Most Wyckoff weekends do not begin on Franklin Avenue. They begin on Lawlins Road, at a working farm that has been on the same 32 acres for more than ninety years and still sets the rhythm for the rest of the town's summer. Downtown fills in around it.
That is the argument of this post: the calendar you actually keep in July and August is the farm's calendar, and the restaurants, the shopping center, and the Sunday concert down the road all take their cue from what is coming out of the fields that week.
The Farm Is the Calendar
Abma's Farm is a fourth-generation, family-run farm on 32 scenic acres at 700 Lawlins Road, and it remains Bergen County's only produce and egg farm. That last detail matters more than it sounds. Every other "farm stand" in the county is a retail outpost for somebody else's harvest. When corn shows up at Abma's in late July, it was picked that morning a hundred yards from the register.
Which is why CornFest on July 25 at the Wyckoff location is not a themed food event so much as a seasonal marker. The day runs on cornhole, live music, and a menu built entirely around corn: grilled street corn, corn muffins, chilled corn bisque, succotash, cornbread, and fresh popcorn. No tickets. You show up.
The farm's other summer anchor is quieter and harder to get into. Tickets for the Farm-to-Table dinner series went on sale March 2, 2026, first come first served, online only, and typically sell out the same day. The 2026 summer dates are Friday, July 17, Friday, August 14, and Friday, September 11. If you are reading this in mid-July, the near-term dinners are already gone. Set a phone reminder for late February next year. That is the actual local move.
For the weeks in between, the smaller workshops fill the gap:
- A hands-on Flower Picking and Arranging Workshop starting July 15, walking guests into the flower fields to cut their own blooms before arranging them at the barn.
- A Candle Making Workshop that begins at 6:30 PM, walks each guest through one candle and one room spray, and pauses mid-project for a glass of wine and a personal charcuterie box.
- Herbal skincare sessions with Shannon Mulligan-Mayernik of Mayernik Kitchen, working through calendula, lavender, chamomile, and rose.
None of these are things you drive to. They are things you notice on the way home from the market and add to the week.
The Tavern That Replaced Cafe Amici
The other thing that shifted the summer rhythm was the closing of Cafe Amici. If you had a standing Sunday brunch there, you know what happened next.
The 315 Franklin Avenue space officially transitioned into Wyckoff Tavern under the same ownership. Cafe Amici's last day was June 29th, and the space closed the next day to begin the transformation. Cafe Amici had run for 23 years in that building.
The important thing for a current resident is what carried over and what did not. Same owners. Same team. Different menu logic. The tavern menu covers lunch, brunch, and dinner, with chicken dumplings, a fettuccine with rock shrimp in white wine sauce, burgers, steak and eggs, and a range of pizzas and salads. Sunday brunch starts at 10 AM with $12 mimosas and Bloody Marys. The drink program includes eight beers on tap, specialty cocktails, and a signature whiskey list.
If you kept a running list of "places to bring out-of-town family," the switch means one line in that list needs rewriting. The address is the same. The reservation logic is not.
The Rest of the Dinner Rotation
Wyckoff is small enough that the dining rotation is finite, which is actually a feature. You know what you have. Alongside the tavern, the working list for a July weekend usually pulls from:
- La Cambusa on the Boulder Run side of downtown. A full-service BYO restaurant specializing in authentic Southern Italian cuisine, with an upscale but casual dining experience. The kitchen has previous locations in Fair Lawn, Ridgewood, and Garfield, and more than 25 years of Italian cooking behind it. Dinner runs Wednesday through Sunday.
- Willow & Whisk, the breakfast and lunch specialist that keeps showing up on the local best-of lists and is a reliable Saturday-morning move before anyone wants to think about dinner.
- Pizzeria Mandara, whose menu draws its inspiration from Positano and pairs New York-style pizza with authentic Southern Italian cooking, fresh local produce, and imported ingredients.
- The Brick House at 179 Godwin Avenue. Under chef-owner Aldo Cascio, the steakhouse has been a Wyckoff fixture for fifty years, and the building itself is worth a note: it dates to 1851 and is one of Bergen County's only examples of a Federal Greek Revival farmhouse.
Four places, four different reasons to book them. If a July weekend needs a birthday dinner, a first date, a bring-the-in-laws stop, and a Sunday brunch, this is where they map.
The Free Concert Almost Nobody Puts on the Calendar
Every summer, the Wortendyke Barn Museum hosts a small run of free outdoor concerts on the barn lawn. The one to know is the closer. The annual "Bluegrass and Cider" concert caps off the free concert series each summer at the Wortendyke Barn Museum.
It is the kind of event that does not get a marketing push because it does not need one. A folding chair, a jug of cider, an hour of music inside a 18th-century Dutch barn. If you have lived here for a while and never been, that is the July or August correction to make.
The Sunday Question at Boulder Run
Here is the piece of local knowledge that catches every new resident once, and only once. Boulder Run sits on Franklin Avenue, and because of Bergen County's blue laws, most of the retail stores are closed on Sundays. The exceptions are the restaurants, CVS, Stop & Shop, Goldfish Swim School, PetValu, and CycleBar.
You cannot do a Sunday Marshalls run. You can do a Sunday grocery run, a Sunday coffee, a Sunday spin class, and a Sunday bagel from the tenants that stay open. The practical translation for a summer weekend: Saturday is the errand day, full stop. Sunday belongs to the farm, the barn concert, and whichever restaurant you booked on Thursday.
Newer residents sometimes read the blue laws as an inconvenience. Longer-tenured ones tend to read them as the reason downtown Wyckoff still feels like downtown Wyckoff on a Sunday afternoon. Both readings are true. The point is that any weekend plan you make has to route around it, and once you do, the shape of the weekend clarifies quickly.
Putting It Together
A representative Wyckoff weekend in the last week of July looks like this. Saturday morning at Abma's for whatever is in season, followed by the Marshalls or Stop & Shop stop at Boulder Run because Sunday is off the table. Saturday dinner at La Cambusa or Wyckoff Tavern depending on whether you brought your own wine. Sunday morning at CornFest with the kids, an hour on the farm, then the Wortendyke Barn if the concert schedule lines up. Brick House if it is somebody's birthday.
The reason to write it out this way is that the plan is not portable. It does not work in Ridgewood or Franklin Lakes or Ho-Ho-Kus. Those towns have their own gravity. Wyckoff's is the farm, and once you accept that, the rest of the summer books itself.
If you are thinking further ahead than this weekend, and a home in Wyckoff or elsewhere in Bergen County is somewhere on the horizon, Krissy Leckie would be glad to help you plan the move around the same calendar you already keep. Schedule a Free Consultation when the timing feels right.
