Sunday, September 20, the avenue that runs through the middle of downtown Ridgewood stops being a street you can drive on. East Ridgewood Avenue closes for its full length from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. so that roughly 200 artists and craft vendors, arriving from four states, can set up along the length of it for the Fall Art & Craft Street Fair. A food court takes over the space in front of Van Neste Square Memorial Park. Kids get their own zone on Walnut Street. Live music runs near the park entrance for the whole afternoon. It is free, it runs rain or shine, and it happens whether or not you planned around it.
What most write-ups of this fair skip is the part that actually matters if you live here and want dinner that night: the avenue closing does not mean downtown closes. It means downtown splits in two, and the split tells you something real about where Ridgewood's restaurant scene has actually been growing.
One Street Closes. The Blocks Around It Don't.
East Ridgewood Avenue is the fair's entire footprint. It is also home to some of the town's most established dining rooms, including Latour Restaurant at 6 E. Ridgewood Ave. and Meltemi at 21 E. Ridgewood Ave., along with Ridgewood Station Café right at the corner at 1 E. Ridgewood Ave. On fair day, all three sit inside the pedestrian fairground itself. You can still get to them, but you're getting to them the way you'd get to a food court stand, on foot, through a crowd, past face painting and a folk duo.
One block over, on Chestnut, Prospect, Oak, and North Broad, nothing changes. Cars still park. Tables still turn over on a normal Sunday rhythm. Felina sits at 18 Prospect St., Roots Steakhouse at 17 Chestnut St., The Office Tavern and Grill spans 32 to 34 Chestnut St., Park West Tavern is at 30 Oak St., and Steel Wheel Tavern holds down 51 N. Broad St. None of these streets carry fair traffic. All of them are a five-minute walk from it.
If you want to be part of the fair itself, eating on the avenue is the point. If you'd rather skip the crowd and still get a table without a wait, the side streets are where you go. Neither choice is wrong. But most fair coverage treats downtown Ridgewood as one continuous strip, and on the one Sunday a year when that stops being true, knowing which half you're standing in is the difference between a twenty-minute wait and a walk-in seat.
The Newest Restaurants Didn't Land on the Avenue
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only look at this fair one year at a time: Ridgewood's most recent restaurant investment has landed almost entirely on the side streets, not on East Ridgewood Avenue itself.
Morsetto opened this year at 29 Chestnut St., a Southern Italian concept built around the flavors of Puglia. Chef Francesco Curci spent more than a decade cooking across New Jersey, including early years in Ridgewood as both chef and manager, before going on to open Apulia in Hoboken. He returned to Italy for a stretch to reconnect with the cooking of his own region before bringing that back to open on Chestnut Street, a few doors from Roots Steakhouse and The Office.
A few doors the other way, on Prospect Street, Grill & Greens is preparing to open at 36 Prospect St. The fast-casual concept started in Bloomfield and has been expanding through Bergen County. As of late August, no firm opening date had been announced, so it's worth calling ahead or checking the storefront before making a special trip, but the address itself is already confirmed and it puts a second new concept on the exact stretch that stays open on fair Sundays.
Two new restaurants, both on side streets, both within a block of the avenue's closure line. That's not proof of a deliberate strategy. It might just be where the available storefronts happened to be. But it does mean that if you're trying to find what's actually new in Ridgewood's dining scene this year, you're looking one block off the avenue, not on it, which is the opposite of where most visitors instinctively wander during a street fair.
The Saturday Before Matters Too
The fair isn't the only fixture on the calendar this particular week. Ridgewood's farmers market runs Saturdays from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., a season that started June 28 and continues through November 1. That means the Saturday before the fair, September 19, is one of the last handful of market mornings before the season winds down, and it sits directly ahead of the biggest single day downtown sees all year.
Read together, the two days form a weekend built around the same downtown blocks from two different angles. Saturday is produce, early hours, a market crowd. Sunday is craft vendors, a food court, and a street that belongs to pedestrians instead of cars for six hours. If you're the kind of resident who treats a nice fall weekend as two separate outings rather than one, this is the pairing the calendar hands you without you having to plan much of anything.
What to Actually Do With the Information
If you're heading to the fair itself, park with the closure in mind rather than against it. East Ridgewood Avenue will not take vehicle traffic for the day, so circling it looking for a spot is wasted time. Chestnut, Prospect, and Oak stay open to cars the entire time, which also happens to put you within a block of Roots Steakhouse, Felina, Park West Tavern, Morsetto, and eventually Grill & Greens once it opens.
If you're bringing kids, Walnut Street and the park itself are where the inflatables, face painting, and games are set up, so that's a more useful landmark than "somewhere on the avenue" once you're actually standing in a crowd of exhibitor tents. Live music runs near the park entrance for the full afternoon, which gives you a fixed point to regroup if your group splits up to shop.
And if the appeal of the fair is the walk itself rather than any single vendor, remember that it's free, it runs rain or shine, and it's organized through a partnership between Ridgewood Parks & Recreation and PJ's Promotions, the group that handles the logistics of turning a commercial avenue into a pedestrian marketplace for a single day. You can check their event page directly at pjspromotions.com if the forecast looks uncertain or you want confirmed hours before you leave the house.
None of this requires you to think of Ridgewood as a market to evaluate. It's just how the town actually runs on the one Sunday a year when its main street briefly becomes something else, and knowing the layout is the kind of thing that only comes from living here, or paying close enough attention to the town to notice where its newest restaurants have been quietly setting up shop.
If you're curious about what else is shifting in downtown Ridgewood, from new storefronts to the kind of local detail that doesn't show up in a five-minute Google search, The Luberto Group keeps a close eye on this corner of Bergen County year-round. Contact us anytime you want a read on the neighborhood from people who actually walk it.