: onsite pasta, globally inspired plates, a bar with weekend DJ sets, and a stated ambition to give Tenafly something that felt like a city restaurant without the trip into the city. It got real attention, both for the food and for the setting. It also, according to industry trade coverage this spring, closed permanently after about two years in business.
The Chicken Shop That Replaced the Ambition
What replaced the idea of Spring House, at least in Krieger's own portfolio, is Rosto Chicken, which opened earlier this year at 4 Highwood Avenue. There is no historic house, no DJ booth, no framing around becoming a cultural anchor. It is a wood-fired rotisserie concept, and by Krieger's own description one of the only fully wood-fired indoor rotisseries operating anywhere in the country. A whole chicken runs about $29, a half is $17, and sides run around $6 each, which puts a family dinner in the neighborhood of $50 to $60. The menu came together with chef Nitzan Raz, whose background includes kitchens like SushiSamba, Nobu Tribeca, and Mesa Grill, which is a fair amount of culinary pedigree applied to a $29 chicken.
The number that matters more than the menu is this: about 90 percent of Rosto's business so far has been off-premise. People are calling it in or ordering delivery, not booking a table. Seating was added almost as an afterthought. On LinkedIn, Krieger described the approach behind Rosto in terms that read almost like a correction to Spring House's ambitions, one box, one city, one step at a time, with pace treated as a feature rather than a limitation. Whether or not that framing is fair to Spring House, the practical shift is real. One restaurant tried to be a destination. The other is built to disappear into a weeknight routine, and so far that is the one still standing.
The Rest of Highwood Avenue Is Quieter, and Busier
Zoom out from Krieger's two restaurants and the same pattern shows up elsewhere on the block. Massa Pasta opened this spring at 33 Washington Street, run by chef-owner Yosif and his wife Sesil, making handmade pasta from semolina and 00 flour in small batches, with a gluten-free option and a setup that works as both a sit-down meal and a retail counter where you grab fresh pasta to cook at home. It is open six days a week and closed Tuesdays. A few doors down, AWE & WONDER at 35 Highwood Avenue has built a following as a design-focused coffee shop with single-origin coffee, matcha, and hojicha, open early on weekdays and closed Sundays. Around the corner, Tenafly Gourmet Farm at 15 Highwood Avenue stocks a mix of fresh produce, seafood, and international groceries spanning Israeli, Korean, and Eastern European staples, open daily from 8 in the morning until 8 at night.
None of these are destination restaurants in the Spring House sense. They are places built to be used, not visited. And then there is Axia Taverna, at 18 Piermont Road, which has been serving Greek food in Tenafly since 2006 and has picked up three-star reviews from both the Bergen Record and Crain's New York along the way. Axia didn't need to reinvent itself to survive two decades of turnover around it. It picked a lane and stayed there, which starts to look less like an accident and more like the actual formula for lasting downtown.
The Rhythm Nobody Advertises
Underneath the restaurant openings and closures, downtown Tenafly runs on a schedule that has nothing to do with any single operator's five-year plan.
- The Tenafly Farmers' Market sets up at the municipal lot on Washington Avenue and Tenafly Road every Sunday from 10am to 2pm, running from mid-May through late October.
- The Borough of Tenafly's Fall Festival street fair is set for Thursday, October 15, 2026, from 4pm to 10pm at Downtown and Huyler Park, with a rain date the following Thursday, October 22. The event is coordinated with the Tenafly Chamber of Commerce, the same organization Krieger led through 2025.
Neither of these needs a chef with a Nobu résumé or a historic house to work. They just need to happen on the same weekend, at the same time, every year, which is its own kind of proof that the parts of downtown Tenafly that last aren't the ones chasing a moment. They're the ones built into a calendar residents already keep.
What the Pattern Actually Tells You
Downtown Tenafly isn't cycling through restaurants at random, and it isn't simply gentrifying in the generic sense either. It is running something closer to a live experiment, block by block, on what a household here will actually build into a Tuesday. A 230-year-old house with a DJ and a story about elevating the local palate got two years. A rotisserie chicken shop with almost no seating is on pace to outlast it. A pasta counter that lets you eat in or take dinner home fits the same logic. A coffee shop that opens at 7am on weekdays fits it too. And a Greek restaurant that has quietly done the same thing for nineteen years without a rebrand is still the benchmark everyone else on Highwood Avenue is measured against, whether they know it or not.
If you live in Tenafly, this is worth watching not because any of it is dramatic, but because it is the clearest signal available for what this particular downtown is actually for. Not a stage. A routine.
If you're curious how these small shifts in Tenafly's daily rhythm connect to the bigger picture of the neighborhood, from what's opening on Highwood to how the town's housing stock reflects its character, Mia Hur keeps a close eye on both. Let's Connect.
