Restaurants
Subscribe to this tagBest of Jersey 2010: Food and Drink
We asked our readers to list their favorite places to eat and drink, and boy-howdy did they ever respond. Read on to find out which places are readers feel are the "best" in the state.
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Panico's
Can eating at a particular establishment in New Brunswick be considered a gamble? One of our dining critics certainly thinks so.
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Vine
Vine, a eclectic-menu establishment with a spacious and upscale ambience in Basking Ridge, offers a refreshing Southern Mediterranean option for jaded foodies.
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So Long, "Stringent" Process
Looking back with Ruth Cousineau, test-kitchen director for the late, lamented Gourmet.
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Eno Terra
After earning his stripes with restaurant royalty, chef Chris Albrecht triumphs at home.
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Bona Vita Osteria
This traditional Italian restaurant, which occupies a handsome storefront in downtown Summit, is run by culinary veterans.
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Oceanos
Oceanos, a Greek-accented seafood restaurant in Fair Lawn with a luxury yacht-esque ambience, aims for loftier standards.
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Why Cupid Has Chopsticks in His Quiver
The Chinese Year of the Tiger (4707, not Woods) begins on
Valentine’s Day. Here’s a guide to dumplings and other festive fare. (Photos by Brian Yarvin)
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Food: Iron Bounty
There are many fine Spanish and Portuguese restaurants in Newark’s Ironbound section, so inevitably when you select one to write about, there is dissension.
moreThe Original
A century ago, after crossing the Atlantic, pizza crossed the Hudson and established itself in Trenton as the tomato pie—and you can still get the real deal.
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Searching For The Soul of Jersey Pizza
This month, we attempted to answer a question that has befuddled philosophers for centuries—does pizza have a soul? Laura Schenone believes it might.
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Celebrity Pizza Picks
New Jersey-based celebrities dish about they favorite pizza joints around the state.
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25 Perfect Pizzas
We asked for your suggestions, then we started to eat—and eat. We logged more than a thousand miles, and concluded
that these are the pies to pine for.
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Speak Quickly, And Carry a Big Spoon
Whether cooking at her Hoboken restaurants (or at the White House), hunting edible lizards in Peru or hairy chayotes in Weehawken, Maricel Presilla is an ebullient culinary force.
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Big Wing Wah
Can a Chinese and Japanese restaurant in Hillsborough, whose name translates to "big success," make a splash on the dining scene?
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Ebbitt Room
Curtis Bashaw recruited chef Lucas Manteca to run the Ebbitt Room, the AAA Five Diamond Award-winning restaurant at the Virginia Hotel in Cape May.
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Day Trip: Edgewater
A shopping and cultural center along the Hudson.
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Cookbook as Cliffhanger
Restaurant Nicholas’s handsome tome is for kitchens as well as coffee tables.
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Doc's
Builder Don Luisi bids to make his hometown of Sparta synonymous with superb steaks and seafood.
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Fornelletto
A rustic Italian restaurant in the Borgata has developed a convincing wine cellar theme.
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Food: Help On The Side
Daylight savings has come and gone, which means Thanksgiving's right around the corner. You'd love to get into the kitchen and prepare a spectacular meal from soup to nuts, but your schedule's insane.
moreA Soup Kitchen That Turns Out Chefs
Camden's venerable Cathedral Kitchen has been producing some accomplished chefs.
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Tomatoe's
While other Shore restaurants hibernate,
Tomatoe’s in Margate kicks into holiday gear
—and keeps the festive fires burning all winter.
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Witherspoon Grill
When Princeton restaurateur Jack Morrison snapped up a piece of prime real estate on Princeton Library Plaza in 2004 and dropped a substantial sum for the last available liquor license in town, it seemed he had a plan. Turns out, he didn’t. “It took months just to come up with a concept,” he says, laughing. “I like to pick a goal, then figure out the hardest route to get there.”
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Food: Cinnamon and Spice
The aroma is incredible as you enter Cinnamon Indian Restaurant in Morris Plains.
moreZylo
When Zylo opened in March in the new W Hotel in Hoboken (the first W in New Jersey), it was hobbled by amateurish service and no clear identity beyond its slick “Tuscan steakhouse” label. Half a year later, it has emerged from its growing pains as an appealing and even cocky young restaurant.
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Pig Heaven
The Mangalitsa pig has bounced back from near extinction to be prized by foodies for its beefy flavor and luscious fat. The only place Mangalitsas are being raised East of the Mississippi is, you guessed it, New Jersey.
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Food: Lo Fatt Chow
It’s hard to miss the Route 31 billboard for Lo Fatt Chow in the Ringoes/Flemington area-not for its design, but for its name.
moreThe Barkeep's Barkeep
Ray Foley’s recipe for success runs from punch to punch lines.
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Anton's At The Swan
The plush style harkens back to a time before casual was the mantra, but the food is fully contemporary.
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Hoboken's Tastebud Tour
The Hoboken Food Tour offers can't-miss culinary delights fit for the most discriminating palates.
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Farm2Bistro
The term bistro has been so abused it’s easy to forget its original meaning—a small, casual dining spot (originally in France) where locals can eat, drink, socialize, and perhaps enjoy entertainment.
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Equus
It may be immodest, but not altogether inaccurate, for Scott Cutaneo, chef-owner of Equus in Bernardsville, to brand himself Great Scott. The Staten Island native, 41, is something of a celebrity chef, hosting regular “Great Scott” cooking segments on TV’s Fox & Friends and Good Day New York.
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Glad Tidings
As crisp autumn winds begin to blow, grab your favorite sweater and head over to the charming Gladstone Tavern for warm mulled wine, Grandpa Chet’s pumpkin cake, and some neighborly cheer.
