Drive down Franklin Avenue this week and you'll pass a restaurant marking almost a year in business under its current name. As The Local Girl reported, Wyckoff Tavern opened in the space at 315 Franklin Avenue last fall, not long after Cafe Amici closed there following 23 years in the same location. It would be easy to read that as a changeover, one restaurant giving way to a competitor with a different menu and a different name. It wasn't. The people who ran Cafe Amici are the people running Wyckoff Tavern. They kept the address, the staff, and the ownership, and changed almost everything else.
That pattern shows up again and again once you start looking for it. Wyckoff's fall calendar has a handful of businesses and landmarks that residents treat as new arrivals or fresh discoveries each September and October. Most of them aren't new at all. They're old operations that added a layer, renamed a menu, or opened a door that wasn't there before, while the underlying business, family, or building stayed exactly where it's been for decades.
Twenty-Three Years Under One Name, Then One Weekend to Change It
Cafe Amici announced its closing on Instagram in late June, with its last day as Cafe Amici falling on a Sunday and construction starting the very next day. The same ownership group had been planning the transition for months, and by fall the space reopened as Wyckoff Tavern, still under the original team. The new menu leans into brunch and pub fare that Cafe Amici never served, chicken dumplings, fettuccine with rock shrimp in a white wine sauce, steak and eggs, and a Sunday brunch with mimosa specials. The drink list expanded too, with eight beers on tap and a rotating cocktail menu.
None of that required a new operator. It required an existing one willing to gut a farm-to-table concept that had run for over two decades and rebuild it as something else, in the same four walls, with the same name on the liquor license. If you ate at Cafe Amici in its last year and haven't been back since the switch, you're not walking into a stranger's restaurant. You're walking into the same kitchen with a different sign out front.
A Farm Adding a Wine Room Instead of Building a New One
Abma's Farm at 700 Lawlins Road has been part of Wyckoff for a long time. The family's own count puts it at more than 85 years and four generations, with the farm's roots tracing back to the 1790s. Hayrides and pumpkin picking begin every year in late September, alongside the barnyard petting zoo that's open year-round. None of that is new this fall. What's new is smaller and easier to miss: a Tomasello Winery tasting room built into the existing farm market, tucked inside a barn that's already more than 200 years old.
The tasting room didn't require Abma's to build anything new. It required fitting a wine bar into a structure the family already owned, inside a market they already ran, on a farm they'd been working for generations. Josh and Valerie Abma still host the occasional farm-to-table dinner with the farm's own chef, and those dinners reportedly sell out months in advance through a waitlist. The wine tasting is the same story in miniature: an old operation absorbing a new feature rather than a new operation moving in.
| Wyckoff Fixture | What's New This Fall | What Hasn't Changed |
|---|---|---|
| Wyckoff Tavern (315 Franklin Ave) | New name, new pub-style menu, new brunch service | Same ownership and staff that ran Cafe Amici for 23 years |
| Abma's Farm (700 Lawlins Rd) | Tomasello Winery tasting room inside the market | Same family, four generations, farm dating to the 1790s |
| The Brick House (179 Godwin Ave) | Seasonal event bookings | Same chef-owner, same 1851 farmhouse building |
| J.A. McFaul Environmental Center (150 Crescent Ave) | Seasonal programs like Apple Cidering | Same 81-acre county park since it stopped being a pig farm |
The Steakhouse in a Farmhouse Older Than the Township
The Brick House on Godwin Avenue markets itself as a Bergen County steakhouse under chef-owner Aldo Cascio, and by the restaurant's own account it's held that role for roughly 50 years. The building itself is older still. It dates to 1851 and is one of the county's few surviving examples of a Federal Greek Revival farmhouse. Wyckoff wasn't incorporated as a township until 1926, which means the building that now houses the town's longest-running steakhouse predates Wyckoff's own local government by 75 years.
That's not a detail most diners think about while ordering off the fall menu, but it's the same continuity thread running through the town's business fabric. A steakhouse doesn't need a new building to feel like an event space for a wedding or a holiday party. It needs an old one, kept up, with a chef who's stayed put long enough that regulars know his name.
Trick-or-Treating Through a Shopping Center That Hasn't Turned Over
Each October, the Wyckoff Chamber of Commerce runs a Safe Trick-or-Treat event at Boulder Run Shopping Center, where kids collect treats from member businesses and get a bag of chamber giveaways along the way. Boulder Run is also home to Benares Modern Indian Restaurant, a chamber member that's hosted chamber meetings on-site. The event isn't advertised as a discovery tour of new retail. It's a walk through a shopping center whose tenant mix the chamber has leaned on for years to make the holiday work.
The continuity here isn't dramatic. It's a shopping center that keeps its restaurants and keeps its chamber ties, so that a civic tradition can repeat without anyone needing to recruit new participants every fall.
An 81-Acre Loop That Was a Pig Farm Before It Was a Park
The J.A. McFaul Environmental Center sits on 81 acres at 150 Crescent Avenue and is part of the Bergen County Park System, with a waterfowl pond, a gazebo, an observation deck, and nature trails that loop past bird shelters and a rhododendron garden. Long before any of that, the land was an 81-acre pig farm. The park kept the acreage and repurposed the use, the same move Abma's Farm made with its barn and Wyckoff Tavern made with its dining room.
Nearby stands the Zabriskie House, built in 1730 by descendants of Dutch settlers and believed to be the oldest structure in Wyckoff. It predates the farmhouse that now houses The Brick House by over a century and predates the township's 1926 incorporation by nearly two hundred years. The center's seasonal programs, Maple Sugaring in late winter and Apple Cidering in fall, run on weekdays and require scheduling, which keeps them a quieter fixture than the farm hayrides down the road, but they're built on the same old ground doing a new job.
Fall in Wyckoff isn't short on things to do, but very little of what fills the calendar is actually new. The tavern on Franklin Avenue, the wine room at Abma's, the steakhouse in the 1851 farmhouse, the trick-or-treat route through Boulder Run, and the nature trails on a former pig farm are all the same owners, families, and land doing something slightly different with what they already had. That's worth knowing if you've lived here long enough to remember what any of these places used to be. The name changed. The people didn't.
If you're curious about what else is quietly staying the same or changing in Wyckoff this season, from a favorite trail to a restaurant you've wondered about, Claudia H. Sanchez tracks this town closely enough to have an answer. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually happening down the street.
