CITY GUIDES | NORTHEAST

12 Restaurants That Show Jersey City Should be on Everybody's Restaurant Radar

By Maria Rodriguez | April 29, 2026

87 Sussex

AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Spain to Seattle.

With family spread out across northern New Jersey, I’ve spent years crossing the Hudson, pretending traffic is a philosophical exercise, and learning that the best meals in the Garden State are rarely where outsiders assume they’ll be.

Over the years, I’ve been compiling my list of Jersey City’s best restaurants, first in an old notebook, then the Notes app, then on Google Maps. I’d be heading to my great-aunt’s house and start wondering: Roman-style pizza from a James Beard-recognized baker, a Korean tasting menu, an omakase counter, or maybe a Bangladeshi spot with a real following?

That’s the thing about the best restaurants in Jersey City right now. They don’t feel like consolation prizes for people who couldn’t get a reservation in Manhattan. They feel like reasons to come over on purpose.

Here are the 12 best Jersey City restaurants right now.

87 Sussex

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Chef Brian Walter gave Jersey City the kind of polished, grown-up fine dining spot that used to mean a trip to Manhattan. The menu moves through caviar-topped thousand-layer potato, quail egg ravioli with pulled oxtail, frog leg drumsticks in Korean barbecue glaze, Barolo-braised short rib, and duck breast with roasted apricots and Marcona almonds.

Best for: A proper Jersey City fine-dining night

Battello

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Battello still owns one of the city’s great dining views, so I come here when I want to marvel at the Hudson River reflecting the twinkling lights from the Manhattan skyline. But that’s only the first part of the draw here, because there’s also chef Ryan DePersio, whose menu leans contemporary Italian and seafood-heavy, with enough pastas, crudo, and composed plates to keep the restaurant from surviving on the windows alone.

Best for: Waterfront dinner that doesn’t coast on the waterfront

Bread and Salt

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Bread and Salt is Rick Easton’s argument that pizza and bread deserve the same attention other restaurants give to tasting menus. Easton was a James Beard Award semifinalist for Outstanding Baker, and his Roman-style pizza, naturally leavened breads, and tight, disciplined menu have turned the place into one of Jersey City’s essential restaurants.

Best for: People who have strong feelings about pizza

Cellar 335

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Cellar 335 is my pick for a night when the cocktails need to keep up with the food. Cellar 335 comes from Jamie Knott’s group, with Christopher Abbamondi leading the kitchen. The menu runs through spicy cornbread with honey-togarashi butter, avocado fried rice, Korean-style wings, ribeye bulgogi, and large-format fried chicken or crispy pork belly with bao buns.

Best for: A loud dinner where the food keeps up with the cocktails

Corto

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Corto keeps the focus on handmade pasta, seasonal cooking, and the kind of Italian menu that doesn’t need 40 dishes to make its point. Chef Matt Moschella’s cooking in the Heights has earned national attention for fresh pastas, daily-changing meat-and-cheese plates, angry chicken, octopus, and ricotta toast with honey and pink peppercorns. Corto is BYOB, so drop in to CoolVines for a natural wine on your way there.

Best for: Handmade pasta without the performance art

DomoDomo

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DomoDomo brings a more structured kind of sushi counter to Jersey City, built around hand-rolls, small Japanese plates, and a clean, modern dining room. The restaurant comes from Brian Kim and Jae Park, with a format that lands somewhere between casual hand rolls and full omakase.

Best for: A polished sushi dinner with structure

Kat Khao

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Kat Khao is one my newer favorite Jersey City restaurants, with a menu that’s tightly focused on Vietnamese-Japanese flavors. The kitchen moves from beef tataki with yuzu, herbs, peanuts, and chiles to Hokkaido scallop crudo with kombu jime and coconut sauce, teba gyoza stuffed wings, Chilean sea bass chả cá, crab garlic noodles, and Wagyu pho. But the dish that Best sells the concept is the filet mignon banh mi, combining the buttery steak from a Japanese sando and the veg-aioli combo of Vietnamese street food.

Best for: Vietnamese flavors with a sharp Japanese edge

Korai Kitchen

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Korai Kitchen is Jersey City’s first Bangladeshi restaurant, run by James Beard-nominated chef and owner Nur-E Gulshan Rahman, known as Amma. The cooking is halal, homestyle, and deeply personal, with dishes like murgir roast, kosha mangsho, and chingri dopiaza giving the restaurant a point of view that doesn’t need much decoration. But a word of warning: dine-in requires a reservation, so it’s takeout only if you forget to book in advance.

Best for: Bangladeshi cooking with a real point of view

Madame

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Madame comes from the team behind Cellar 335, Saddle River Inn, and Saddle River Cafe, and it treats the French bistro as something alive rather than frozen in tradition. The menu has deviled eggs with caviar, foie gras mousse, ham-and-cheese gougères, escargot, moules frites with crème fraîche and miso, black bass en papillote, truffle ravioli, and short rib gnocchi.

Best for: French bistro comfort with a cocktail-bar pulse

Nigiri

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Nigiri is a modern omakase and temaki bar from the Honshu group, built around chef-selected seasonal ingredients, premium sake, whiskey, wine, and cocktails. It’s the Jersey City sushi pick for a tasting-menu format that still feels relatively approachable.

Best for: Omakase without the white-knuckle price tag

ONDO

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ONDO comes from Brian Kim and Jae Park of DomoDomo, and it gives Jersey City a contemporary Korean restaurant with real polish. The menu mixes traditional Korean flavors with modern turns, including galbi-jjim, bossam, beef tartare bibimbap, Korean fried chicken, bulgogi cream perilla pasta, and a tasting-menu option that serves as a course-by-course Korean dinner.

Best for: Modern Korean cooking with date-night polish

Razza

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Razza is the Jersey City restaurant that made pizza a serious New Jersey dining conversation again. chef Dan Richer was a 2025 James Beard Award finalist for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic, and his wood-fired pizzas, housemade bread and butter, seasonal small plates, and obsessive ingredient sourcing still make the case that a pizzeria can be one of the most important restaurants in the state.

Best for: Pizza that justifies the conversation around it