In June 2025, the owners of Cafe Amici posted a short message to Instagram: "Big changes are underway!" The farm-to-table spot at 315 Franklin Avenue had been feeding Wyckoff for 23 years. Its last day as Cafe Amici was June 29, 2025. It closed the next day, and by that September it reopened as Wyckoff Tavern, run by the same team, in the same room, with a new name on the door.
If you drove past and assumed a new operator had swooped in on a vacant storefront, you'd have the story backward. That single transition tells you something about how this stretch of Franklin Avenue actually works, and it's worth understanding if you eat here more than once a month.
The Room That Never Actually Closed
Arthur Toufayan is the chef and owner behind Wyckoff Tavern, and he didn't arrive as a stranger. He spent 23 years running the kitchen at Cafe Amici in that same address before deciding the concept needed to change, not the location or the person cooking. His resume before Wyckoff includes stints at Union Square Cafe, the Waldorf Astoria, Aureole, and Mondrian, four decades of professional kitchens behind him by the time he rebuilt his own dining room.
The new tavern kept the bones familiar customers would recognize and changed the menu around them. Expect daily fresh fish and oysters, rotating specials, and a room built to work as both a quiet dinner spot and a place to watch a game at the bar. The build-out is modest by design: about 3,000 square feet, roughly 50 seats inside, a 12-seat bar, and another 20 seats on the patio. Sunday brunch starts at 10 a.m. with $12 mimosas and Bloody Marys, and the dinner menu runs from chicken dumplings and wood-fired pizzas to fettuccine with rock shrimp in a white wine sauce.
What makes this worth knowing isn't the food itself. It's that a 23-year run didn't end because the neighborhood lost interest. It ended because the person running the kitchen wanted to build something different in the exact spot where he'd already proven he could hold an audience for two decades.
Four Doors Down, the Same Story Already Played Out
Walk about a block south to 393 Franklin Avenue and you'll find La Cambusa, a Southern Italian BYOB run by the father-son team of Anthony and Nino Parlato. Before Wyckoff, the Parlatos had already spent 25 years operating restaurants in Fair Lawn, Ridgewood, and Garfield. They didn't open La Cambusa as a first attempt at the business. They moved a proven concept into a space that had sat dark since 2018, when its previous tenant, the Plum and Pear, closed for good.
That's now been five years of continuous operation for La Cambusa, long enough that Tasting Table named it to a list of the 25 best Italian restaurants in New Jersey in a piece published in March 2024. The menu draws on Amalfi Coast cooking, with housemade gluten-free pasta and a private room that can hold up to 85 guests for events.
Set next to Wyckoff Tavern's story, the pattern gets harder to ignore. Two of Franklin Avenue's most talked-about restaurants didn't start as new businesses testing an idea. They were established operators relocating a track record into a town that had an empty room and enough foot traffic to support it.
The One Restaurant That Never Needed a Second Act
Not every anchor on this street fits that mold, and the exception is worth naming because it shows the other half of what makes the block work. Willow & Whisk, the breakfast and brunch spot at 319 Franklin Avenue, has been voted Best of Bergen every single year from 2021 through 2026. Six consecutive years is a long enough streak that it stopped being a fluke sometime around year three.
Willow & Whisk didn't need to relocate a proven concept from another town, because it built the reputation locally and never lost it. Put next to the Wyckoff Tavern and La Cambusa stories, it's the counterweight: proof that Franklin Avenue rewards consistency whether that consistency arrives fully formed from Ridgewood or gets built one Sunday brunch at a time, right here.
Here's how the block actually breaks down if you're mapping it out:
| Restaurant | Address | What's notable |
|---|---|---|
| Wyckoff Tavern | 315 Franklin Ave | Opened fall 2025 in the former 23-year Cafe Amici space, same ownership, chef Arthur Toufayan |
| Willow & Whisk | 319 Franklin Ave | Best of Bergen winner six years running, 2021 through 2026 |
| La Cambusa | 393 Franklin Ave | Parlato family's Southern Italian BYOB, operating since 2021 after 25 years in Fair Lawn, Ridgewood, and Garfield |
That's three addresses on one street, three different paths to staying power.
The Rest of the Block, Worth Knowing By Name
Franklin Avenue isn't just those three doors. Benares, previously known as Saffron under a different name, shows up on OpenTable's current list of the neighborhood's best-ambiance dining rooms, another example of a space that changed its identity without changing its address. T.S. Ma Chinese Cuisine has built a loyal following partly by being one of the few BYOB Chinese kitchens in the area willing to accommodate celiac diners, a detail regulars mention often enough that it's become part of the restaurant's reputation. PAZZA, Harmony Mediterranean Grill, and The Brick House round out a strip dense enough that you could eat a different cuisine every night for a week without leaving Franklin Avenue.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
The easy version of this story is "Wyckoff has good restaurants," and that's true but not useful. You already knew that. The version that's actually worth carrying around is that this particular stretch of Franklin Avenue has become a place where restaurants with a track record elsewhere choose to plant their flag, and where the ones that started here tend to stay long enough to become institutions rather than novelties.
That matters for something as simple as deciding where to make a Friday reservation. A restaurant on this block that opened last year isn't necessarily a gamble, because the odds are decent that the people running it have already done this somewhere else. And a spot like Willow & Whisk, six years into a Best of Bergen streak, isn't coasting on an old reputation. It's still winning the vote every year because it's still earning it.
If you're new to town or just haven't paid close attention to the turnover on this street, the next time you walk past 315 Franklin and see the Wyckoff Tavern sign, you'll know it's not a stranger who moved in. It's a chef who spent 23 years learning exactly what this block wants, and decided to give it something new anyway.
For more on what makes Wyckoff worth knowing beyond the restaurant scene, or if you're weighing a move to this part of Bergen County, the Tony Nabhan Collective can walk you through what else the town has to offer.