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Soulful Stirrings
Consummate queen of cuisine Julia Child once declared, “I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.”
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Pluckemin Inn
After a stressful year, the Pluckemin Inn reemerges with a sterling new executive chef and continuity in other key posts, from pastry chef Joseph Gabriel to owner Gloria LaGrassa.
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Sonic Boom
It began quietly in the fall of 2007 with the opening of Sonic’s first New Jersey location in Waretown. Millville and Rio Grande followed in 2008.
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Blackfish
Blackfish, a breezy, beach-chic establishment in Stone Harbor, serves up New American fare for the beach-going set.
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Topaz Thai
Nearly every Thursday since it opened three years ago, about six interns and residents from the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark have driven north to Belleville for lunch or dinner at Topaz Thai.
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Food: Pick the Blossom
There is a blossom in bloom in a nondescript strip mall on Howard Boulevard in Mt. Arlington.
moreJanice, A Bistro
The Sheridan Café, a circa-1949 Ho-Ho-Kus luncheonette, was bought in 2001 and restored, bistro-style, by locals Janice and John Tinari.
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Shogun Legends
From the moment you enter its castle-like wooden doors, Shogun Legends in Wall showers the senses.
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IndeBlue
Indeblue in Collingswood does not look like your average Indian tandoor house. Small and snug, with only 31 seats, it retains the shiny-blue and hazmat-orange surfaces of its predecessor, an icy-hip crêperie called 5th Corner.
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2009 Readers' and Critics' Restaurant Poll
The results of our 26th Annual Readers’ Choice Restaurant Poll.
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Cucharamama
Maricel Presilla’s Cucharamama (“Mother Spoon”) celebrates traditional South American cooking as lovingly passed down by women at the family hearth.
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Save My Restaurant
Owners learn to be careful what they wish for after inviting Gordon Ramsay and his reality TV series Kitchen Nightmares to right their ships.
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Savor City
Paterson, the one-time Silk City, is a Great Falls of ethnic eating.
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The Wizard of Zod
Why New York wants to grab New Jersey’s hugely talented, most idiosyncratic chef, and why he doesn’t want to leave—yet.
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Andrea Trattoria
If not for the luxury cars crowding the parking lot on Saturday nights, Andrea Trattoria in Newfield would look like any number of South Jersey roadside taverns.
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Controlled Chaos
They say you should never look at a restaurant's kitchen if you want to feel good about eating there.
But what about the back of a restaurant?
moreResto
What is “modern French,” the cuisine of Madison’s year-old Resto? In the hands of chef-owner Robert Ubhaus—an Edison native who trained in Paris, Italy, San Francisco, Long Beach Island, and at New York City’s French Culinary Institute—it’s above all “fine dining without the pretension.”
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Here Comes The Sun
Until yesterday and today, spring looked and felt a lot like what you see here. Click below to see full picture...
moreMatt's Red Rooster Grill
The Red Rooster, a four-and-a-half-year-old restaurant in a converted Victorian in Flemington, is trying hard to bring big city sophistication to Hunterdon’s county seat.
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Oh! Calamares
Long before Miami chefs dreamed up Nuevo Latino fusion in the late 1980s, Peruvians had fashioned their own enduring fusion.
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Deep in the Heart of Jersey
Boyd Lafferty grew up in Cape May, then spent 28 years in the semiconductor business in Austin, Texas. While there he earned a PhD. in international business, but when he returned home in 2004 he was thinking strictly local.
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Kinkis: The Wings Beneath My Belt
A late-night stop in Atlantic City pays off in peerless chicken wings.
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Blu
Zod Arifai serves great food at prices that are simply unfair (to other restaurants that charge more for less).
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Max's Seafood Cafe
One thing that never flusters a 97-year-old restaurant is a culinary fad. So at Max’s—a handsome tavern founded by German immigrant Joseph Fred Leisinger in 1912—you won’t find sous-vide duck breast, tapas, or powdered olive oil.
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La Fusta
Beef cattle are so plentiful in Argentina, the legend goes, that gauchos barely have to reach out to carve a steak from a passing animal. As gruesome as that sounds, it illustrates the point that beef is an even bigger part of the Argentine diet than it is of ours.
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Nisi Estiatorio
The Mourkakos brothers lured chef John Piliouras from Molyvos, the New York restaurant he made famous, to Englewood, where he’s raising Greek cuisine to Olympian heights.
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Oliver A Bistro
Like the European bistros this cozy restaurant seeks to emulate, Oliver has an identity that can be linked directly to its owners.
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Raul's Empanadas Town
Raul Silva grew up in Colombia on his grandmother’s traditional cornmeal-crusted beef and chicken empanadas. When he emigrated to New York City at age 20, he started as a dishwasher in a Bolivian restaurant in Queens and eventually ascended to line cook at two of the jewels in New York’s restaurant crown—Jean-Georges and Daniel.
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Looking Inside Out
If the sign looks like this, you haven't lost, you've won. Buon appetito!
click "read the rest of this post" to see full picture.
moreElevation Burger
Health-conscious fast food.
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The 25 Best Restaurants 2008
Looking for a great restaurant? Check out our critics' top restaurant picks. With fine dining ever finer, our critics and dining editor tackle the difficult task of choosing the 25 best restaurants in NJ.
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Readers' and Critics' Choice - Restaurant Poll Winners 2008
Our critics do a lot of eating, and every August we look back and share the best of the best with you. And you do the same by voting in our Annual Readers' Choice Restaurant Poll. Discover which restaurants we honored and which are your favorites.
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