Two days ago, Lackawanna Plaza shut down for eight acres of jazz. The Montclair Jazz Festival's Downtown Jamboree and Block Party ran from noon to 10 p.m. on Saturday, with Christian McBride's Grammy-winning Big Band, Dianne Reeves, Patrice Rushen, and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra taking turns on the main stage while Grove Street sat closed to traffic. It was the 17th year the festival has done this, and it drew the kind of crowd that now requires a free advance registration just to manage the gate.
About six weeks from now, on September 26, something happens on Bellevue Avenue that has never happened there before. A daylong music festival called Uptown Sound will close the street and put a stage where cars usually park. It exists because two people who run a burger restaurant got tired of watching downtown have all the fun.
That tension, uptown wanting what downtown has always had, is the story of Montclair's food and music scene this year. It is not a coincidence that both corridors are getting new restaurants at the same time their festivals are taking shape. If you live here, the next six weeks give you two distinct nights out, on two different streets, for two different reasons.
The Rivalry Has a Name and an Instagram Account
Dan Campeas and Dayanna Ordonez own Dan & Day's Burger Place on Bellevue Avenue. In May, they posted an announcement that became the origin story for Upper Montclair's first standalone music festival: "We're sick of downtown getting all the live music." Campeas told Montclair Local the motivation directly: "Our motivation has always been to bring more business and attention to uptown because we feel like downtown gets all the love, especially with live music."
What started as a single Instagram post turned into a full afternoon on Bellevue Avenue, running 2 to 8 p.m., free and open to everyone, dogs welcome on a leash. The festival is still working toward formal nonprofit status, but it already has a presenting sponsor in Frederic's Fine Jewelers and a five-week lead-up called Summer Stage, free Friday concerts on the lawn of St. James Episcopal Church at 581 Valley Road, backed by Radio Free Montclair. Campeas has said the long-term goal is something closer to Maplewoodstock than a typical street fair.
That rivalry is worth sitting with for a second, because it explains why the restaurant openings on Valley Road this year read differently than the ones on Bloomfield Avenue. Downtown's restaurant boom is happening around an institution. Uptown's is happening around an argument.
What Downtown Built Around Its Institution
Bloomfield Avenue didn't need a reason to get new restaurants this year, but it got several anyway, timed almost perfectly with the run-up to the Jazz Festival. Campofiore opened March 31 at 664 Bloomfield Avenue, a farm-to-table Italian concept from Stout NYC Hospitality Group led by chef Dan Drohan, who spent 16 years as executive chef at Otto Enoteca Pizzeria in New York before helping launch Eataly Flatiron. Ju-Ichi opened in June at 512 Bloomfield Avenue, a family-owned sushi and ramen spot with roots in Morristown. A few doors down, Ani Ramen at 511 Bloomfield added a full sushi program under executive chef Julian Valencia, something the longtime ramen shop, open since 2014, had never offered before. Hummus Republic took over the old Plaza Convenience Plus space at 412 Bloomfield, and Insomnia Cookies opened its doors at 332 Bloomfield in April, catering as much to Montclair State students as to late-night regulars.
That stretch of Bloomfield Avenue is the same stretch the Gotham Kings marched through Saturday, leading a New Orleans-style second line from Church Street and Park Avenue to the festival grounds at Lackawanna Plaza. Every restaurant that opened this year sits inside the corridor the festival has anchored for 17 years. New restaurants downtown don't have to build an audience. The audience already shows up every August.
What Uptown Is Building From Scratch
Valley Road's version of this story looks different because there was no festival to build around until this fall. Clementina opened in June at 627 Valley Road, taking over the former Saunders Hardware space with a menu from chef Michele Rocchi inspired by the Adriatic coast. A few storefronts away, the family-owned Mediterranean spot formerly known as Jackie's Grillette expanded into the space next door at 612 Valley Road and shortened its name to just Jackie's, giving a longtime neighborhood favorite more room without losing the breakfast sandwiches and fresh juices that built its following.
Those two openings now sit inside the same corridor where Uptown Sound will close Bellevue Avenue on September 26. A week before that, on September 19, the annual Upper Montclair Sidewalk Sale runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., giving the neighborhood two consecutive weekends of foot traffic before the festival even starts. It's the first time in memory that Upper Montclair has had a multi-week run of its own programming instead of borrowing energy from downtown.
Two Festivals, Side by Side
The scale difference between the two events is worth naming plainly, because it's part of what makes the uptown effort notable.
| Downtown Jamboree + Block Party | Uptown Sound | |
|---|---|---|
| Date | Saturday, August 15 | Saturday, September 26 |
| Location | Lackawanna Plaza, Bloomfield Avenue | Bellevue Avenue, Upper Montclair |
| Hours | 12 p.m. to 10 p.m. | 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. |
| History | 17th annual | First edition |
| Access | Free, advance Jam Pass registration required | Free, no registration mentioned |
| Scale | Roughly 30,000 attendees, eight acres of festival grounds | Single-street closure, five or six full band sets |
The Jazz Festival has 17 years of institutional weight behind it, a nonprofit producer in Jazz House Kids, and this year a Smithsonian partnership tied to the nation's 250th anniversary. Uptown Sound has one summer of Friday night warmup shows and a couple who decided their neighborhood deserved its own night. Both things can be true at once, and both are reasons to plan a Saturday around them.
What This Means for the Next Six Weeks
If you already live in Montclair, the practical takeaway isn't which festival is bigger. It's that the town now gives you two separate reasons to walk somewhere new depending on which end of it you're closer to.
Downtown, the restaurant cluster around Campofiore, Ju-Ichi, and Ani Ramen's new sushi menu sits an easy walk from Lackawanna Plaza, meaning a pre-festival dinner reservation and a stroll to the block party are the same trip. Uptown, Clementina and Jackie's sit close enough to Bellevue Avenue that a Sidewalk Sale afternoon on September 19 can turn into dinner without moving the car, and the same is true for Uptown Sound a week later.
What's actually changed this year isn't just the restaurant count on either street. It's that Upper Montclair has closed the gap between having good food and having a reason for people to come find it. Downtown didn't lose anything. Uptown just stopped waiting.
Whether you're grabbing a slice window pizza before the Jazz Fest or trying Clementina before Uptown Sound's first downbeat, the short version is this: for the first time, Montclair's two main streets are both worth building a Saturday around, on the same calendar, for different reasons.
If you're keeping an eye on how neighborhoods like this one continue to develop, whether that's the restaurant scene or the housing market underneath it, Fast Track Real Estate Company has spent four decades watching North Jersey towns change block by block. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what's next, on Bloomfield Avenue, Valley Road, or wherever your next move takes you.
