"It's a perfect time for us to introduce our modern steakhouse experience to Bergen County," Fleming's president Sheilina Henry said when the chain's new Montvale location opened in March 2025, calling the town a "close-knit community that's full of suburban charm."
She wasn't wrong about the timing. What she didn't mention is that the steakhouse she was describing sits inside a development named for a farm, on a stretch of Market Street where almost every neighbor is a national brand, a short drive from a smaller, less-photographed piece of that same farm that the borough spent last year making sure would keep growing food.
Most people who eat dinner in Montvale a few times a month know the town has changed its restaurant lineup fast. Fewer know that the change runs in two directions at once, and that the older direction recently landed a twenty-year commitment behind it.
What Opened on Market Street
Fleming's isn't standing alone. Its immediate retail neighbors in the same S. Hekemian Group development include Chipotle, Chopt, Starbucks, Crumbl, Sweetgreen, Paris Baguette, Habit Burger Grill and SQ Pizza, according to the trade coverage that ran when the steakhouse opened. Walk a few minutes farther and you're inside The Farm, the branded name for the Shoppes at DePiero Farm, a 250,000-square-foot center anchored by Bergen County's first Wegmans. The tenant roster there reads like a checklist of national retail: Lululemon, Orangetheory Fitness, CycleBar, Warby Parker, CityMD, Ulta Beauty, First Watch Cafe.
The Part of the Farm That Didn't Sell
Here's what the shopping center's name leaves out. The DePiero family didn't stop farming in Montvale when Wegmans opened in 2017. They kept working a smaller, separate tract, and according to reporting from Pascack Press, that family farmed in Montvale for 101 years total before the borough acquired the remaining 8.4-acre piece in August 2025.
That's eight more years of an actual farm operating in the same town as the shopping center built on its name. The retail version of "The Farm" and the real one overlapped for almost a decade, a few minutes apart on the same roads.
What happened next matters more than the acquisition date. Instead of folding that last tract into another retail or residential phase, the borough leased it for twenty years to D'Agostino Landscaping of West Nyack, New York, specifically to continue farm operations. Montvale had every incentive to treat that last parcel the way it treated the first one in 2017. It didn't. The decision to keep the land in active agriculture, on a twenty-year term, is a longer commitment than most of the leases signed by the tenants a few minutes away.
For a resident who's watched the Market Street corridor fill in with familiar national names over the past year, that's the detail worth knowing: the farm the corridor borrowed its identity from wasn't a memory being marketed. It was still operating nearby, and the town just extended its life by two more decades rather than letting it become the next phase of development.
The Restaurants That Didn't Come From a Site Plan
Montvale's other dining thread runs through buildings that were never part of a master plan. Delpino Restaurant, a BYOB Italian spot at 108 Chestnut Ridge Road, is owned by two brothers who bought the space from Aldo and Gianni Restaurant, where they'd worked as waiters and servers for more than 25 years before taking it over themselves. It's the kind of ownership transition that doesn't show up in a commercial lease filing, just a family deciding to keep running the same kitchen under a new name.
Fire & Oak, tucked inside the Courtyard by Marriott off Grand Avenue, is a different kind of fixture. It's not a destination restaurant in the way Fleming's is built to be. It's the kind of place that ends up on a Tuesday-night rotation because it's close, dependable and doesn't require a reservation three weeks out.
Between those two and the steakhouse-and-salad-bowl corridor on Market Street, Montvale now runs two dining economies in parallel. One is built by national operators on twenty-year commercial leases inside branded developments. The other is built by people who worked in the same kitchen for a quarter century before their names went on the sign.
Why the Farm Detail Changes the Picture
It would be easy to read Montvale's last decade as a straight line: family farm sells, chain retail moves in, repeat. The 2025 land acquisition breaks that line. The DePiero family's actual, working acreage outlasted the shopping center that took its name by eight years, and when the last piece finally did change hands, the borough chose a twenty-year farming lease over another retail pad site.
That sequencing says something about how this specific town has handled the tension between growth and continuity, and it's not the version implied by walking past Lululemon and calling it The Farm. The literal farm was never gone. It just got smaller, and quieter, until last year, when Montvale made sure it would stay that way on purpose rather than by accident.
If you eat at Fleming's this month, or grab a salad at Sweetgreen before an Orangetheory class, you're a short drive from ground that's still being farmed under a lease that runs through the mid-2040s. Most towns that redevelop a farm site don't keep farming any of it. Montvale kept a piece and then locked in its future for longer than most of the businesses named after it will likely occupy their current storefronts.
Montvale's mix of legacy family businesses, national retail commitments and land-use decisions like the DePiero Farm lease says a lot about how a town balances growth with what it already has. If you're curious how these kinds of local shifts affect property values and buyer interest in Montvale and the surrounding Bergen County towns, The Luberto Group has been watching this market from the ground up for years and is always glad to talk through what it means for your own plans.