What could be better than dinner at New Jersey’s best restaurants? We’ll tell you: a multi-course, up-close-and-personal meal at their exclusive, insider-y tasting dinners.
Read on for details on the Garden State’s most fabulous chef-finessed feasts.
Reservations—and an appetite—are essential.
[RELATED: The 40 Best Restaurants in New Jersey]
Fiorentini, Rutherford
“I cook with the world’s best ingredients,” chef Antonio De Ieso declares. “They’re from Italy and New Jersey.” The Florentine native is now the kitchen magician at Fiorentini, one of NJM’s rare three-and-a-half-star restaurants. If you’ve ever wanted ringside seats at a brilliant Italian chef’s kitchen to learn the secrets of intense flavors and luscious textures, Fiorentini’s chef’s table is the ticket. De Ieso doesn’t stray from his perch opposite two to four lucky diners at a black Carrara marble counter that straddles dining room and kitchen, where he puts the finishing touches on table-bound plates, including every one of the chef’s-table courses.
Yet this laser-focused chef keeps his cool and his charm, chatting with chef’s-table diners about the legacy of each dish—from tortellini with 24-year-aged balsamic to NJ farm-raised venison with chanterelles and chestnuts—and its place “here in the global dining festival that is New Jersey,” he says. This intensely personal dinner engages every one of your senses, as well as your mind. Seven courses, $195; BYO.
98 Park Avenue; 973-721-3404
Heirloom Kitchen, Old Bridge
The chef’s counter at Heirloom Kitchen. Photo: Courtesy of Heirloom Kitchen
Locally beloved and nationally hailed, Top Chef icon David Viana is synonymous with New Jersey dining. His flagship, Heirloom Kitchen, is much more than a restaurant. It’s a monument to the power of food: making it, teaching it, relishing it, forming communities around it. For half the week, Heirloom Kitchen gives classes to ambitious home cooks. On weekends, the sunny, restful space is overtaken by in-the-know restaurant-goers. The four-course prix-fixe is the sole menu option. It’s exotically multicultural and exquisitely micro-seasonal, flaunting Viana’s mastery of flavors and his confident balance of harmony and surprise. Vegetarians and vegans are welcome.
A seven-course tasting dinner is served on Sundays only at the bi-level chef’s counter, offering 16 seats at either the chef island or the chef’s pass, the food’s final stop. Reservations are taken up to two months in advance for two to eight seats. (Repeat diners often request pass seats 7 and 8.) Four courses, $96; seven-course Sunday chef’s tasting, $128; BYO or purchase Alba Vineyard’s Jersey wines by the bottle.
3853 Route 516; 732-727-9444
Viaggio, Wayne
The chef’s bar at Viaggio. Photo: Courtesy of Viaggio
It’s not easy to keep up with rockstar chef Robbie Felice, the restless innovator behind, most recently, pastaRAMEN, Montclair’s Italian-Japanese sensation. His home base and first restaurant, Viaggio, serves contemporary Italian dishes that he says are the essence of uncluttered “intentional cooking, in which every ingredient has something to say.”
“We call our chef’s table here the chef’s bar for its hip, social, insider-y vibe,” Felice says. It’s daring, too, often doubling as a lab for new concepts and dishes from Felice and his culinary director, Zach Parrinello. “The chef’s bar is where pastaRAMEN premiered,” explains Felice. “Diners got a sneak preview of a menu that people talk about now.”
Through this fall, he says, Viaggio’s chef’s bar is “a test kitchen” for Bar Mutz, Felice’s new trattoria and “mozzarella extravaganza” slated to open in Westwood (where he also owns Osteria Crescendo). What you’ll encounter at Viaggio’s five-seat chef’s bar is an eating adventure that “spotlights mutz’s many personalities,” he says, “taking you from amuse-bouche to dessert.” Nine courses, $110; BYO.
1055 Hamburg Turnpike; 973-706-7277
Red Horse by David Burke at Bernards Inn, Bernardsville
The chef’s table at Red Horse by David Burke at Bernards Inn. Photo: Courtesy of David Burke Hospitality Management
The newest of ubiquitous chef David Burke’s nine Jersey eateries, this restaurant is set in an inviting and elegant 125-year-old hotel that has been reinvigorated as a Bernardsville hub.
The most intense gastronomic immersion available is its chef’s-table dinner, served in a semi-private corner of the elegant lobby. The table itself is remarkable: the biggest disk of tempered glass in the entire state, set on the sculptural root of a gnarled rosewood. Up to 12 revelers can customize a mix-and-match menu—say, an assortment of sushi with executive chef Daryle Dingcong’s beautifully presented dishes, alongside Burke classics like lobster dumplings, clothesline bacon, bison short ribs and “tin can” cake. “Just call and ask,” Burke says. “If I’m there, talk to me.” Six courses for $100, with an optional $40 wine pairing; ten courses for $120, with an optional $70 wine pairing.
27 Minebrook Road; 908-766-0002
Nunzio by Chef Michael DeLone, Collingswood
The chef’s table at Nunzio by Chef Michael DeLone. Photo: Courtesy of Nunzio by Chef Michael DeLone
Nunzio showcases chef Michael DeLone’s refined Italian home cooking; it’s what you’d eat if home was a Tuscan villa and dinner a nightly ritual, fervently cooked and passionately savored.
Nunzio’s chef’s-table meal adds a layer of celebratory joy. The intrigue begins early, with a dash through the lively kitchen to a corner table, bookable for six to 12 gourmets. “This is a very exclusive experience in Nunzio’s heart of hearts, where diners engage with our team and with me,” DeLone says. “Chef’s-table meals often mark a special occasion—but the menu is an occasion of its own.”
Seasonal recipes flaunt special ingredients, such as black and white truffles shaved onto creamy gnocchi, or house-made pasta lavished with wild-boar ragu. “Our BYO status makes the chef’s table all the more festive,” says DeLone. “We’ll even create a menu in advance to pair with special wine you’re bringing.” Seven courses, $100; BYO.
706 Haddon Avenue; 856-858-9840
Stone House, Warren
The chef’s room at Stone House. Photo: Courtesy of Landmark Hospitality
Renowned Jersey chef David Drake is clearly at home in the Frank Lloyd Wright-style Stone House, where he infuses a farm-fresh American bistro menu with his suave, globally influenced flavors and textures. Pork belly goes Pacific Rim with kimchi and a soy-ponzu glaze. Italian crostini accompanies a French cassoulet appetizer. Agnolotti are sublimely brightened by Adriatic lemon ricotta.
Stone House’s “chef’s room” looks into the kitchen through a picture window, “so you’re in your private space but feel a part of the cooking crew,” notes Drake, who likes to “pop in and out of the chef’s room through the meal.” Its ever-evolving menu is as playful as the dining room’s, but heightened with deluxe trappings. Tournedos Rossini—“a vintage haute-cuisine French dish that’s always in style with me,” Drake says—invokes house-baked brioche, Prime filet mignon tenderized in a dry-aging locker, and an ample topping of foie gras. The fisherman’s stew is like bouillabaisse, “but with lobster and our garden’s vegetables and herbs,” Drake says. “Our kitchen loves cooking chef’s-room meals. For them and for the diners, the mood is peak experience.” Five courses for $92, with a $35 optional wine pairing.
50 Stirling Road; 908-754-1222
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