A Resident's Summer 2026 in Saddle River: One Top-100 Table, a New Bridge Behind Borough Hall, and Six Miles of River Path

Saddle River does not have a downtown, and that is the point. The borough's two-acre minimum lot size is what gives the streets their quiet, but it also means the summer here does not assemble itself on a single main street the way it does one town over. You have to know where the anchors are.

There are fewer of them than in most Bergen County towns, and they carry more weight because of it. This year the math tipped further in residents' favor. One of those anchors is now, by one national measure, the best restaurant in the state. Another is finally getting a bridge that opens ten acres of quiet river frontage a five-minute walk from Borough Hall.

The Only New Jersey Restaurant on the Top 100 Is Two Barnstable Court

If you live here, you already know where the Saddle River Inn is. What is worth registering this summer is that Chef Jamie Knott's restaurant was the sole New Jersey entry on OpenTable's 2025 Top 100 Restaurants in America, a list generated from verified diner reviews across the platform. That distinction has not been a one-off; the Inn has appeared on the national list five times, and it has been recognized in New Jersey Monthly's "Top 30" for eleven consecutive years.

For a household planning a dozen dinners between Memorial Day and Labor Day, that changes the calculus. You are not driving forty minutes into Manhattan or Jersey City for a special-occasion table. You are walking or driving three minutes into a restored 1840s sawmill on Barnstable Court, where the menu changes twice seasonally and the BYOB policy means the cost of a bottle is whatever you paid for it at the wine shop. The signature filet, the Maribar, comes with roast shallot mash, béarnaise, and chestnut butter. Dinner service currently runs Tuesday through Sunday.

The practical wrinkle: reservations are difficult. Regulars know to book three or four weeks out for a Saturday, and to try the 5:00 or 9:30 slot midweek when a table on shorter notice is realistic. If you have a summer birthday or anniversary that you keep deferring to fall, now is the week to open the calendar.

Knott's Wider Portfolio, Read From Saddle River

The Inn is not a solo operation. Knott and his PB&J Hospitality Group run a small collection of restaurants that a Saddle River resident can plausibly work through in a single summer:

• Saddle River Café, 171 E Saddle River Road. The casual sister restaurant, opened in 2018. Weekday lunches lean toward pressed juices, grain bowls, and three-day farm-fresh eggs. Dinner service was added, which turns it into a viable weeknight option rather than only a daytime stop.
• Madame, Jersey City. Knott's brasserie in a brick building with purple accents; classic French with a modern hand. Named to New Jersey Monthly's "Top 30" two years running. A worthwhile evening if you are already going into the city.
• Cellar 335, Jersey City. Progressive American with Asian influences, and a tiki program that Condé Nast has flagged nationally.

The 2026 development worth flagging is that Knott's group has announced a new American steakhouse in Franklin Lakes, on track to open this year. That puts a second Knott-run kitchen inside a fifteen-minute drive of most Saddle River addresses, which is a genuinely unusual concentration of one chef's work in a corner of Bergen County that is otherwise light on destination dining. If you have followed his cooking at the Inn, the steakhouse is worth watching for the fall.

The Bridge Behind Borough Hall

The other anchor is Rindlaub Park, which sits behind the municipal building at 100 East Allendale Road and does not appear on most out-of-town lists. It is where the Saddle River/Ho-Ho-Kus Recreation sports fields are; it has two tennis courts, a playground, walking paths, and a small amphitheater that the borough uses for community programming.

What is different this year is that the borough has been building out a pedestrian bridge intended to connect Rindlaub to a landlocked ten-plus-acre parcel on the far side of the water. Mayor Al Kurpis described the plan around river views, sculptures, bird watching, fishing, and a walking trail. For a park that has always felt like a residents' secret because of its position behind the municipal complex, the expansion roughly doubles the acreage available to walk on a summer evening, and it does so without touching a single private road.

The practical read: if your habit is a post-dinner walk from your driveway, Rindlaub is now large enough to be that walk on its own rather than a five-minute lap. If you have kids in Wandell School programming or borough rec sports, the amphitheater side of the park is a reasonable place to plant a blanket while games run.

A Six-Mile Path That Starts Where the Borough Ends

The third piece is the one most residents underuse. Saddle River County Park is a 577-acre linear park administered by Bergen County that runs along the Saddle River and Ho-Ho-Kus Brook. Its multi-use pedestrian and bicycle path is approximately six miles long, connecting Ridgewood at the north end to Rochelle Park at the south, and passing through Glen Rock, Fair Lawn, Paramus, and Saddle Brook along the way.

The route is worth reading as a set of destinations rather than a single trail:

If you keep a bike in the garage, the pragmatic entry point from Saddle River is the north end of the path in Ridgewood. Riding to the Dunkerhook waterfall and back is a comfortable summer-morning outing, roughly an hour of moving time each way at a conversational pace, and it is entirely off-road once you are on the path.

The county's own materials note the falls and the Easton Tower as the two landmarks worth planning around; the tower is a designated Bergen County historic site and sits at a natural rest point roughly halfway down the path.

What Ties This Together

A common story about Saddle River is that its two-acre zoning trades daily life for privacy. The trade is real. What the summer of 2026 clarifies is how much daily life the borough has quietly assembled around a small number of high-caliber anchors: one nationally ranked restaurant with a casual counterpart and a Franklin Lakes sibling on the way, a municipal park doubling in usable acreage this season, and access to a six-mile off-road bike path that most residents have not been on in years.

The version of a Saddle River summer that uses all three, an Inn reservation booked in advance, a Wednesday-evening walk at Rindlaub after the bridge opens, and a Saturday-morning bike ride down the county path to Dunkerhook, is genuinely difficult to replicate in any of the neighboring boroughs. It is worth building the calendar around it.

If you have been thinking about the way your home fits into that calendar, whether the next chapter is a larger property closer to the county path, a downsize into something more manageable, or a shore complement in Spring Lake, Catherine Bossolina offers a private consultation drawing on senior-led representation and the international reach of Prominent Properties Sotheby's International Realty. Request a Private Consultation to talk through timing, presentation, and strategy for your specific address.