Walk down Anderson Avenue around six on a weeknight and you can figure out what's for dinner by smell alone. Garlic and grilled lamb drift out of one doorway. A few storefronts down, something is coming out of a wood-fired oven. Somewhere past that, a bakery counter is still warm from the afternoon. None of this is new. What's new is that a food critic from outside town just told the rest of New Jersey they've been underrating the whole street.
If you've lived in Cliffside Park for more than a summer, you already know the borough as Turkish food territory. That part of the reputation is true and it's earned. What most people outside town haven't caught up to yet is how much has grown up around it.
The Reputation That Still Holds
Anderson Avenue has been a Turkish dining strip for years, and the two names locals mention first are usually Beyoglu Grill and Dayinin Yeri. Around them sits a wider cluster that gives the corridor its density: Haki Baba, Istanbul Borek & Kebab, Cinar, and Saray Cuisine all sit within a short walk of each other, each running its own version of grilled meats, mezze, and borek. This is the anchor. It's why people from outside Bergen County have driven in for dinner for years, and it's still the safest bet on a night when you don't want to think too hard about where to eat.
But it's not the whole story anymore, and a recent write-up made that case in print.
What NJ.com Actually Found
NJ.com food writer Peter Genovese put together a list of New Jersey's most under-appreciated dining towns, and Cliffside Park landed near the top of it. His framing was blunt: of everywhere on his list, Cliffside Park was the town most people had wrong. The Turkish restaurants he'd already know about. What he wanted readers to notice was everything that's built up around them.
That includes Napoli Wood-Fired Pizza, which made his list of the state's best new pizzerias. It includes Rustica Restaurant & Lounge on Gorge Road, a pasta-and-chops spot that opened in 2017 with the specific goal of bringing a SoHo-style dining room to North Jersey, and now runs live music four nights a week, an acoustic Latin band on Fridays and Saturdays, a jazz duo at Sunday brunch. It includes 354 Steakhouse on Lawton Avenue, where the menu blends classic steakhouse cuts with Cuban flavor and the dish people keep ordering is the Canadian baby back ribs. And it includes 690 Park, which took over the old Loft Public House space with chef Hakki Gökce running a kitchen aimed at bold, high-end American cooking, a different register entirely from the borough's grill-and-kebab reputation.
On the colder, simpler end, there's Blackbeard Ramen for noodle soup and Dipped Doughnuts for made-to-order, over-the-top designs that look better suited to a bakery case in Manhattan. And there's Miller's Bakery, which has been running since 1947 and isn't going anywhere regardless of what opens next door.
Here's the shape of it laid out plainly:
| Spot | What it's known for | Where it sits in the story |
|---|---|---|
| Beyoglu Grill, Dayinin Yeri, Haki Baba, Istanbul Borek & Kebab, Cinar, Saray Cuisine | Turkish grill, mezze, borek | The long-standing reputation |
| Napoli Wood-Fired Pizza | New pizzeria, named on a statewide best-new list | Proof the town competes outside its lane |
| Rustica Restaurant & Lounge | Italian-American, live music most nights | The dinner-and-a-show option |
| 354 Steakhouse | Steaks with Cuban influence, baby back ribs | A cuisine mashup that didn't exist here a decade ago |
| 690 Park | High-end American, chef Hakki Gökce | The fine-dining entry |
| Blackbeard Ramen | Traditional Japanese noodle soup | Filling a gap the town didn't have |
| Miller's Bakery | Running since 1947 | The anchor that predates everything else on this list |
That's not a town coasting on one cuisine. That's a town where the reputation is the floor, not the ceiling.
Anderson Avenue Keeps Adding
The clearest sign that this isn't a one-time write-up is what's opened since. Poke Burrito officially opened its doors at 692 Anderson Avenue on July 27, about two weeks before this was written, bringing customizable poke bowls to a strip that didn't have one before. It sits almost directly across from L'Angolo Trattoria at 696 Anderson, where chef and owner Carlo Pietroniro has been running a from-scratch Italian menu in a small, quieter dining room. A poke counter and a family-run trattoria opening blocks apart from each other, on the same street as six Turkish restaurants and a 79-year-old bakery, is not a coincidence of geography. It's what a food scene looks like when it's still adding rather than settling.
A Weeknight That Actually Works Right Now
None of this requires planning a special trip. The borough's Summer Concert Series runs Saturday evenings from 6:30 to 9:30 at the Towne Centre Plaza, and it's one of the longer-running outdoor concert seasons in Bergen County, stretching from June straight through September. That means there are still Saturdays left this month and next. Grab dinner on Anderson Avenue first, whether that's a kebab plate or a poke bowl, then walk over for the show. It's the kind of routine that doesn't need a reason beyond it being a Saturday in August.
If you're the type who wants variety across a single week rather than a single night, this is a town built for it. Turkish on Monday. Ramen on Tuesday when it's the last thing you feel like cooking. Pizza from Napoli on a night you want something familiar. Dinner at Rustica when you want the jazz duo running in the background. A stop at Miller's on a Saturday morning before anyone else in the house is up. None of that is aspirational content. It's just what a week actually looks like here now that the options span this many directions.
The Part Worth Sitting With
The interesting thing about an outside critic calling your town under-appreciated isn't the compliment. It's the implication buried in it: everyone assumed they already knew what Cliffside Park was. A grill-and-kebab town, good at one thing, done. That assumption held for a long time because the Turkish restaurants really were that good and really were the loudest part of the story. But a town doesn't add a high-end American kitchen, a new pizzeria that makes a statewide list, a Cuban-inflected steakhouse, and a poke counter within the space of a couple of years by accident. Something about the demand here changed, or the people opening these places saw something the rest of the state hadn't yet.
Either way, the reputation locals have been living inside for years just got a wider frame put around it. Anderson Avenue was never just one thing. It just took an outsider putting it in writing for everyone else to notice.
If you're already living this version of Cliffside Park, you don't need anyone to tell you where to eat tonight. But if a friend, a coworker, or a family member ever asks you what the town is actually like day to day, beyond the listings and the drive-by impression, that's a conversation Real Estate Fun with Barb is always happy to be part of. Bilingual, local, and paying attention to the same streets you walk every week.
