"Is there anything to do here but eat?" a visitor once asked a local writer touring downtown Ridgewood. The honest answer is yes, but eating is still most of the argument. That tension between having plenty going on and being defined by its restaurant row is exactly what's on display this fall, right as (201) Magazine handed Ridgewood its 2026 Best of Bergen Award for Best Downtown in the county.
If you already live here, the ranking probably didn't surprise you. What might surprise you is why it's true this particular year. It isn't because a national chain decided to plant a flag on East Ridgewood Avenue, and it isn't because the Village added some flashy new attraction. The pattern behind this fall's downtown energy is quieter and more specific: chefs who already had roots in Ridgewood are doubling down here instead of expanding elsewhere, and two separate civic organizations are running back-to-back street events on the same six blocks without stepping on each other. That combination, retention over novelty, is worth understanding if you want to know what's actually driving foot traffic downtown right now.
The award nobody in town needed to see coming
(201) Magazine's Best of Bergen Awards named Ridgewood the number one Best Downtown Destination in the county for 2026, and the win went beyond the headline category. Five local businesses picked up their own "Best of" trophies, including Sook Pastry for its croissants and Van Dyk's for its ice cream, alongside a mention for Park West Tavern. The magazine also pointed to the Ridgewood Public Library as more than a books-and-quiet-reading-room operation, calling it a cultural anchor for the village.
None of that is new information if you've lived here a while. Sook Pastry and Van Dyk's have been fixtures for years. What the award captures is less a single new thing and more a density of small wins stacking up in one six-block stretch centered on Van Neste Square, which is exactly the kind of cluster effect that's hard to manufacture and easy to lose.
Three restaurants, but only one real pattern
Downtown's restaurant scene added at least three notable names this year, and the interesting part isn't the openings themselves. It's who opened them.
Morsetto, a Southern Italian kitchen inspired by the flavors of Puglia, opened at 29 Chestnut Street this spring under chef Francesco Curci. Curci isn't new to town. His early career included work as both chef and manager in Ridgewood, which is where he built the relationships that eventually led him to open Apulia in Hoboken. After several years running that restaurant, he returned to Italy to reconnect with the culinary traditions of the south before coming back to open his own place, and he chose Ridgewood to do it.
Chef Claudia Rovegno took a similar path without ever leaving. Rovegno already runs From Scratch, an established flagship downtown, and this year she announced a second concept, Pizza by From Scratch, built around Roman-style pinsa. Rather than opening a second location somewhere new, she's expanding the same footprint she already has here.
Then there's Café 37, a modern American BYOB that landed at the corner of Broad and Hudson with a seasonal menu built around seafood, meats, and pastas made to order.
Put those three next to each other and the pattern is retention, not discovery. Ridgewood isn't pulling in restaurateurs who picked the town off a map. It's holding onto people who already had a stake here and giving them a reason to reinvest rather than relocate. That's a different kind of growth than a downtown chasing its first big-name opening, and it tends to be more durable because the operators already know the customer base, the rents, and the rhythm of the calendar.
Two civic groups, three weeks apart
The fall calendar downtown is really two separate operations running in close sequence, and neither one seems to be trying to outdo the other.
On Sunday, September 20, East Ridgewood Avenue closes to traffic for the Ridgewood Fall Art & Craft Street Fair, running from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. with roughly 200 independent artists and craftspeople lining the corridor and a food court built around Memorial Park at Van Neste Square. The event is organized through a partnership between Ridgewood Parks & Recreation and PJ's Promotions, the company that handles the logistics of turning a single Sunday into a full street closure with live music and a children's zone. Admission is free and the fair runs rain or shine.
Three weeks later, on Saturday, October 3, the Ridgewood Guild's Fall Harvest Marketplace takes over the same park from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. This is a Guild event, not a Parks & Recreation one, and it started smaller. Its first run in 2024 brought in more than 70 retail, craft, food, and service vendors. Organizers describe this year's edition as bigger than the last, though they haven't published a vendor count yet.
Two organizations, one park, three weeks apart, and no apparent turf war. That's not an accident of scheduling. It reflects a downtown with enough civic infrastructure that a Parks Department event and a business association event can both claim Van Neste Square in the same season without cannibalizing each other's turnout. Most suburban downtowns have one signature fall event. Ridgewood effectively has two, run by different people, and both are drawing crowds.
The market that never gets the headline
Underneath both of those marquee events, the Sunday farmers market has quietly been running since late June, organized by the Ridgewood Chamber of Commerce out of the train station parking lot on the west side of town, 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Local listings differ slightly on the exact closing date this year, with some pointing to October 26 and others to November 1, but the market has run into late fall for years regardless of the precise cutoff.
It's the least glamorous piece of the puzzle and probably the most consistent one. The street fair and the harvest marketplace are single-day spikes. The farmers market is the weekly habit that keeps people walking the same stretch of downtown from June through the edge of November, which is likely part of why the restaurants and shops nearby don't have to depend entirely on the big fall weekends to stay busy.
Why this matters if you already live here
None of this is really about one event or one restaurant. It's about the fact that downtown Ridgewood is running on overlapping systems at the same time: chefs reinvesting in the town rather than leaving it, two civic groups filling the same public square without conflict, and a weekly market that keeps the sidewalks busy on the Sundays between the bigger events. That's a harder thing to replicate than a single new opening, and it's probably closer to the real explanation for a countywide "Best Downtown" title than any single ribbon-cutting.
If you're heading downtown this fall, the Fall Art & Craft Street Fair on September 20 and the Guild's Fall Harvest Marketplace on October 3 are the two dates worth putting on the calendar, with the Sunday farmers market as the connective tissue in between. And if you're curious what a restaurant scene built on people staying rather than passing through tastes like, Morsetto and Café 37 are both worth a visit before the outdoor tables get put away for the season.
Claudia H. Sanchez has spent more than two decades watching Ridgewood's downtown evolve, one small business and one Sunday market at a time. If you're weighing a move to the village or already call it home and want a market read grounded in that same local knowledge, reach out to Claudia H. Sanchez for a personalized consultation.
